Trump’s retreat from Nato was priced in. But his humiliation of Qatar and India spells total chaos | Nesrine Malik

All over the world, political leaders are gathering in hastily convened summits and meetings. Last week, after Israel’s strike against Hamas leaders in Doha – a colossal violation of the sovereignty of a country that is not only a close ally of the US, but an anchor of Gaza peace talks – Gulf leaders sprang to show solidarity. The president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, arrived on an unscheduled visit to Doha and embraced the Qatari emir. It was a public show of fraternity that would have been unfathomable only a few years ago when the two countries were locked in a bitter feud. Qatar’s other adversary in that feud, Saudi Arabia, called after the Israeli strike for “an Arab, Islamic and international response to confront the aggression” and Israel’s “criminal practices”. On Sunday, heads of Arab and Muslim states were en route to Doha for an emergency summit. A little more than a week before, another gathering pointed towards other new coalitions. The leaders of India, China and Russia met in Tianjin, producing an image of smiling warmth that is likely to be an artefact of this era. The summit was convened in the wake of Donald Trump’s alienation of another ally, Narendra Modi. After Trump’s second election, Modi was one of the first leaders to visit Washington DC, where he was called a “great friend”, and the two countries set the target of doubling their trade to half a trillion dollars by 2030. A few months after that, Trump slapped India with a 50% tariff on the country’s imported goods, a tariff doubled as punishment for India’s purchase of Russian oil. He then proceeded to call the Indian economy “dead”, and commented on the Tianjin summit by posting: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China.” He is now lobbying the EU to impose tariffs of up to 100% on India and China. Only a few months before the Israeli strike on Doha, Trump – while visiting the Qatari capital – said “let us give thanks for the blessings of this friendship”. It seems that being called a friend of Trump is now less a guarantee of good relations, and more an augur of being thrown under the bus. Some of these gatherings, new statements of solidarity and concentration of regional alliances are, in certain respects, for show. Neither India nor Qatar has any interest in openly antagonising Trump. Their expressions of anger and performances of friendship are to demonstrate to the US that these states are not quislings, and other mates are available. Allies betrayed by Trump also have to manage their response to US humiliation with an eye on their domestic and regional reputations. But in other ways, these are also genuine attempts to explore what blocs of power can be formed. What Trump, and in a way Benjamin Netanyahu, are also counting on is that they can afford to be what is known in finance as a “price-setter” or a “price-maker” – a party that has the ability to determine the cost of goods and services because of an uncompetitive market. Israel can bomb whoever it likes, the US can violate security pacts and dictate economic terms, and no one has the right to retaliate. Do that for too long, however, and rational actors start to look for ways to adjust to these imperfect market conditions. That is less because these newly alienated nations have an objection to the US and Israel being militarily powerful; Gulf states in particular have energetically wooed and flattered the US, and either tolerated or normalised relations with Israel. Pivots are being studied because, simply, Trump is unhinged, and Israel is out of control. People begin to pat their pockets, make some calls, try to figure out what capital they have (and they do have it) and how it can be pooled. There will be no shortage of nervous and like-minded others to join forces – because when you betray a close ally, everyone realises that no one is safe. It has been striking how the UAE, a signatory to the Abraham accords, has been uncharacteristically, loudly critical of Israel since the Qatar strike. Already, the fate of those accords is being questioned. In Tianjin, China urged members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to leverage their“mega-scale markets” to support trade and investment between each other, and announced a “global governance initiative”, a clear bid to cast China and its allies as the underwriters of a new world order. In attendance at the summit were other countries such as Turkey and Egypt, who are also in the political and economic crosshairs of the Middle East crisis. In this new phase of Trump’s foreign policy, uneasiness about his unreliability is hardening into understanding that overexposure to the whims of his regime is straight-up dangerous, because there is no degree of investment in him that will bear fruit. A ruthless deal-maker is only worth engaging with when they observe one fundamental rule: once the deal is made, even if it is a bad one, it is abided by. Trump has violated that tenet. And when it comes to Israel, Trump no longer appears as someone who can be persuaded, flattered and wooed by Arab states. He simply does not have the attention span to prevent the conflict from sprawling in ways that are increasingly redrawing the physical and political map of the Middle East. He is a lazy and capricious emperor, sitting on the heap of a nation roiled by violence and crisis. The global realignment is fledgling, slow and gnarly, and potentially unsettling and chaotic for those countries bound to the US through economic and military ties. The US is the largest consumer economy in the world, and its security umbrella and arms sales constitute a pillar of the stability of many states, particularly in the Arab world. But the choice now for many US allies is between handing their sovereignty over to Trump, or finding ways to shore it up by other means, while not making an enemy of the US president. That the latter needs to happen carefully may create the impression that the tectonic plates are not shifting. The unprecedented alacrity with which states are literally embracing each other suggests otherwise. For the moment, Trump and Netanhayu may look at the summits and statements and see them as pointless demonstrations by the weak, but the power of their two nations is partly psychological. Indulging them was premised on the understanding that everyone was in it together to preserve a status quo, which meant allies wouldn’t be bombed or their economies savaged. Once that spell is broken, all bets are off. Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist