The price of looking away

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Foreign investment, or buying influence.

A new analysis shows expenditures totalling $400 billion dollars spent in the U.S. by Qatar over the last quarter century. And that may be a conservative number.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The tiny emirate is a major non-NATO U.S. ally and hosts a large U.S. military base.

Qatar has poured money into U.S. energy, defense, and education sectors.

The report raises questions about whether the money has bought influence for a country that does not always align with U.S. interests.

Here’s WORLD’s Lindsay Mast.

MAST: Natalie Ecanow wrote that report. She is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on the Middle East and the Gulf. She spent a year researching this topic and says she erred on the conservative side with a figure that could potentially be three times more. 

She joins us now to talk about it. Natalie, good morning.

NATALIE ECANOW: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

MAST: Thanks for being here. 

Natalie, let's start with, you know, there are other countries who invest heavily in the U.S., why the questions surrounding Qatar?

ECANOW: Yeah, so when I initially started this project, there was just a lot of noise in the media about the Qataris. This was shortly after October 7th, the Hamas attacks of October 7th that I started really investing a lot of time in this research.

And as time went on and administrations changed over, we started hearing these big numbers being thrown out about how much money the Qataris had spent in the United States. At one point, the Trump administration released a fact sheet that said that, you know, the Qataris had committed to spending $1.2 trillion in the United States. The details of that press sheet didn't add up to $1.2 trillion. 

At the same time, a lot of universities were coming under heat for accepting foreign funding and what influence that foreign funding was potentially buying. So I started looking into Qatari money for those reasons.

MAST: What do you think Americans should know briefly about its governance, its history, things of that nature?

ECANOW: Qatar is an extremely tiny country, it's about half the size of New Jersey. It has approximately 330,000 citizens. 

But at the same time, it sits on the world's largest proven natural gas reserve. So that gives it almost endless wealth to play with. Qatar is also an autocracy. It's run by the Althani royal family. It's a strong U.S. ally, at least in name. The Biden administration made Qatar a major non-NATO ally. It's a major purchaser of American arms. 

But at the same time, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the Qataris have sponsored Hamas, sponsored the Taliban. They are behind Al Jazeera, which is a major, major media network that often promotes Islamist talking points, if not amplifies Islamist voices themselves. 

Also, I should mention it's not just sponsoring Hamas and the Taliban, they actually host Hamas and Taliban offices inside their borders.

So that's kind of Qatar in a nutshell. And you can see there's this tension between ally versus adversary, sort of in that picture that I just painted.

MAST: One thing you note as particularly alarming is Qatari influence on schools. What did you find that's notable on that front?

ECANOW: Based on disclosures submitted to the Department of Education, the Qataris have spent about $8.8 billion dollars in the American higher education system. And by the Department of Education's own counting, that makes Qatar not only the top foreign funder of U.S. universities, but that puts Qatar ahead of China by some $2 billion dollars. 

There are half a dozen U.S. universities with satellite campuses in Doha. And that's one of the defenses that the Qataris will say actually. When people point out that they're the top foreign funders of universities, they'll say, "Well, most of that money is just going for operating costs of the satellite campuses over in Doha. And the universities operate as usual, they stick to their values, they stick to their principles, et cetera, et cetera."

Well, Georgetown University, which has soaked up about a billion dollars from Qatar in the last couple of decades, last year decided to award the mother of the Qatari Emir with like a prestigious honor that the president of Georgetown can give out. 

It just so happens that a few months prior to receiving this award, the mother of the Emir, this same woman, put out a post on X publicly eulogizing Yafiya Sinwar, who was the Hamas chief in Gaza and one of the masterminds, if not the mastermind, behind the October 7th terrorist attack. 

That should sort of give you a sense of how Qatari money may be purchasing influence in the educational space.

MAST: Well, let me ask you this: If Qatar also buys and orders American goods that creates jobs and economic growth, is that not a benefit for Americans?

ECANOW: I think that's a good question. And I think the more the Qataris do this, the more goodwill that they build in these communities. And that goodwill masks the vices... the terror sponsorship, not to mention you know, a history of being entangled in corruption schemes. 

Something else I haven't mentioned is the Qataris have good a good relationship with Russia, a good relationship with China. Up until the Iran War, they had a good relationship with Iran. So it's terrorist groups, it's corruption, it's American adversaries. 

That's not to say that Qataris can't do good, but that's also not to say that we shouldn't hold them accountable for the bad things that they do. 

I think a lot of the money that isn't directly buying influence—some of it is directly buying influence, lobbying, public relations, media—but some of the stuff that's not directly directly buying influence down the line does end up buying influence.

MAST: What do you recommend on the policy front and what needs to happen to move in that direction?

ECANOW: So I think step one is just to start holding the Qataris accountable for decisions that don't align with American priorities. I don't think we can nor should we go from, you know, major non-NATO ally to grouping Qatar with China/Russia/Iran.

What I do think is that when they make decisions or promote talking points or amplify viewpoints that are anti-Western or just simply don't align with our policy priorities, we shouldn't just be turning a blind eye to that. 

A concrete step that I can point to, or a concrete example, I should say, of like what that could look like in practice is Al Jazeera, which I mentioned earlier, operates what's essentially a subsidiary based in the United States called AJ+. 

AJ+ back in 2020 was ordered by the Department of Justice to register as a foreign agent. It is now 2026, AJ+ has not registered as a foreign agent, and there has been very little effort at the federal level, a little bit, but not a lot, to force AJ+ to comply with U.S. law. And so I think at the bare minimum, we should just expect AJ+, Al Jazeera, the Qataris, whoever you want to point to, to just comply with US law. That should be the bare minimum. 

Friends can hold friends accountable. That doesn't mean you're bad, it just means, you know, they can't get away with everything. And I think right now we're we're letting them get away with a lot.

MAST: Alright, well, Natalie Ecanow is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focusing on the Middle East and the Gulf. 

Natalie, thank you so much for your time.

ECANOW: Thank you.

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