[Traktor]

Qatar FM phoned his counterpart in Moscow.

https://theduran.com/desperate-qatar-calls-russia/

[Disco_Volante]

Do Iran / Russia even need Qatar? I thought they were directly competing against a potential Qatari pipeline that was to run through Syria anyways. Assad wouldn't allow Qatar's pipeline yet Iran and Russia are still friendly with them?

[8ball]

I hope something good comes out of this, like taking away Qatar's world cup. Really dumb to hold the tournament in mid season.

[sonoran_]

^interesting you brought up the point about the world cup. Yea playing in 50 degree weather is bad, but Im more concerned about the slave labor they are using to make the stadiums. Just like how UAE used slave labor to build its grandiose cities, Qatar is doing the same.

That plus AL Jazeera + known funder of terrorists = Qatar can go hell.

In an ideal situation here, Qatar is destroyed ( even in an economical sense) and then Persia destroys Saudi in that coming war.

[Hypno]

(06-05-2017 11:21 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

This would explosively help raise oil prices if the whole area starts going to war.

that alone is sufficient motive for all of this, although that is probably not what caused this one.

[HighSpeed_LowDrag]

(06-05-2017 02:36 PM)Hypno Wrote:  

(06-05-2017 11:21 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

This would explosively help raise oil prices if the whole area starts going to war.

that alone is sufficient motive for all of this, although that is probably not what caused this one.

Unless war actually breaks out between the Saudis and Qataris, oil prices are probably more likely to drop, as this diplomatic conflict will cause doubts as to whether OPEC can maintain its recent oil production cuts indefinitely.

[Rigsby]

This is a big deal. Totally unexpected. Something sinister is afoot.

To see Qatar being hung out to dry like this can only mean one thing: their card has been marked.

Even though the nature of the culture of these people is tribal and therefore very often treacherous, this has come straight out of left-field.

Of course it looks like big bad daddy Saudi Arabia are leading the charge. Of course their little bitch in the region - Bahrain - follows suit. Bahrain is nothing more than a giant aircraft carrier/landing strip housing the largest naval deployment the world has ever known in Juffair, just outside of the capital Manama - the US 5th Fleet.

And now there is massive naval investment being put in there too by the UK. Of course we turn a blind eye to the tortures and abuses by the Sunni rulers: the Al Khalifah clan - hell, we even train them how to torture their peasants, what's more, we don't just sell them arms, we sell them the torture equipment to use on their uppity Shia population (that comprise 70 percent of the population).

The house of Saud owns Bahrain pretty much. The little island, not much bigger than the isle of Man relied on them to send the tanks in via the longest causeway ever built (at the time) to quell their dissidents.

To give you an idea of the kind of medieval conditions the Bahrainis live in, they are not even allowed to go to the beach, on an island! The choice spots are sectioned off by the ruling despots and dictators. Hell, they even commandeered one of the biggest islands in the archipelago - Um an Nassan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_an_Nasan - the fifth biggest island in the archipelago. No shame. While their population live in one of the most densely populated regions on earth.

http://listverse.com/2007/08/30/top-10-d...d-nations/

It's fourth or fifth.

Here we go.

Bahrain is the 4th most densely populated sovereign state on earth. The only sovereign states that have a greater density are city states. The northern region of Bahrain is so densely populated and urbanized that it is often considered a single massive metro area.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countri...opulation/

And even though it's not much bigger than the Isle of Man, most of the population are congregated in the North. The South of the island is for defense, airstrips, and for dropping malcontents out of helicopters. You can't get in there. Why not? Why waste that space?

The dispute that Bahrain had with Qatar (a long running and nasty affair) was resolved sometime around the beginning of the new century with the disputed Hawar islands in the archipelago being finally awarded back to Bahrain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawar_Islands

Bahrain doesn't have much in the way of oil reserves, or really anything much at all these days by way of natural resources, but by god if it isn't the jewel in the crown of the whole Middle East. A stones throw away from Iran. Native shias are sometimes called 'Biranis' instead of Bahrainis. And Qatar, their ill-tempered neighbour is also just across the water.

