Saudi Arabia has publicly accused the United Arab Emirates – a fellow Gulf Arab state and former companion in the Yemen struggle – of undermining its national security, an unusually blunt cost that exposes a rift lengthy stored behind closed doorways.
The language is amongst the sharpest Riyadh has used towards its ally and displays rising Saudi unease with the UAE’s more and more unbiased international coverage, tensions that final week culminated in Saudi strikes on a UAE-linked cargo in Yemen.
NCS has discovered that Riyadh is especially involved about the UAE’s position in Yemen, which shares a lengthy border with Saudi Arabia, and in Sudan, which lies throughout the Red Sea from the kingdom’s west coast. Saudi officers fear that instability or state collapse in both nation might have grave penalties for its personal nationwide safety.
Those issues prolong past Yemen and Sudan. Riyadh can also be cautious of the UAE’s insurance policies in the Horn of Africa and in Syria, the place it believes Abu Dhabi has cultivated ties with parts of the Druze community, a few of whose leaders have brazenly mentioned secession.
A UAE official informed NCS that the nation’s international coverage prioritizes worldwide cooperation and long-term prosperity, framing it as a part of a broader dedication to “responsible leadership” and “enduring progress.”
The official didn’t deal with allegations relating to Abu Dhabi’s position in Syria. The UAE has not publicly endorsed Druze aspirations for autonomy or secession in the nation.
For the UAE, southern Yemen’s strategic significance lies in its location alongside key maritime commerce routes and Red Sea delivery lanes, in addition to its proximity to the Horn of Africa, the place Abu Dhabi has constructed each army and industrial pursuits. The UAE says its position in Yemen has to do with its broader technique of combatting extremism. ISIS and Al Qaeda have lengthy had a presence in the nation.
But Yemen, Sudan and the Horn of Africa lie far nearer to Saudi Arabia than to the UAE, magnifying Riyadh’s sense of publicity.
While analysts don’t count on the rift to escalate into direct battle, even a restricted deterioration might carry far-reaching penalties. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are amongst the world’s largest oil exporters and are positioned close to two of the most important maritime chokepoints in world commerce – the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab – by which a important share of the world’s seaborne oil flows and far of the delivery sure to and from the Suez Canal passes. Even a restricted confrontation between the two US allies could be carefully watched by power markets.
They are additionally the largest and second-largest Arab economies respectively, with long-term funding pledges to the US working into the trillions of {dollars}, notably in protection and know-how, alongside entry to a few of Washington’s most superior army programs.
Just a decade in the past, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have been carefully aligned round what they noticed as the area’s most urgent threats: Islamism, Iran’s increasing affect and the problem to the regional establishment posed by Arab Spring–impressed uprisings. Together, they launched a military intervention in Yemen to roll again the advance of the Iran-backed Houthis, backed counter-revolutionary forces in the area and imposed a punishing blockade on fellow Gulf state Qatar over its alleged help for Islamist actions.
That alignment has since frayed. As a few of these threats receded, Saudi and Emirati priorities started to diverge, bringing competing agendas to the fore. In current years, the two have discovered themselves backing opposing sides in regional conflicts, most notably in the civil wars in Yemen and Sudan.
Saudi Arabia is now leveling towards the UAE the very accusation that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as soon as manufactured from Iran: that backing non-state actors in the area threatens safety – a reversal unfolding as Tehran’s influence weakens and competitors for power intensifies.
“How does an action undertaken to defend shared security come to be reframed as a liability?” Ali Al Nuaimi, an influential lawmaker, wrote on X, referring to the Abu Dhabi’s position in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. “How do those who assumed risk and cost become objects of suspicion rather than partners in outcome?”
The UAE official additionally famous the “substantial sacrifices” that Abu Dhabi made in Yemen “at the request of the legitimate Yemeni government and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Dozens of Emirati troops have been killed in Yemen throughout the marketing campaign there.
Competing pursuits in Sudan and Yemen are what led to the rift lastly popping out in the open after Yemen’s UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) overran the south of the nation in early December, taking swathes of territory and expelling Saudi-backed Yemeni authorities forces from these areas.
NCS has discovered that Saudi Arabia believes the UAE mobilized Yemeni separatist forces in provinces bordering the kingdom after being falsely knowledgeable that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had requested US President Donald Trump during a White House visit in November to impose sanctions on Abu Dhabi over its alleged support for a warring party in Sudan’s civil struggle. Riyadh has reached out to the UAE to elucidate that it made no such request.
