Even with its demographic and geographic limits, Qatar has several assets that turn out to be in short supply elsewhere in the Middle East and to be of strategic value, given the tumult in the region. First, it is home to al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language news network that has transformed how Arabs get their news. Al-Jazeera gives Qatar “soft power” well beyond its size.

Forty years after a week of table tennis exhibition matches helped restore relations between the United States and China, Ping Pong Diplomacy is making a comeback at a table tennis tournament in Qatar.

The U.S. State Department clearly views Al Jazeera as a tool of Qatar's foreign policy; one cable from November 2009 claims that the Persian Gulf state uses the channel "as a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries, particularly those soured by al-Jazeera's broadcasts, including the United States."

Al Jazeera helped overthrow Hosni Mubarak,...and has now turned against its onetime ally Syria. The victory over Libya—won in part with Qatari money and weapons and fighters, in addition to the soft power of Al Jazeera—may have been the crowning touch.

The political gamble has paid off as Qatar, perhaps the richest country in the world, emerges as a player able to deploy more than the soft power of TV channel Al Jazeera, which has fanned most of the region’s revolutions.

As one of the first countries to recognize the National Transitional Council, Qatar supplied the rebels with arms, uniforms, and $400 million in aid, while also helping the rebels sell their oil. Not least, Qatar provided invaluable moral support with its exhaustive coverage of the rebels on the Al Jazeera TV network, the emir’s powerful public diplomacy wing.

Al Jazeera English has squashed several planned rebroadcasts of “Shouting in the Dark,” an hourlong documentary about Bahrain’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that abrought complaints from Bahraini authorities. The episode illustrates the thorny issue of independence for Al Jazeera, which is financed by the emir of Qatar and is perceived by some people to be a diplomatic tool of the country.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera has not gained distribution on any major cable or satellite systems in the United States. On Monday, the channel will be carried in New York City for the first time, though only by subletting space from a channel owner...it is finding out that cable and satellite distributors wield an enormous amount of control over the channels that viewers in the United States can and cannot see.