I think the reasoning is: if these fuckers (Iran) decide to storm the mainland (Saudi Arabia) then countries like Qatar are first in the line of defense. No idea. Geographically though, it's very very close. With the Straits of Hormuz cornering things off at the other point (Oman), then you might see how maybe Qatar might like to keep relations up to par with Iran. They could be put in a very awkward position very quickly.

What with the recent supposed advances in Russian missile tech, and Iran being just across the 'pond', I can't help feel that they are being leveraged somehow. And those gas field reserves don't hurt!

Bahrain is just the lap dog to Saudi Arabia, to the US, to the UK, they are everybody's whore, but one of the most in-demand, never-the-less. Never forget the long held rivalry between these countries.

But still, all just pawns. Something big is afoot, I have no idea what it is, but I know it is a big deal and it portends not good things. Why now? Why so blatant? It was another 'dead child on a beach' feeling for me when I took my coffee this morning and saw this.

I wish I was more educated on matters and could offer more insight, but that's just my 200 fils.

[AManLikePutin]

^ Regarding Bahrain-Saudi relationship, I will never forget a faithful weekday evening in 2001 when the last round of Asian World Cup qualifiers were due.

Saudi Arabia hosted Thailand in Riyadh (won 4-1)
Bahrain was to play Iran in Manamah. Bahrain were already eliminated and Iran needed a win to qualify to the WC ahead of Saudi Arabia. In that evening, Bahrain played the most disgusting dirty tricks I've ever seen in a soccer match (Both verbally, and pre-game, and during the game) and to a huge surprise beat Iran 3-1. After the final whistle, as the Saudis were celebrating in their own stadium having heard the news, BAHRAINI players started dancing in Manamah with the Saudi flag and waving it in and around the Persian players who were in tears and despair. Dancing with a FOREIGN flag when their own team was already eliminated and had achieved nothing just to spite the Persians.

[Repo]

The timing of this with the $300B weapons deal to Saudi is very alarming. This could be another step towards war with Iran.

[TheBulldozer]

So when do those World Cup 2022 tickets go on sale?

[LEMONed IScream]

Are we sure Trump didn't have a play in this? This sounds like vintage Trump. If he actually put the two main funders of terrorism and the two top dogs in the Arabic Peninsula against each other... This is classic Machiavellian genius. I'd love to be a fly to know what he might have done...


http://www.atimes.com/article/trump-triu...-underway/

[RaccoonFace]

(06-05-2017 01:44 PM)AManLikePutin Wrote:  

[/url]

[url=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/872086906804240384]

[Cattle Rustler]

Saudi Arabia is playing 4D chess while DJT is playing Tic-Tac-Toe.

If the nigga can't tell that Saudi is the biggest pusher of terrorism worldwide and the 9/11 hijackers are mostly from there, then there's not much we can do to save him.

[LEMONed IScream]

Cattle Rustler, two words:

Divide and conquer.

[MOVSM]

[Disco_Volante]

According to Zerohedge, Qatar realized they couldn't topple Assad to get their pipeline, so they started trying to buddy up with Russia / Iran to allow their huge gas field to be pipelined to Europe anyways. Iran apparently owns part of Qatar's huge gas field too. Hopefully Trump is just bullshitting and won't actually help the Saudis.

[Traktor]

(06-05-2017 07:50 PM)LEMONed IScream Wrote:  

Are we sure Trump didn't have a play in this? This sounds like vintage Trump. If he actually put the two main funders of terrorism and the two top dogs in the Arabic Peninsula against each other... This is classic Machiavellian genius. I'd love to be a fly to know what he might have done...


http://www.atimes.com/article/trump-triu...-underway/

I think you are giving Trump too much credit here.

[RaccoonFace]

From another forum:

Quote:

Going by his earlier tweets, Trump obviously knows his Saudi buddies are also jihad-sponsors, so this kinda confirms my suspicion: Trump really wants to punish some Islamist country for financing terrorism, but the Saudis paid enough jizya bucks not to be it, and threw regional rival Qatar under the bus.

[DamienCasanova]

(06-04-2017 10:46 PM)komatiite Wrote:  

Wow -- this is interesting. Qatar has the largest offshore gas/condensate field on Earth - the North Dome Field. Arguably why the war in Syria is being fought - to get that gas pipeline to Europe.

Are the Saudis, Egyptians, UAE actually being serious about condemning Qatar funding terrorism? If so, does this imply that the Gulf states are willing to leave Qatar on a proverbial island, leaving that resource stranded? I'd imagine that Qatar requires formidable Western technology to exploit this field, which would have come via Saudi Aramco's highly paid technical team of Western expats.

Bingo. Really interesting read on the economics behind this Qatar-strophe, follow the natural ga$$$

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-06...atural-gas

Forget Terrorism, The Real Reason Behind The Qatar Crisis Is Natural Gas

According to the official narrative, the reason for the latest Gulf crisis in which a coalition of Saudi-led states cut off diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar, is because - to everyone's "stunned amazement" - Qatar was funding terrorists, and after Trump's recent visit to Saudi Arabia in which he urged a crackdown on financial support of terrorism, and also following the FT's report that Qatar has directly provided $1 billion in funding to Iran and al-Qaeda spinoffs, Saudi Arabia finally had had enough of its "rogue" neighbor, which in recent years had made ideologically unacceptable overtures toward both Shia Iran and Russia.

However, as often happens, the official narrative is traditionally a convenient smokescreen from the real underlying tensions.

The real reason behind the diplomatic fallout may be far simpler, and once again has to do with a long-running and controversial topic, namely Qatar's regional natural gas dominance.

Recall that many have speculated (with evidence going back as far back as 2012) that one of the reasons for the long-running Syria proxy war was nothing more complex than competing gas pipelines, with Qatar eager to pass its own pipeline, connecting Europe to its vast natural gas deposits, however as that would put Gazprom's monopoly of European LNG supply in jeopardy, Russia had been firmly, and violently, against this strategy from the beginning and explains Putin's firm support of the Assad regime and the Kremlin's desire to prevent the replacement of the Syrian government with a puppet regime.



Now, in a separate analysis, Bloomberg also debunks the "official narrative" behind the Gulf crisis and suggests that Saudi Arabia’s isolation of Qatar, "and the dispute’s long past and likely lingering future are best explained by natural gas."

The reasons for nat gas as the source of discord are numerous and start in 1995 "when the tiny desert peninsula was about to make its first shipment of liquid natural gas from the world’s largest reservoir. The offshore North Field, which provides virtually all of Qatar’s gas, is shared with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s hated rival."



The result to Qatar's finances was similar to the windfall that Saudi Arabia reaped from its vast crude oil wealth.

The wealth that followed turned Qatar into not just the world’s richest nation, with an annual per-capita income of $130,000, but also the world’s largest LNG exporter. The focus on gas set it apart from its oil producing neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council and allowed it to break from domination by Saudi Arabia, which in Monday’s statement of complaint described Qataris as an “extension of their brethren in the Kingdom” as it cut off diplomatic relations and closed the border.

In short, over the past two decades, Qatar become the single biggest natural gas powerhouse in the region, with only Russia's Gazprom able to challenge Qatar's influence in LNG exports.

To be sure, Qatar has shown a remarkable ability to shift its ideological allegiance, with the FT reporting as recently as 2013, that initially Qatar was a staunch supporter, backer and financier of the Syrian rebels, tasked to topple the Assad regime, a process which could culminate with the creation of the much maligned trans-Syrian pipeline.

The tiny gas-rich state of Qatar has spent as much as $3bn over the past two years supporting the rebellion in Syria, far exceeding any other government, but is now being nudged aside by Saudi Arabia as the prime source of arms to rebels.



The cost of Qatar’s intervention, its latest push to back an Arab revolt, amounts to a fraction of its international investment portfolio. But its financial support for the revolution that has turned into a vicious civil war dramatically overshadows western backing for the opposition.

As the years passed, Qatar grew to comprehend that Russia would not allow its pipeline to traverse Syria, and as a result it strategically pivoted in a pro-Russia direction, and as we showed yesterday, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund agreed last year to invest $2.7 billion in Russia’s state-run Rosneft Oil, even as Qatar is host of the largest US military base in the region, US Central Command. This particular pivot may have also added to fears that Qatar was becoming a far more active supporter of a Russia-Iran-Syria axis in the region, its recent financial and ideological support of Iran notwithstanding.