The UAE official who spoke to NCS didn’t instantly deal with the matter when requested.
Driving dwelling its message of zero tolerance for instability at its border, Riyadh launched airstrikes on a UAE cargo in Yemen on Tuesday and backed the Yemeni authorities’s name for UAE forces to depart the nation. The UAE pledged to withdraw, however anti-UAE rhetoric in Saudi state media and amongst influential commentators has only intensified.
NCS understands that additional Saudi strikes focusing on the STC stay on the desk ought to the separatists not withdraw. After the UAE pulled its troops from Yemen final week, the STC moved towards secession, however beneath intense army stress from Riyadh and its native allies, it misplaced territory and was compelled to concede to coming into dialogue with Saudi Arabia, a potential setback for Abu Dhabi.
The message from Riyadh is obvious: Saudi Arabia sees itself at the apex of the Arab and Muslim worlds and expects others to align accordingly.
“There is a recurring phenomenon in the (Gulf Arab states) that stems from a structural imbalance between one very large state – Saudi Arabia – and a number of much smaller ones,” Ali Shihabi, a distinguished Saudi commentator wrote on X. “As these smaller states acquire great wealth, they often begin to operate under the illusion that they are equal partners of the kingdom rather than beneficiaries of a system ultimately stabilized by it. To assert their individualism, they periodically adopt contrarian political positions to signal independence.”
The UAE, specifically, has sought to emphasise its independence from regional heavyweights lately, pursuing insurance policies which have damaged with conventional regional consensus, together with normalizing relations with Israel earlier than the institution of a Palestinian state and intervening in international locations properly past its speedy neighborhood to confront perceived Islamist threats.
In an interview with NCS’s Becky Anderson late final 12 months, the UAE president’s diplomatic adviser, Anwar Gargash, outlined Abu Dhabi’s geostrategic imaginative and prescient for the area in the context of Sudan, framing it by way of countering extremism and selling regional stability.
“We are an influential country in the region,” he mentioned. “Maybe somebody doesn’t like it but matter of fact, we are, and as a result I think we have a regional view on what we want to see in countries around us.”
Gargash has beforehand mentioned Abu Dhabi’s unbiased method stems from a perception that “if nations of our size isolate themselves, they risk marginalization.”
‘Illuminating a dark land’
The UAE sees itself as an exemplar of Arab modernity – a self-styled island of stability in a turbulent area – and has constructed a document to help that narrative. In the 54 years since its founding, the state, roughly the dimension of Austria, has grown into the Arab world’s second-largest financial system, diversified extra efficiently than lots of its oil-rich neighbors and emerged as a main world investor with affect in Washington, Europe and past. It is dwelling to a few of the area’s most cosmopolitan cities and, in a reflection of its ambitions, has even set its sights on space.
Surveys constantly rank the UAE as the prime vacation spot for Arab youth seeking opportunity overseas, eclipsing Western international locations that after dominated these aspirations.
“We are in an unstable region, a difficult region that has challenges, has different points of view,” UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, said in an address to Emirati youth in 2019, when he was crown prince of Abu Dhabi. “But I am convinced that our country, the UAE, today is like the light that is illuminating a dark land, an example for others, with my respect to all our neighbors.”
Despite the unprecedented nature of the rift between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, consultants don’t foresee it escalating considerably – at the least to not the scale of the final intra-Gulf disaster, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE led a blockade of Qatar between 2017 and 2021.
“We can see more economic competition, and there will inevitably be competition in how their respective foreign policy approaches are explained and finessed to the White House,” mentioned Karen Young, a senior analysis scholar at Columbia University. “Both will seek US support, and this will be a tension point in any future escalations between the US (and) Israel, and Iran.”
Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has made economic transformation its top priority, a shift that has more and more formed its international coverage calculations. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a analysis fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says that focus is more likely to mood Riyadh’s urge for food for escalation.
“Both countries have financial muscle and economic leverage that could be deployed against each other, but one lesson of the Qatar blockade is that the attempt to isolate Qatar was a failure inasmuch as Doha was not forced to make concessions,” he mentioned. “The fact that both the Saudis and the Emiratis have invested so heavily in deepening relations with the Trump administration means that Washington may become a proxy venue for competitive rivalry if the situation escalates.”