Are the Arab Gulf nations headed for a divorce with Qatar?

The Gulf Cooperation Council, a coalition of six Gulf Arab monarchies established in 1981 to defend the borders of the Arab sheikdoms from Iran's revolutionary government, has gotten itself into a pickle.

Diplomatic disagreements between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar aren't unprecedented. They've happened before throughout history; indeed, just because a group of states are members of a regional club doesn't at all mean that they agree on anything and everything all of the time.

Riyadh, accustomed to being the big brother to all of the other little brothers in the Gulf, has frequently lashed out publicly and privately at Doha's willingness to pursue a foreign policy that is destabilizing in the minds of the al-Saud family. Due to their financial and political support to the Muslim Brotherhood movement, their financial contributions to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, and their relatively pragmatic relationship with the Iranians, the Qatari royals are typically type-casted as the outcasts of the GCC.

The simple rule of thumb is that Saudi Arabia and the UAE want the status quo to prevail above all else, while Qatar wants to tap into any opportunity or political entity that will provide the gas-rich peninsular nation with influence on par with a genuine regional player. Riyadh, to state the obvious, doesn't exactly appreciate the GCC's black sheep challenging its authority.

In 2014, the Saudis, Emiratis, and Bahrainis withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in what was seen at the time as the worst diplomatic crisis to hit the Gulf states in a generation. The current rupture in relations, however, makes the 2014 episode look like a minor matter.