Donald Trump really wanted the plane. The Qataris had flown the $400 million Boeing 747 to West Palm Beach just after he returned to the White House so he could run his hands over the soft leather chairs and inspect the sycamore- and wacapou-wood veneers. A sales brochure had described the en-suite master bathroom, with its mother-of-pearl inlays, as “almost a piece of art.”The plane was a flying palace fit for a Persian Gulf monarch, or an American president who would like to live like one. But its operating costs—about $25,000 per flight hour—were steep even for the Qatari royal family. The government had been trying to sell it for five years.The Qataris knew Trump would want the plane. They understood the man, and his taste. It sat in the same aesthetic register as the comparatively puny “Trump Force One,” the gold-heavy Boeing 757 that he had flown as a private citizen. They also knew that Trump didn’t like the aging, baby-blue 747s that had been carrying presidents since 1990. He’d ordered two new planes from Boeing in 2018, but they were years behind schedule. Trump wanted the 11-bathroom Qatari plane, repainted in a red-white-and-blue color scheme. And he wanted it in time for a flyover on America’s 250th birthday.This was an absurd demand. Air Force One is meant to serve as an airborne military command post. The Qatari jet would have to be stripped to the studs and retrofitted with encrypted-communications equipment, as well as special material to shield it against the radiological blast of a nuclear weapon, and a variety of countermeasures to foil missiles and rockets. It had taken a Parisian design firm four years to complete the plane’s interiors. It could take American engineers at least that long to convert the jet into a flying fortress.But these were details to be worked out later. Or not. The Qataris drew up the paperwork for a government-to-government sale. But they should have seen Trump’s next move coming.People close to Trump—it’s still not clear who—suggested to the Qataris that instead of selling the plane, they could donate it to the United States. A gift. A freebie from “friends” who had already put hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s son-in-law’s private-equity firm and bought a debt-laden Manhattan hotel belonging to Steve Witkoff, his Middle East special envoy, for $623 million. That’s to say nothing of the $8 billion they’d spent to build the Americans an air base—the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East—or their plans to spend $10 billion more to enhance and maintain it. What was another $400 million, for a plane that the president so dearly loved?Even some Qatari leaders were surprised by the president’s gall. But they did what they’ve always done when an American official has asked them for something dubious—politically, ethically, or even legally. They said yes.It’s not easy to buy good press, though the Qataris have tried. But it also takes real effort to generate the kind of bad press the plane brought to a country whose name many Americans probably can’t pronounce correctly (it’s kah-tar). The bipartisan outrage in Washington was incandescent. The plane was a flying emolument, an obvious constitutional violation. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. But what Trump couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see is that only a fool would view the plane as anything other than a massive bribe, especially given that Trump said publicly that he planned to have it transferred to his presidential library once he leaves office.[Paul Rosenzweig: American corruption]Even by the immoderate standards of the Persian Gulf, it’s quite a move to give a world leader a free airplane. But the Qataris had already given one to the president of Turkey, and they saw that bad press dissipates. And as the Qataris know, probably better than anyone, the price with Trump is always high.To understand this strange deal—so absurdly corrupt that there is nothing analogous in the history of the American executive branch—it’s necessary to understand Qatar, the rare country with both the means and the disposition to even contemplate it. The Qataris don’t have allies. They have investments. Their investments in American relationships are undoubtedly their most important, and they’ve provided billions of dollars of diplomatic and military-support services to the U.S. But at the same time they’ve been providing money to America’s defense, they’ve also provided support to America’s enemies.The Qataris play every side, and many of their partners resent them for it. Nonetheless, for decades their experience seemed to show that they really could just buy their national security, along with global influence and even a cosmopolitan culture. Trump must initially have seemed to them to be an ideal partner. And indeed, just four months after the delivery of his airplane, in September 2025, the president signed an executive order that ostensibly guaranteed American protection.But recently, Qatar’s leaders haven’t gotten what they paid for. In February, the United States attacked Iran with practically no warning to the Qataris, despite the fact that they host a major U.S. military base. Then Iran attacked Qatar, badly damaging the country’s natural-gas facilities, the main source of its wealth. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the only route available to Qatar to export its natural gas, which must be liquefied for transport and is complex to deliver. The country’s neighbors can move oil over land and are planning to build new pipelines now that Iran controls the waterway. But Qatar is stuck, uniquely afflicted by the misadventures of the guy who took their airplane.In Trump, the Qataris had met a man who could not be bought. He could be paid, and expected to be. But the security the Qataris hoped for turned out to be a protection racket. A man who doesn’t remember yesterday never asks Are we friends? He only wants to know, What have you done for me lately?Qatar would never have had so much to lose had it not won the geological lottery. In 1971, engineers with Shell who were prospecting for oil 50 miles off the coast came upon a promising Triassic-period limestone formation about 200 feet below the ocean surface. To their surprise, it turned out to contain natural gas.Subsequent mapping revealed that the gas field was not merely large. It was gargantuan—roughly twice the size of Delaware. So much natural gas was seeping out of the ground that previously unknown species of bacteria had evolved just to consume it. In this one continuous structure was 20 percent of the world’s known natural-gas reserves.The deposit was a one-of-a-kind bounty. Thanks to their oil reserves, which were modest for the region, the Qataris were already rich. But the North Field, as the new gas deposit became known, made them unfathomably so. It took 25 years and a meaningful chunk of Qatar’s wealth for the country’s ruling Al Thani family to develop the field. Recently, annual liquefied-natural-gas revenue has been roughly $50 billion, which accounts for about a quarter of Qatar’s gross domestic product.Younger Qataris wouldn’t recognize the country their grandparents inhabited in their youth. It was a poor and forgettable protuberance on the east coast of Saudi Arabia before large oil shipments began in the mid-20th century. Pearl diving accounted for much of its economy. Now the government pays for Qataris’ health care throughout their lives. It pays for their higher education, having imported universities from the U.S.: Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and other colleges have branches there, supported by Qatari largesse. Qataris pay no income tax, and foreign residents, who make up 90 percent of the country’s 3.3 million people, do just about all of the physical labor. You are unlikely to see a Qatari behind a cash register, driving a taxi, waiting on a table, or picking up a piece of litter. (Thanks to the foreign workers who perform the most menial tasks, you are also unlikely to see much, if any, litter on a Qatari street.) And now, with all the money in the world, the Qataris have extended their influence well beyond their borders.The Qataris have been drawn to trophy real estate and major international events, such as Formula 1 races and the World Cup, which Qatar hosted in 2022 under a cloud of allegations (all denied) that they had bribed the selection committee. When it won its bid, Qatar didn’t even have stadiums in which to play the matches. The Qataris built them, of course, seven in all, along with new roads and public-transportation systems. Well, they didn’t. Migrant laborers did the work, and thousands of them died, according to human-rights organizations. Undeterred by scandal or by summer temperatures that often reach 120 degrees, last year Qatar announced its bid to host the Olympic Games in 2036.In London, the Qataris’ state investment fund owns Harrod’s, the Shard (Western Europe’s tallest building), a portion of Heathrow Airport, and about a quarter of the district of Mayfair, also known as Little Doha, in the city’s center. In France, it has the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club, and in Washington, it holds a minority stake in the Wizards, the Capitals, and the Mystics. In New York, it’s got the Plaza and St. Regis hotels and a stake in the Empire State Building.Qatar is also the world’s largest acquirer of fine art. The country’s collection of paintings and sculptures is estimated to be worth $40 billion, advisers who helped amass it told me. The works, which include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction, are destined for museums that Qatar is still constructing.But more than buildings, art, or global sporting events, Qatar invests in relationships, and one above all others. When Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani overthrew his father to become emir in 1995, he told the American ambassador that he wanted Qatar to be the United States’ most valuable ally in the Gulf. This was an audacious proposal from a 43-year-old ruler who imagined that his upstart emirate had anything to offer the world’s remaining superpower. But Hamad and the favorite of his three wives, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, had a shared vision for Qatar to become a modern nation, rooted in traditional Muslim culture, and they needed a protector. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States’ large military presence in Saudi Arabia became untenable. The Americans needed a new military base, so Hamad gave them one.Al Udeid Air Base, located southwest of Doha, is now home to about 10,000 U.S. military personnel, as well as the Middle East headquarters of U.S. Central Command. Its runway, more than two miles long, can accommodate heavy cargo planes, aerial-refueling tankers, and fully loaded B-52 bombers.The Qataris performed other services, too, becoming a diplomatic back channel for the United States to communicate with extremist groups, including the Taliban and branches of al-Qaeda. They hired retired U.S. military officers and diplomats whom they’d worked with as lobbyists and advisers. In 2022, after Qatar helped evacuate U.S. personnel from Afghanistan, President Biden called it a “good friend and reliable and capable partner.” To label this partnership an alliance would be overselling each side’s contributions, and Biden’s comments glossed over the times when Qatar was less than reliable. The relationship was mostly transactional from the start. But for two decades, it worked, by and large, for both sides.President Trump unveils the 747 Boeing jetliner donated by the government of Qatar and painted red, white, and blue, on June 19 (Allison Robbert / The New York Times / Redux)“I trust Qatar like I trust a rest-stop bathroom,” the inimitable Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, told Fox News not long after Trump’s airplane deal was announced. One of his Republican colleagues, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, likened the plane to a Trojan horse, citing security concerns.Their worries weren’t solely based on the gift of the airplane. The Qataris spend lavishly on their friends, but they have also broadly defined who counts as one. For decades, Doha has provided support of one sort or another to some of the very groups that the United States has tried to eradicate.In the mid-1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future architect of the September 11 attacks, worked in a Qatari government ministry while plotting terrorist attacks against the United States. He fled the country after a member of the ruling family, who Mohammad later said had paid for some of his jihadist activities, reportedly tipped him off to an FBI manhunt. One former U.S. official told me that when the CIA was searching for Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, the Qataris obtained information about his communications and potential whereabouts but declined to share everything they knew about the origins of that information with the Americans.Qatar has had diplomatic relations with Iran for more than 50 years. Its approach has been partly pragmatic—about a third of the massive natural-gas field that Qatar depends on lies in Iranian territory. But its steady engagement is unusual in the region and a major irritant to Qatar’s neighbors.Hamad’s regime cultivated ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Israel clerics, including one who famously praised suicide bombers. In the mid-’90s, Qatar established and funded Al Jazeera, creating a media network putatively free from state censorship but that reliably railed against Israel. And in 2012, the emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza since Hamas had violently taken power five years earlier. He brought $400 million in reconstruction aid. That year, Hamas also moved its political headquarters from Damascus to Doha. The country’s strong embrace of a group designated as a terrorist organization in the U.S. sets it apart from other Muslim monarchies, just as its stance toward Iran does. During the Obama administration, U.S. officials publicly put the Qataris on notice for lax financial regulations that made their banking system a useful money-laundering network for extremists and terrorists.The many U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and military veterans I spoke with consistently offered the same appraisal: It would be inaccurate to say that Qatar directly “supports terrorism,” but the country’s money and politics support an environment that helps terrorism and extremism flourish.The Qataris justify their involvement with a wide range of regional players by saying that they are a small country, beset by chaos on each side, that cannot afford to make many enemies. They say that active outreach puts them in position to help solve conflicts within the region, and even outside it. Since the late ’90s, their diplomats have acted as mediators, negotiators, and go-betweens for violent political disputes, proxy battles, and full-on wars in Lebanon, Yemen, Darfur, and more. Qatar has been involved in talks between rival Palestinian factions, between Chad and Sudan, between the U.S. and, respectively, the Taliban, Venezuela, and Iran. Last year, Qatari officials told me, their teams were participating in a dozen separate negotiations at once.“You can literally draw a small circle around Qatar, where an oasis of stability exists,” Majed Mohammed al-Ansari, an adviser to the prime minister and the chief spokesperson for the foreign-affairs ministry, told me not long ago. “And even that oasis keeps shrinking.” The alternative to trying to tamp down surrounding flare-ups, he said, is “basically watching your house burn down while drinking tea.”Qatar has sometimes been called “the Switzerland of the Middle East,” but it isn’t. Neutrality is the cornerstone of Swiss foreign policy. (The country didn’t even join the United Nations until 2002.) Qatar funnels money to some of the parties whose conflicts it tries to resolve—sometimes it is paying both opposing parties in one way or another—and it takes political positions that neutral countries avoid.Much of the country’s mediation and back-channeling has benefited the U.S., and some has come at its behest. Qatari officials are quick to point out that the American government asked them to host Hamas, so that Washington could open an indirect channel with its leaders. This is true, up to a point. Washington had concluded that Qatar was likely going to let Hamas move in anyway, after the group was expelled from