As a result of the tiny nation's growing financial and political "independence", its neighbors grew increasingly frustrated and concerned: “Qatar used to be a kind of Saudi vassal state, but it used the autonomy that its gas wealth created to carve out an independent role for itself,” said Jim Krane, energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, quoted by Bloomberg.

Furthermore, Qatar’s natural gas output has been "free from entanglement" - and political pressure - in the OPEC, the oil cartel that Saudi Arabia dominates.

“The rest of the region has been looking for an opportunity to clip Qatar’s wings.”

And, as Bloomberg adds, "that opportunity came with U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, when he called on “all nations of conscience” to isolate Iran. When Qatar disagreed publicly, in a statement the government later said was a product of hacking, the Saudi-led retribution followed."

To be sure, in a series of tweets, Trump himself doubled down on the "official narraitve", taking credit for Qatar's isolation (perhaps forgetting that a US base is housed in the small nation).

The cynics may be forgiven to assume that if Trump is tweeting that the reason for Qatar's isolation is "to end the horror of terrorism", even as the US just signed a $100+ billion arms deal with the single biggest supporter of terrorism in the world, Saudi Arabia, then indeed the Trump-endorsed "narrative" is to be dismissed outright.

Which again brings us back to nat gas, where Qatar rapidly emerged as the dominant, and lowest cost producer at a time when its neighbors started demanding the commodity on their own, giving the tiny state all the leverage. As Bloomberg adds "demand for natural gas to produce electricity and power industry has been growing in the Gulf states. They’re having to resort to higher-cost LNG imports and exploring difficult domestic gas formations that are expensive to get out of the ground, according to the research. Qatar’s gas has the lowest extraction costs in the world."

Of course, with financial wealth came the need to spread political infludence: "

Qatar gas wealth enabled it to develop foreign policies that came to irritate its neighbors. It backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and armed factions opposed by the UAE or Saudi Arabia in Libya and Syria. Gas also paid for a global television network, Al Jazeera, which at various times has embarrassed or angered most Middle Eastern governments.

And, above all, "gas prompted Qatar to promote a regional policy of engagement with Shiite Iran to secure the source of its wealth."

And here the source of tension emerged: because as Steven Wright, Ph.D. Associate Professor at Qatar University told Bloomberg, “you can question why Qatar has been unwilling to supply its neighboring countries, making them gas poor,” said Wright, the academic, speaking by telephone from the Qatari capital Doha. “There probably was an expectation that Qatar would sell gas to them at a discount price.”

It did not, and instead it took a step backward in 2005, when Qatar declared a moratorium on the further development of the North Field that could have provided more gas for local export, adding to the frustrations of its neighbors.

Qatar said it needed to test how the field was responding to its exploitation, denying that it was bending to sensitivities in Iran, which had been much slower to draw gas from its side of the shared field. That two-year moratorium was lifted in April, a decade late, after Iran for the first time caught up with Qatar’s extraction rates.

As Qatar refused to yield, the resentment grew.

“People here are scratching their heads as to exactly what the Saudis expect Qatar to do,” said Gerd Nonneman, professor of international relations and Gulf studies at Georgetown University’s Doha campus. “They seem to want Qatar to cave in completely, but it won’t call the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, because it isn’t. And it isn’t going to excommunicate Iran, because that would jeopardize a relationship that is just too fundamental to Qatar’s economic development.”

* * *

Whether nat gas is the source of the Qatari isolation will depend on the next steps by both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt - are all highly reliant on Qatari gas via pipeline and LNG.

According to Reuters, traders startled by the development, have begun to plan for all eventualities, especially any upsets to piped gas supplies from Qatar to the UAE. The UAE consumes 1.8 billion cubic feet/day of Qatari gas via the Dolphin pipeline, and has LNG purchase agreements with its neighbor, leaving it doubly exposed to tit-for-tat measures, industry sources and traders said.

So far flows through Dolphin are unaffected but traders say even a partial shutdown would ripple through global gas markets by forcing the UAE to seek replacement LNG supply just as its domestic demand peaks.

With LNG markets in bearish mood and demand weak, the UAE could cope with Qatar suspending its two to three monthly LNG deliveries by calling on international markets, but Dolphin piped flows are too large to fully replace.

"A drop off in Dolphin deliveries would have a huge impact on LNG markets," one trader monitoring developments said.

