In the aftermath of the 39th summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) held in Riyadh earlier this month, the war of narratives behind the Qatar crisis continues. Voices in Doha and the blockading Gulf states are busy portraying the annual meeting’s outcome on entirely different terms. The main message from Doha is that Qatar has successfully escaped the Saudi shadow and that the gas-rich emirate is better off not being allied with Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Manama. Meanwhile, media outlets in the so-called Anti-Terror Quartet (ATQ) — Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are accusing Qatar of damaging GCC unity and suffering in isolation as a consequence.

Abundantly clear is the fact that although all six GCC members are set to continue cooperating on technocratic levels, the summit did not bring Qatar and the ATQ any closer to resolving the fundamental political and ideological tensions at the heart of the bitter Gulf dispute. Looking ahead, there is no question that in 2019, like 2018, the GCC will remain an ineffectual and toothless institution that falls extremely short of achieving the objectives set out at the subregional institution’s establishment in 1981.

Simply put, the general perception that the Islamic Republic of Iran poses the gravest threat to all six Gulf monarchies has been replaced in Qatar, Kuwait and Oman with a new perception that the Riyadh-Abu Dhabi axis represents a more dangerous menace to these Gulf littoral states than Tehran’s quest to export Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution to the Arabian Peninsula’s wealthy, pro-Western sheikdoms. Likewise, from the ATQ’s perspective, Qatar deserves to be cast as a regional pariah due to its links with groups that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh classify as terrorist organizations.

The question of Turkey’s role in the GCC’s security architecture is another polarizing issue. Qatar and Kuwait are strengthening their ties with Ankara against the backdrop of the ATQ states’ deteriorating relations with Turkey as the Jamal Khashoggi murder case continues to unfold. To be sure, as intra-GCC divisions come closer to the surface, it is evident that although the Qatar rift is the GCC’s gravest source of internal friction, this 18-month-old dispute is not the only crisis plaguing the group.