For most of its modern history, Qatar was a place that things happened to. It was a quiet peninsula prized for its energy resources and consulted about little, living on the margins of larger ambitions. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who died in Doha on Sunday at the age of 74, refused that inheritance.Despite what many commentaries will reduce his legacy to, he did not just make Qatar rich. He made it relevant. And for a small state, this is a form of security.That was the legacy of his 18 years in power, and it outlived him. The country he handed on in 2013 has sat at more tables and has brokered more conversations than a peninsula its size had any business reaching.The break came in June 1995, when Sheikh Hamad took the throne from his father and ended a long national habit of caution. Deference had been the small state’s survival instinct: keep your head down, defer to the powerful, and wait.Sheikh Hamad inverted it. A country with no strategic depth in territory or numbers could not outweigh its region, so he set out to make the peninsula – wedged between Saudi Arabia and Iran – indispensable to its nei …