And since it all boils down to who has the most leverage as this latest regional "balance of power" crisis unfolds, Qatar could simply take the Mutual Assured Destruction route, and halt all pipeline shipments to its neighbors crippling both theirs, and its own, economy in the process, to find just where the point of "max pain" is located.

[Samseau]

If the US can declare Qatar a funder of terrorism with Saudi Arabia, then what's to stop the USA from taking over Qatar in a day? We have a massive military base there already, the Saudis and USA could easily divvy up the country in a day. It would also probably spark an open war with Iran, pleasing Israel. And then Iran and the Saudis would be focused on killing each other, while the US sits back and reaps in the profits.

Sick fucking game but it's easy to understand why it is being played.

[TigerMandingo]

Just heard a reporter asking Sean Spicer about the Qatar situation and pronouncing it as "cutter"


Such fucking retards in the MSM....

[zigZag]

(06-06-2017 02:13 PM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  

Just heard a reporter asking Sean Spicer about the Qatar situation and pronouncing it as "cutter"


Such fucking retards in the MSM....

Could be worse... they could of pronounced Iraq and Iran... iRaq and iRan

[Cattle Rustler]

(06-06-2017 02:13 PM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  

Just heard a reporter asking Sean Spicer about the Qatar situation and pronouncing it as "cutter"


Such fucking retards in the MSM....

That's how you actually pronounce it.

I used to say "Khatar" until I went to a Model Arab League* conference. Everyone kept saying "cutter" and I was bewildered. Niggas tried to correct me, but I went all "NO, you're wrong!".....then I learned they were right.

* - It's like Model UN but only for Dubai Porta Potty and goat fucking countries.

[TigerMandingo]

(06-06-2017 02:40 PM)Cattle Rustler Wrote:  

That's how you actually pronounce it.

I used to say "Khatar" until I went to a Model Arab League* conference. Everyone kept saying "cutter" and I was bewildered. Niggas tried to correct me, but I went all "NO, you're wrong!".....then I learned they were right.

haha really? I stand corrected, then.

Still though....."cutter"?

[HighSpeed_LowDrag]

Big news: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-06...kade-qatar

Quote:

In what has emerged as the most significant escalation to result from the Qatar diplomatic crisis - which pits two of OPEC’s largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, against the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas and further disrupts stability in the region - the biggest Middle East oil and container ports banned all vessels sailing to and from Qatar from using their facilities.

According to a notice posted on the website of Inchcape Shipping, Saudi Arabian and Bahraini authorities closed off all of their ports to Qatari-flagged vessels or ships traveling to or coming from the Persian Gulf state, in what has been described as a naval blockade.

As Bloomberg adds, container and oil terminals in the United Arab Emirates also closed off traffic to any ships touching Qatar.

Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast is home to the port of Ras Tanura, which state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co. says is the biggest crude terminal in the world. Jebel Ali port, the region’s biggest container terminal, will be restricted from Tuesday until further notice, its operator Dubai’s DP World Ltd. said in an emailed statement according to Bloomberg. In the U.A.E., DP World operates Jebel Ali along with Dubai’s Mina Rashid and Mina Al Hamriya ports. Elsewhere, government-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil closed its crude and refined-product ports to any vessels to or from Qatar. The port at Fujairah, a main oil transit and refined product hub, said Monday it was closed to Qatar-linked traffic.

For now, shipping at Egyptian ports was operating normally as of Tuesday, according to Inchcape. The company also said the Suez Canal Authority has advised that there aren’t restrictions on vessels in the waterway since it is an international route.

Separately, Bloomberg also reported that A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, which owns the world’s biggest container line, said it can no longer get cargo to Qatar as a result of the Saudi-imposed blockade of transport to and from the Gulf state. Though the situation remains “very fluid,” with updates expected throughout the coming hours, Maersk Line expects “disruptions to our Qatar services,” spokesman Mikkel Elbek Linnet said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. For now, “we have confirmation that we will not be able to move cargo to or from Qatar,” he said.

Maersk Line doesn’t use its own vessels to bring cargo to Qatar, but relies on third-party so-called feeder services from the United Arab Emirates Jebel Ali port in Dubai. “We will notify our customers on alternatives as soon as possible,” Linnet said.