Syria. “We did ask, but it was like pushing on an open door,” a former U.S. official who was serving at the time told me.What skeptics in Washington call duplicity, Qatar calls a balancing act. Regardless of what you call it, building and maintaining relationships with dubious actors has turned out to be, in itself, a source of influence and leverage. It also, some Qataris admitted to me, helps keep the ruling family from becoming targets of terrorists.Above all, the Qataris hedge their bets. They are morally flexible rather than rigidly ideological. True, some conservative Islamists in the government have embraced extremists and bridled at Qatar’s rush into modernity. But they have also failed to stop it. The country’s relationships are not passionate; they are tactical and serve the national strategy: to be safe, to have influence, and to remain very, very rich.Trump must have seemed a gift to the Qataris when he was first elected in 2016. Here was an unashamedly acquisitive leader who showed plenty of ideological flexibility where there was a deal to be done. But the indications that he might care little about Qatar’s preexisting relationship with the U.S. came early and were hard to miss.On May 23, 2017, the Qatar News Agency’s website and social-media feeds published comments attributed to Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who had succeeded his father as emir four years earlier, praising Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s regional proxy militia. Tamim reputedly cautioned other nations not to confront Iran, which he called an “Islamic power.”There is persuasive evidence that the Qatari sites were hacked and the emir’s comments faked. But Qatar’s neighbors were incensed, and on June 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt simultaneously severed diplomatic ties with Qatar. They expelled Qatari citizens and closed land, air, and sea routes to the country, disrupting imports overnight. The tiny nation was blockaded.At a dire moment like this, Qatar might have expected that its strategic investment in the United States would pay off. But Trump encouraged the blockade. Barely six months into his first term, he had just wrapped up a summit with Arab leaders in Riyadh, his first trip abroad as president, where he awkwardly swayed in a ceremonial sword dance and laid hands with the Saudi king on a strange glowing orb. Trump gave a major speech about combating terrorism. As the blockade took hold, he went on Twitter:So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!It’s doubtful that Trump understood the nuances of terrorist financing in the Middle East. But he had done business with the Saudis as a private citizen. A Saudi prince had bought Trump’s yacht in the early 1990s, when he was a real-estate developer deep in debt and in need of cash. And during the presidential campaign, Trump had registered eight companies that, based on their names, appeared set up for a potential hotel deal in Saudi Arabia.Trump’s friends in Riyadh had just moved against the host of the United States’ biggest Middle Eastern military base. Despite American grievances about Qatar’s support for extremism, it’s very hard to imagine that another president would have green-lighted the blockade.Qatar, of course, had resources available to weather the crisis. To guarantee that its residents would have enough milk and yogurt, for instance, the government flew in more than 3,000 dairy cows from Europe, Australia, and California aboard Qatar Airways. The government subsidized a new farm in the desert, and within two years Qatar was a dairy exporter.By late 2019, Qatar and its neighbors were quietly talking, and tensions eased. The Trump administration, by then, was in a hurry to confront Iran and wanted a united front in the Gulf. The Americans urged the parties to reconcile. Qatar took effective measures to clean up its banking system, a long-sought U.S. objective. And in August 2018, an asset-management company in which Qatar was a major investor announced it had agreed to lease a Manhattan office building owned by Kushner Companies for more than $1 billion, saving the family business of Trump’s son-in-law from debt. The crisis in the Gulf officially ended in 2021, when Qatar and its neighbors reestablished diplomatic ties.Trump had burned the Qataris with his support for the blockade, but he’d come back around. And the whole episode seemed to reaffirm the idea that with Trump in charge, the power of money was ascendant. Certainly, Qatar started acting more nakedly on that premise.Since Trump was first elected, Qatar has paid nearly $250 million to at least 88 different lobbying and public-relations firms in the United States. Washington is steeped in influence peddling, but Qatar’s largesse is out of proportion for such a small country. It has hired several officials and advisers in Trump’s orbit—to do what, other than be a friend of Qatar, is not always clear. FBI Director Kash Patel and former Attorney General Pam Bondi received payments from Qatar before joining the current administration. (As AG, Bondi reportedly signed a memo saying the Qatari plane transfer was legal.) White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was a co-chair of a public-affairs firm that lobbied on behalf of the country.Qatari cash sloshes across the political aisle. The country’s advisers have included staff members who worked for Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the foreign-relations committee, as well as the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s