During the early years of the Cold War, Marshal Josip Broz Tito was an unlikely ally for Harry Truman and the U.S.-led anti-Communist West. Tito came to power in Yugoslavia as a Communist, of course, and acted like it: collective farms, paranoid show trials, and other features of Communist dictatorships came to Yugoslavia after World War II.

But Tito wanted to be more than a mere puppet of Moscow, and Truman exploited the crack in the Soviet sphere. The U.S. furnished Tito with weapons and aid despite his nondemocratic leadership and his desire to be courted by both East and West because, geographically, doing so extended NATO’s sphere of influence and limited the Soviets’ near-abroad. Considering the role that NATO was to play over the course of the next half-century, Truman’s compromise was clearly defensible, if costly.

Much of the discussion around the current U.S. relationship with Qatar, a strategically located but ultimately untrustworthy frenemy, echoes the discourse on Truman and Tito. But Qatar lacks the main ingredient that makes such a state worth taking a risk on: It provides no obvious benefit.

That is not to say there are no benefits at all to our relationship with Qatar. But the disproportionate nature of the trade means the alliance will always require justification. You don’t need to wonder why we wanted to bring Yugoslavia under the Western security umbrella in 1951. You only had to look at a map.

Qatar, on the other hand, seeks to be in a different category of ally altogether—one made up of countries that occasionally undermine U.S. national security but not enough to undo the benefit of having them in our corner.

You could argue, for example, this category includes Saudi Arabia, the location of President Trump’s visit today. We have strategic relationships with all kinds of states, and they do not all share our values or even necessarily our strategic goals.

But such states have one thing that Qatar is lacking: the ability to rein in the trouble they cause. Qatar can occasionally help us strategically but it is almost never able to control the chaos it unleashes. The best Qatar can do is to stop (or pause) its troublemaking. And it’s fair to wonder if that’s really good enough.

For example, consider Qatar’s sponsorship of Hamas. The reason Israeli leaders believed they could live with a situation in which Qatar ensured that Gaza didn’t run out of money was because that money was supposed to come with strings attached. Qatar would keep Hamas afloat as the cost of keeping Gazans’ standard of living stable. (If you’ve seen the “this is what Israel destroyed” social media posts, you’ll know that not only was Gaza not an open-air prison but it actually had a lot to lose in from the invasion of Israel.)

In return, the Qataris would make sure that the level of terrorism was also kept stable at a manageable level. Under Hamas, Gaza was never going to become a peace colony, but putting a ceiling on Hamas’s threat was worth the price—at least, that was the gamble.

Oct. 7 destroyed that narrative. The Qataris weren’t, it turned out, keeping a lid on Gazan extremism; They were using the money instead to keep Hamas afloat while it planned the massive pogrom-like violence of that day.

Before Oct. 7, you could say “Yes, the Qataris fund Hamas, but….” There’s no “but” in the equation anymore.

Another example would be Qatar’s flooding of America’s elite universities with money. These donations at times reach unfathomable amounts, and they entrench a certain tolerance of extremism on campus when it comes to Israel and Jews. But it turned out—though surely many at these institutions expected the events of the past 18 months, and plenty of them approve of the riots—that the academic argument against Israel was also the academic argument against America. The students at Harvard also want Harvard to be destroyed, and they say so freely. Same goes for Columbia and the rest.

Then there’s the larger question of what can be controlled at all. Plant a carrot, declares Bellomy in The Fantasticks, and you get a carrot. But Qatar planted the seeds of self-hatred, anti-Semitism, and paranoid discontent among young and impressionable minds. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle even if Qatar wanted it to.

The Qataris don’t know how to play the game of geopolitics. They just have money and like spending it. The chaos they breed is far more of dangerous to the West than anything they accomplish with their occasional goodwill gestures.