Kuwait, which announced the opening on Monday, has also served as a mediator. His foreign minister, Sheikh Ahmad Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah, said in a television broadcast that the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Qatar would be a “new page in fraternal relations”.
Saudi Arabia officials did not immediately confirm the existence of an agreement between the two countries.
The Gulf countries’ decision in 2017 to cut ties with Qatar, breaking diplomatic relations and suspending land, air and sea travel, forced the small monarchy into an immediate crisis. The trade that used to flow smoothly around the Gulf has collapsed; some families were suddenly unable to see relatives who lived on the other side of the line; thousands of people had to leave their homes practically overnight to return to Qatar or other countries.
Since then, however, Qatar has relied on its enormous wealth of natural gas to become more self-sufficient and build stronger relations with Iran and Turkey, another enemy of the blocking countries, the United Arab Emirates in particular.
Combined with pressure from Washington, the road to negotiations has become clearer in recent months, with officials on both sides signaling that the negotiations were progressing. And analysts said Saudi Arabia may have seen repairing the disruption as a way to start the kingdom’s relationship with the next Biden government, which has positively threatened to take a tougher stance with Saudi Arabia.
But some analysts say there is little evidence that Qatar is changing its behavior with regard to practices that frustrate its neighbors the most – nor by fully controlling the megaphone it uses to spread its message and harass its enemies, the Al Jazeera media network, nor moving away from Iran and Turkey.
Getting Qatar to change its relationship with Turkey “could be an illusion,” wrote Hussein Ibish, an analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington in December. “Given the number of issues that are likely to remain unresolved, there is significant potential for future discord and perhaps another crisis over Qatar’s policies at some point in the foreseeable future.”