friend and frequent golfing buddy.From 2021 through June 2025, Qatar’s agents officially reported 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts, more than any other country. Many of them were with Graham, who lambasted Qatar for its support of Hamas “and other terrorist groups” after the October 7 attacks, but later called Qatar “our allies” after Qatar Airways announced it would purchase up to 210 Boeing Dreamliners assembled in Graham’s home state of South Carolina.Qatar throws lavish parties in Washington and flies politicians, journalists, and social-media influencers to Qatar every year for the Doha Forum, covering their first-class airfare and five-star-hotel accommodations. In May 2025 at the Qatar Economic Forum, another marquee event where the country tries to showcase its influence and convening power, the news about Trump’s new airplane had just broken. The prime minister seemed annoyed during an onstage interview. “I don’t know why people are thinking about it as a bribery or consider it as Qatar wants to buy influence with this administration,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said, without evident irony. “We need to overcome this stereotype,” he added, that Qatar tries to buy influence in the U.S.The next month, Iran attacked Qatar for the first time. More than a dozen short- and medium-range ballistic missiles targeted the American military base in a largely performative retaliation for U.S. air strikes on Iran, which Trump claimed, falsely, had “obliterated” its nuclear facilities.Then, in September, Israel launched an air strike on Hamas’s political office in Doha, killing six people, including a Qatari security official. The country could now claim the unenviable distinction of having been attacked by Iran and Israel in the same year.The Qataris got a little payback: Trump was furious because he had been angling for a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war in Gaza, and cease-fire negotiations, facilitated by the Qataris, had been under way. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was screwing up his plans. Trump claimed not to have known that the strike on Qatar was coming and tried to get Qatari diplomats back to the negotiating table. He insisted that Netanyahu apologize to his Qatari counterpart. In front of photographers, Netanyahu called the prime minister from the Oval Office and read from a script partly written by Ali al-Thawadi, a Qatari fixer, who watched the scene from a chair near the Resolute Desk.[Franklin Foer: Why the Gulf monarchs shower Trump with gifts]For a time, it seemed like Qatar would get more still from the attack, and from its long and expensive cultivation of Trump and his allies. The same day as Netanyahu’s apology, Trump issued an executive order that any attack on the “territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure” of Qatar would be considered a threat to the peace and security of the United States. To go with that security guarantee, the Defense Department announced that Qatari fighter pilots would train at a U.S. air base in Idaho.But like all of Trump’s guarantees, this one didn’t amount to much. After the U.S. and Israel again began attacking Iran on February 28, despite efforts by Qatar and other governments in the region to prevent the war, Iran struck the main natural-gas processing facility in Qatar. The energy minister said that the damage reduced export capacity by 17 percent, a hobbling blow to the economy.The attack followed an Israeli strike on an Iranian natural-gas plant, and as with Israel’s earlier air strike on Doha, Trump claimed not to have known about it in advance. Officials in Doha were furious again, and this time they were frightened. Qatar’s entire relationship with Iran, which lay at the core of so many of its disputes with its Gulf cousins, was premised on pragmatic coexistence. Trump’s war was breaking that peace.Between Iran’s missile attack and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the only transit point for Qatari gas, the country has had little choice but to shut down its liquefied-natural-gas production entirely since the war began. The lifeblood of the nation’s ambitions, plans, and influence is drying up. And Qatar’s global strategy, premised on so many contradictory bets, is crumbling. It’s hard to say these days who ranks higher on the list of threats to the emirate: Israel, which has long been Qatar’s main adversary; the United States, its most important strategic partner; or Iran, which controls the strait for the foreseeable future.During a two-month period this summer, while the American president declared the war in Iran over, then back on again, Iran continued to strike Qatar. On America’s 250th birthday, the president’s new jet flew low over Washington, part of an all-day aviation spectacle that shook the walls and windows of houses in the capital, including mine. The retrofit had reportedly cost more than $1 billion, two and a half times the Qataris’ initial asking price. But the president seemed to think he’d gotten what the country had paid for. The jet was “the largest and the greatest in every aspect,” a “flying White House at a level of luxury no one has ever seen before.”As the plane heads off to a hangar, to be retrofitted again for the security features it needs to protect the commander in chief, Qatar’s negotiators sit in Doha trying to find an off-ramp between the Americans and the Iranians. The middleman is stuck in the middle—right where they always put themselves.