Extract from ABC News
Analysis
In the Middle East and in Europe, political leaders are making their own arrangements in the absence of US leadership. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
It has been a week dominated by authoritarian leaders testing and breaking boundaries: Benjamin Netanyahu, with his strike on both a non-combatant country and people negotiating a peace deal and Vladimir Putin, with his testing of European preparedness and resolve with his drone fly-over in Poland.
By habit, and sometimes by hope, many in the world immediately looked to Washington to see what the reaction of the United States would be to both these incidents.
They found a US president who had not been consulted about the Israeli strike, and whose incoherent response seemed to reflect his increasingly incoherent strategy in the Middle East. Donald Trump said he was "not thrilled" about the strike.
And they equally found a US president with little to say about the Russian incursion into Polish, and therefore NATO, territory.
"What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go," the US president said on social media.
The intensification of Vladimir Putin's aerial assaults on Ukraine in recent weeks, and now the incursion by drones into Poland's airspace, have made a mockery of Trump's Alaska summit. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)
Trump holds little sway over Netanyahu
While Trump's day to day colour is always distracting, the week's events in Doha only seemed to confirm the view that he holds little, if any, sway over Netanyahu.
Equally, the intensification of Putin's aerial assaults on Ukraine in recent weeks, and now the incursion by drones into Poland's airspace, have also made a mockery of Trump's Alaska summit.
In the Middle East and in Europe, in an absence of US leadership, or influence, in either theatre, political leaders are making their own arrangements.
The Israeli strike aimed at Hamas leadership caused a wave of anger across the region which has brought often warring nations together.
There had been rare consensus at the UN Security Council in condemning the strike in Qatar — even the US signed up to a resolution, but reportedly only after a watering down of wording made no explicit reference to Israel as the aggressor.
Qatar's Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said that there must be a "collective response" and the small gulf nation will host an emergency Arab-Islamic summit in Doha on Sunday and Monday to discuss the Israeli attack.
The invitations have gone far and wide: certainly as far as Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.
Already, a procession of Gulf leaders have expressed their support to Qatar — Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Jordan, some with personal visits to Doha.
The United Arab Emirates said that any attack on a Gulf nation constituted an attack on the collective Gulf security system.
Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said the attack "requires Arab, Islamic, and international action to confront this aggression and to take international measures to stop the occupation authority and deter it from its criminal practices aimed at destabilising the region's security and stability".
There were reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Qatar is pressuring the United Arab Emirates to take immediate diplomatic measures against Israel, including closing its embassy in Tel Aviv.
And this brings us to the question of just what sort of retaliatory action is actually open to Qatar and the states who have pledged to back it.
'This was the wrong thing to do': Penny Wong on Israel's strike in Qatar (ABC News Breakfast)
Netanyahu's vast territorial ambitions
No-one seems to be talking about a military response at this stage.
But the significance of Qatar's pressure on the UAE is that the UAE, and Bahrain, were the first two states to sign up to what are known as the Abraham Accords: agreements which not only normalised diplomatic relations with Israel and saw the Arab states formally recognise Israel, but agreements which have significantly opened economic ties with Israel.
And even before the strike in Doha, these agreements were under pressure because of the Israeli government's talk of annexing the West Bank.
Netanyahu does not seem too fussed about this, declaring at a ceremony to mark the massive expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank that "we are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us".
There is renewed focus on even greater territorial ambitions by Israel under Netanyahu: the idea of a "Greater Israel' that extends not just to the West Bank and Gaza Strip but into areas of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
The Doha meeting will provide a crucial guide to just how capable regional leaders are of forming a potent joint response to Israel's crossing of so many red lines and will only focus further attention on the question of what they do — or should do — about the continuing catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.
In a week's time, world leaders will be meeting in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and there will be what is known as a "high level meeting' to discuss Palestine and a two state solution, even if Israel is moving as fast as possible to make a state of Palestine an idea which can never come to fruition.
It is at this meeting where countries like Australia are expected to outline their support for Palestinian statehood.
But the Doha strike has only brought into stark contrast why the rest of the world is under pressure to do more than just recognise a state.
The week's events in Doha only seemed to confirm the view that Donald Trump holds little, if any, sway over Benjamin Netanyahu. (Reuters: Abir Sultan/Pool)
Putin expected to continue
European countries are also under pressure to work out their collective response to another conflict after this week's Russian drone strike over Poland.
With the extent of Trump's ambivalence towards NATO and Europe now well soaked in among European leaders, the many threads of how Europe now deals with Putin are becoming clearer.
There are the political and diplomatic questions: how leaders find some sort of coherent strategy when many — but particularly French President Emmanuel Macron — are facing serious domestic political strife.
But the appearance of Russian drones in Polish skies this week also raise the question of how well equipped Europe is, and/or how quickly it can gear up its military assets.
As the former UK Chief of the Defence Staff, General Nick Carter wrote this week, while there may be growing common cause among European leaders and significant increases in defence spending, it's not clear whether that spending "can unfold quickly enough to save Ukraine without significant help from the US".
"It also remains to be seen if these factors can restore deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic area to discourage a Russian threat materialising before 2030," he wrote in Politico.
Another former commander of military forces in Europe, Ben Hodges, told the Financial Times that Moscow would have taken note of the fact that Europe had "still not learned from what Ukraine has been dealing with for years".
The former commanding general of the US Army in Europe said: "We are absolutely not prepared for that ... and now they are at our door."
Europe needed a multi-layered, integrated air defence system that could assess the scale of an inbound attack and divert the right resources, he told the FT, unlike the response to the Polish incursion, where high-value fighter jets such as Dutch F-35s were scrambled to shoot down cheap drones.
The expectation is that Putin will continue to mount incursions into NATO spaces, well short of full-scale warfare, but significant enough to unnerve Western Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to continue to mount incursions into NATO spaces, well short of full-scale warfare, but significant enough to unnerve Western Europe. (Reuters: Maxim Shemetov/Pool)
He will undoubtedly do so with ever-increasing confidence that a Trump-led US is unlikely to intervene.
This weekend, he will continue to unsettle the neighbours on his western borders with war games with Belarus.
Western European countries are more than aware that previous bi-annual exercises have war-gamed what turned out to be dry runs for the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, and a nuclear strike on Warsaw.
Three years ago, European nations spent most of their time arguing about how they could support Ukraine without escalating things into a conflict between Russia and NATO.
Now the Russian leader is bringing on the fight directly to the alliance.
That not only requires more military capacity but a very different way of looking at the war in Ukraine, as well as even more ambitious Russian expansion plans.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
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