Fighter jets bearing Qatar’s maroon-and-white insignia will start ripping through Idaho airspace in five years’ time. That’s the plan as announced this month by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth and Qatari defence minister Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani. A Qatar Emiri Air Force squadron is set to train at Mountain Home Air Force Base from 2030. The detachment will consist of 12 Qatari F-15QA fighter jets, supported by approximately 300 Qatari and US personnel.

The arrangement isn’t unusual. Luke Air Force Base in Arizona trains 70 per cent of the world’s F-35 pilots, while Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas is home to the Euro-Nato Joint Jet Pilot Training Programme. Mountain Home has hosted the Peace Carvin V detachment of the Royal Singapore Air Force since 2009.

Yet the prospect of Qataris training on US soil has raised hackles on both sides of the aisle. Democratic strategist Max Burns called it a “national security crisis”, while Natalie Ecanow, a senior research analyst at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, deemed Qatar a “frenemy” at best.

But the sharpest critique has come from the Republican far-right, which counts Idaho as a stronghold. The most bizarre objections come from elected officials such as state senator Brian Lenney, who is leery of welcoming foreign nationals whom he alleges pledge fealty to a Sharia legal system incompatible with US constitutional law and represent a country where Christianity cannot be practised. Qatari pilots would, of course, be subject to US laws. While Islam is Qatar’s religion, there are actually churches in Doha, though surely fewer than in Mountain Home.

Isolationist by nature, these America Firsters don’t trust Qatar as an ally, pointing to its poor track record combatting illicit funding to terror groups. Their worst fear is a repeat of the December 2019 incident when a Saudi airman training to be a pilot at a naval air station in Florida shot dead three US service members in a jihadist attack. (Though Idahoans should feel secure if they follow Lenney’s advice to remain well-armed – he wrote an entirely sincere children’s book titled Why Everyone Needs an AR-15! A Guide for Kids.)

These parochial protestations miss the opportunity for the US to enhance its soft power through hard power and for Idaho to position its sparsely populated land mass as an ideal training ground for allied air forces with constrained airspace. According to Pentagon officials, the Qatari deal was in the works for at least three years but the public unveiling of the proposed long-term training scheme comes at a pivotal moment in bilateral relations. Mere weeks after Israel’s norm-shattering strike at Hamas leadership in Doha, the White House issued a security guarantee that elevates Qatar to near-Article V status.

Like it or loathe it, Doha has ingratiated itself with the US and savvy minds in Washington should use that relationship to their advantage. For one, training access keeps Qatar writing cheques for the blockbuster $12bn (€10.32bn) deal that it made with the US in 2017 to buy 36 specially modified F-15s. For another, interoperability and shared training makes the country, which hosts the largest US base in the Middle East, a more reliable strategic ally in a volatile region. It could also provide further leverage to pressure the Qataris to up their counter-terrorism bona fides.

Since the Florida attack, the US has rightly increased the scrutiny applied to foreign military students. I suspect that Idahoans meeting the Qataris who pass the vetting will find courteous and respectful young men with traditional values not so different from conservative Christians. They will certainly be anything but rabble rousers – a model of probity that US soldiers stationed abroad would be wise to emulate.

Gregory Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For his take on why Trump’s troops on US soil might do some good, click here.