Maersk ships about 16 percent of the world’s seaborne freight, making it the global leader in container transportation. Maersk, which has been working on splitting off its energy business to concentrate on its transport operations, said last year it lost the biggest oil field in its portfolio when Qatar ended a 25-year partnership with the Danish company. The agreement allowing Maersk to operate the Al Shaheen offshore field expires next month, after the company lost its bid for renewal to Total SA.

In addition to crippling overall Qatar-bound trade, the sea blockade will hurt shipments of oil and refined products from the world’s biggest energy exporting region.

According to Per Mansson, a shipbroker at Affinity Shipping in London, the Saudi ban on vessels going to and from Qatar will create logistical difficulties for some combination charters of crude oil supertankers from the Persian Gulf and will likely increase the use of smaller vessels. "It will be a little more difficult, it will be a little bit more tricky for certain charters”: Mansson said, noting that there are “not huge quantities” of oil being exported from Qatar relative to other Gulf states.

Afffinty also says that the combination charters, where loading occurs in more than one nation, are popular on routes to Japan, Korea and adds that the use of Suezmax and Aframax ships on Qatar routes may increase. That said, companies could still book combination charters with Qatar and other nations that don’t have restrictions, including Iran and Iraq.

Yet while the shipbroker tried to talk down the potential impact of the shipping ban, according to Bloomberg oil strategist Julian Lee, blocking vessels going to/from Qatar is probably the most important direct move that Saudi Arabia has made in terms of hindering its smaller neighbor’s ability to export crude oil and condensates.

Saudi Arabia’s move mirrors similar restrictions by United Arab Emirates, which will mean ships going to/from Qatar no longer have access to the Middle East’s biggest refueling center at the port of Fujairah.

According to Bloomberg, 27 of 31 vessels that loaded Qatari crude, condensate in May co-loaded in either Saudi Arabia or the UAE.

The good news is that aside from the above, Lee believes that there is little reason - so far - to believe that measures against Qatar will have a materially negative impact on country’s energy exports.

* * *

Finally, there is the question of LNG shipments. Here, as Reuters reported earlier, LNG traders took a wait-and-see approach, alert to potential disruption of regional energy flows "but erring on the assumption that any trade shocks could be contained given well supplied global markets."

Qatar's top clients in Japan and India quickly received reassurances that supplies would continue as usual. Whether this persists is unclear: within hours of the diplomatic break, the UAE barred all vessels coming to or from Qatar using its popular anchorage point off Fujairah. The ban impacts about six LNG vessels linked to Qatar now anchored in the Fujairah zone which may need to be moved out, according to shipping data on Thomson Reuters.

But there was little sign yet of LNG supply being hit. "I cannot see this impacting exports of Qatari LNG outside the Arab world at all and it won't likely impact LNG and gas pipeline exports within the Arab world either," Morten Frisch, an independent LNG and gas industry consultant, said. Still, traders startled by the development began to plan for all eventualities, especially any upsets to piped gas supplies from Qatar to the UAE.
Egypt, while relying heavily on Qatari LNG brought in by Swiss commodity trade houses, is less vulnerable than the UAE because it has no direct deals with Qatar, domestic gas output is squeezing out the need for imports, and traders would be liable for any moves by Qatar to restrict exports.

"Trafigura, Glencore and Vitol frequently take LNG from Qatar and deliver it to Egypt but they take ownership of the cargoes at the Qatari port and don't use Qatari ships, meaning technically that Qatar shouldn't have sway," one trade source said. In reality though, Qatar can block exports to certain countries by issuing so-called destination restrictions.

"It's not clear yet," another LNG trader said of potential impacts to deliveries from Qatar to Egypt.

* *

Can (and will) Qatar respond to the blockade?

Retaliatory measures such as suspending LNG supply deals would leave Qatar free to push more volumes into Europe where it has access to several import terminals. Under that scenario, trade houses with supply commitments to Egypt could turn to the United States, Algeria and Nigeria for replacement cargoes, traders and industry sources told Reuters.

The deterioration in ties between Qatar and Egypt contrasts with 2013 when the producer gifted five LNG cargoes to Egypt - when Mohamed Mursi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, served as president. Ironically, it is Qatar's support for the MB - if only according to the "official narrative" - that is the catalyst for the current crisis.