A recent Saudi air strike on UAE weapons in Yemen exposed major differences between the two important Gulf states’ foreign policy plans. But which plan is most likely to succeed?
They’ve always competed behind the scenes, but last week, the rivalry between two of the Middle East’s most influential countries — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — took a violent turn, and very publicly.
On December 30, Saudi Arabia bombed the Yemeni port city of Mukalla, targeting a shipment of weapons for separatists there. The shipment was sent by the UAE for the Southern Transitional Council, or STC, which wants to establish a separate state in southern Yemen.
The Emiratis said the shipment was intended for their own security forces in the area, not the STC. The Saudis clearly didn’t believe that, saying they’d warned the UAE not to send the weapons and that it viewed Emirati actions as “extremely dangerous.”
Yemen’s Hadramout province, where the STC operates, has a long land border with Saudi Arabia. Having it controlled by a group not aligned with the Saudis was not acceptable to Riyadh, Saudi researcher Hesham Alghannam, a nonresident scholar at the think tank Carnegie Middle East Center, explained to Yemeni media outlet Aden Al Ghad.
The Saudi strikes were the first direct confrontation between the two countries and afterwards the UAE said they would withdraw any remaining Emirati troops from Yemen.
But experts say the basic problem between the UAE and Saudi Arabia isn’t going away. Because what it comes down to is two fundamentally different kinds of foreign policy.
“Regional developments in the last couple of months have really illustrated the difference in visions of regional order,” Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told DW.
He says the two countries have come down on different sides in a number of conflicts.
“There is no appetite in Saudi Arabia for renewed military adventurism, unlike the perceived appetite that Abu Dhabi has for risk-taking and backing armed non-state regional groups,” Coates Ulrichsen says.
Regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia is more focused on seeking stability, regional economic cooperation and their own domestic development, as well as working through established institutions like the United Nations, H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, or RUSI, in London, argued in a widely-read post on social media.
UAE’s ‘axis of secessionists’
Meanwhile the UAE tends toward what researchers have called a more Machiavellian, “break-to-build” model of foreign policy, one that doesn’t necessarily align with Arab regional consensus.
Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, describes what the UAE has been doing as building as an “axis of secessionists” — that is, the Emiratis have been supporting various armed non-state actors in places like Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, as a way to gain influence without having to deal with governments. The UAE itself regularly denies this.
“The [UAE’s] axis of secessionists is networked and agile,” Krieg explains. “It is also more resilient than Saudi Arabia’s state-centric approach because it does not depend on one capital, one channel or one formal agreement… money, logistics, aviation, ports, media amplification, lobbying and procurement converge in Emirati space,” he told DW.
And there’s a lot more going on “below the waterline,” Krieg continues, including “brokers, traders, shipping and aviation intermediaries, corporate vehicles, cash and commodity circuits.”
Through these layered networks, the UAE has gained influence and access to important maritime routes, ports and energy hubs.
This creates “an alternative regional order in which Abu Dhabi sets terms through nodes and corridors rather than treaties. It sidelines traditional heavyweight actors by routing leverage around them,” Krieg argues.
This has seen Saudi Arabia and the UAE on opposite sides in different conflicts.
For example, Saudi Arabia has acted as mediator in Sudan, backing the internationally recognized government there, while the UAE has been accused of supporting Sudanese paramilitary, the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.
Recently, when Israel recognized Somaliland as a state separate from Somalia, the majority of Arab states (and many other countries), including Saudi Arabia, protested the controversial action. The UAE did not — it has close ties with Somaliland and Israel.
The UAE has normalized relations with Israel while Saudi Arabia says it won’t until the question of Palestinian statehood is settled.
The UAE has also been accused of encouraging separatist factions in Syria — among the Druze minority in particular — who want to break away from the new Syrian government. The latter is supported by the Saudis.
Differences between the two countries are getting harder to manage diplomatically, and observers suggest it’s leading to a kind of “Cold War” between two of the most influential nations in the Middle East.
What’s next for Saudi-Emirati tensions?
After last week, locals from both countries have been attacking one another on social media. One Saudi analyst said the UAE was “tearing countries and societies apart” while another likened the UAE to a rebellious little brother. Meanwhile an Emirati commentator complained Saudi Arabia was like the big brother who thinks they’re better than everybody.
But for now, observers don’t think things will go beyond name-calling.
“I think the Saudis moved decisively in Yemen to secure their interests and this may have been one of the first times that the UAE faced significant blowback for their support for non-state groups,” Coates Ulrichsen told DW.
But there’s no real desire for any permanent rupture, so what’s most likely to happen is that “the Saudis and Emiratis double down on their own separate policy pathways,” he said.
Additionally, although the UAE may have withdrawn its special forces from Yemen, it won’t back down altogether, Krieg says: “[Recent events] will make them tighten process, reduce visibility and manage blowback — but the underlying logic still looks intact.”
That’s a pattern, Krieg says: “When it meets resistance, [the UAE] tends to adjust the wrapper rather than abandon the core play.”
Winning a ‘Cold War?’
The UAE has achieved a lot with its methods, Krieg argues. “But the decisive variable is reputational and political cost.”
For example, the group the UAE supports in Sudan, the RSF, have been accused of massacres and other atrocities, and the UAE has been criticized for supporting them.
Sudan is a major stress test for the UAE’s “axis of secessionists” policy, Krieg concludes.
“The price of sustaining an RSF-centered ecosystem is rising, deniability is thinning, and the blowback is increasingly multi-directional, including from within the Gulf,” he says. “So over time, the side that can turn leverage into legitimacy and durable stability will be the one that truly wins.”
