Trump Pledges To Defend Qatar…Who Was Just Attacked By Israel

By Jacob Weindling | October 2, 2025 | 12:12pm

Photo by The White House

Trump Administration Israel

Trump Pledges To Defend Qatar…Who Was Just Attacked By Israel

Trump’s foreign policy has always been a bit of an adventure, but his relationship with Israel and perhaps his chief frenemy in Benjamin Netanyahu has always been extra weird. He is beholden to Likud and has accomplished more for the Israeli right-wing than perhaps any U.S. president, but Trump also despises Benjamin Netanyahu and thinks he betrayed him in the 2020 election. It would not be unreasonable at all to assert that Joe Biden and Netanyahu had a friendlier relationship than Trump and Bibi do, and now the pretend dove Trump is clearly struggling with what to do with the dog he let off the chain.

If one thing this year has been made clear, it’s that Trump wants, nay—needs—a Nobel Peace Prize. Donald the Dove is a tongue-in-cheek joke slash New York Times headline, but Trump, a man who bombed Iran earlier this year, believes it is real. He wants the Nobel as a tulpa to manifest this lie into reality, and Israel, the world’s most bellicose actor, is a big problem for Trump on this front, because its entire existence as the West’s forward operating post in the Middle East is opposed to the concept of any kind of shared peace.

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Trump wants to be the man who ended what he calls a war and what civilized society calls a genocide, and Netanyahu stands opposed to him on this front because he would like to keep perpetuating a genocide. Netanyahu also stands opposed to his (past) war cabinet on this front, as a leaked Israeli government document obtained by Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that occupying the Gaza Strip would cost Israel $5.4 billion each year, making many Israeli military leaders uneasy about the prospect of an extended occupation leading to a budget crisis. This concern was raised in world before giants like Maersk and Microsoft cut Israel off from their businesses to varying degrees, so I’m sure it has only become more heightened as lucrative tax revenue flees this apartheid state over fears it has legal liability in a genocide. The Israeli autocrat has pushed everyone out of his war cabinet who wanted to end this assault, and now he is going head-to-head with a U.S. president who doesn’t care whether any Israeli or Palestinian lives or dies, so long as he gets to take credit for whatever fiction he needs to invent around a war ending.

But it’s really hard to invent any kind of fiction around Israel bombing Doha while the peace negotiations the Americans want accomplished take place. If Qatar is attacked again, Trump signed an order today that says, “the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.” This is remarkably similar to NATO’s Article 5 guarantee that has only been exercised once, when our European allies attacked al-Qaeda after September 11th. This is not subtle.

This is…an open threat to Israel to use armed force against them. There’s no other way to interpret providing Qatar NATO-style Article 5 protection. If we had this guarantee to them in place last month, would we have attacked Israel by now? What Trump pledged today in the NATO context pretty much guarantees we would have to.

This is nuts. It’s hard to glean any good information from the chaos of the Trump administration, but I think it’s safe to interpret this as their answer to Israel’s bombing last month. Whatever backroom negotiations are taking place through the hollowed-out husk of the State Department clearly aren’t working, and so more drastic measures must be taken to rein Israel in. It’s a very Trumpy kind of measure too, where they only have a hammer in their toolbox and see the whole world as a nail.

This threat, which is very likely a hollow one, is still more than Biden’s tepid attempts to not even reach the low bar provided by Ronald Reagan and countless other U.S. presidents’ attempts to rein Israel in. It’s physically impossible to ever have any sympathy for the Trump administration, but the exasperation billowing off this move of providing Qatar Article 5 protection can be seen echoing throughout history with America’s intransigent chief client state.

So…what happens if Israel does it again? What happens if they probably rightly think this threat is bullshit and there’s no way the U.S. would bomb Tel Aviv, and they try to kill more Hamas negotiators in Doha? Will the United States adhere to its commitment to attack those who attack our beloved allies, in, uh, Qatar, and stage a ground invasion of Israel?

We sure do live in interesting times, and I am constantly reminded of Dave Levitan’s correct instinct to plot everything along a stupid and evil x-y axis (go subscribe to his newsletter Gravity Is Gone), where everything in Trump 2.0 has just been concentrated in the top right-hand portion of it. I’m not quite sure where to plot this development on the evil axis, but the stupid one is pretty obvious–although it’s not all the way at its most extreme point. This seeming illogical threat to use armed force against our ally does fall in line with Israel’s longstanding disregard for logic and the rules that the rest of the world lives by. Trump threatening to bomb Israel if they bomb Qatar again is as much about Israel as it is about Trump, but the fact that this is where we find ourselves towards the end of 2025 really helps demonstrate how the very concepts of logic and reason abandoned us long ago.