To all appearances, it really seems as if the UAE has chosen a side as a result of the US and Israel’s war with Iran, a side that may isolate it from much of the rest of the Arab world.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Israel and the UAE are setting up a joint defense fund, under which the two countries will jointly purchase weapons. The report, first published by media outlet middle east eyeTwo unnamed US officials were cited and this has not been confirmed by any government.
The fund was apparently agreed upon during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s secret visit to the United Arab Emirates, which he made public on the evening of May 13. A few hours later, the United Arab Emirates denied that the visit had ever taken place.
A day earlier, at an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee confirmed that Israel had loaned air defense weapons to the UAE to help defend against air attacks from Iran.
major regional changes
All this – combined with the United Arab Emirates’ announcement in late April that it was leaving the oil producers’ syndicate OPEC, to which it had belonged for 59 years – prompted a flurry of analyzes saying that the Middle East was fundamentally changing.
“A decades-old Gulf order is fading and another is taking shape,” wrote Cinzia Bianco, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. A comment from mid-May.
“The geopolitical earthquake caused by the UAE is much more than a temporary regional conflict,” Ma Young-sam, the former Korean ambassador to Israel, recently said in an English-language daily. korea times . “This signals the emergence of a new Middle Eastern order.”
Markus Schneider, who heads the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s regional project for peace and security in the Middle East in Lebanon, described the two emerging blocs this way: One is a hexagon, he said, made up of the United Arab Emirates and Israel, and the other is diamond-shaped, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt. The latter countries, which have Sunni-majority populations, have also been referred to as the “Quarte”.
Schneider said what connects Israel and the UAE is that both are currently practicing strategies of “disruption” to try to “reshape the Middle East and beyond.”
Netanyahu has often claimed that Israel is “changing the face of the Middle East”. He reiterated in early March After Israel’s joint attack with America on Iran. “The UAE seeks to redraw the map of the Middle East and build new networks of geopolitical and geoeconomic influence centered on Abu Dhabi,” Bianco wrote.
But there are other practical reasons for partnership, too. Bianco added, “For the UAE, Israel provides resources, networks, defense capabilities, technical skills and influence in capitals around the world.”
Meanwhile, the so-called Sunni “diamond” is pursuing a different kind of policy, Schneider told DW. Although the Saudis have been responsible for their fair share of disruption in the past, recently their behavior has changed as they need stability to achieve their economic objectives.
“It’s a more give-and-take approach,” Schneider said of the four-nation grouping. “As in, ‘We have a shared interest in engaging with Iran because we are the ones who suffer,’ and ‘We also have an interest in Israel, because the Israeli thinking is that they can somehow bomb everything, everywhere, all the time, and we basically want to take that into account as well.'”
Saudi Arabia’s growing concerns about Israel were outlined in an article in May written by Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of the Saudi intelligence agency, in a London-based newspaper. Asharq Al-Awsat. The remarks were said to represent the view of the Saudi government.
Al-Faisal wrote, “If the Israeli plan to provoke a war between us and Iran had succeeded, the region would have been plunged into ruin and destruction.” “Thousands of our sons and daughters would have been lost in a war in which we had no stake. Israel would have succeeded in imposing its will on the region and would have remained the only actor in our environment.”
choose a side
Even before the UAE’s moves this month and the Iran war, there were rifts in the Gulf, as evidenced by disagreements between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over Yemen.
“The regional developments have really illustrated the differences in approach to regional order,” Christian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Texas, US, told DW earlier this year. “Saudi Arabia has no appetite for renewed military adventurism, while Abu Dhabi has a reported appetite for risk-taking and supporting armed non-state regional groups.”
When the Iran War began, the Gulf countries put aside those differences in favor of unity. But now, the divide has resurfaced, with one country deepening cooperation with Israel and the other describing it as a growing threat. “The Saudis and the Emirates are basically moving in opposite directions,” Schneider confirmed.
However, analysts also say that the idea that the UAE or Saudi Arabia have “chosen a side” is the wrong way to look at these changes. It is not about unresolved ideological differences, such as were seen during the Cold War. Despite recent changes, the Saudis and Emiratis are still working together in other areas.
“We are in an era of what is being called geopolitical insularity,” Schneider explained. “And these are not rigid alliances.”
“The alignment we see in the Gulf does not reflect a calculated, sustainable grand strategy,” Ibrahim Ozturk, a professor of economic development at the University of Duisburg-Essen in central Germany, told DW. “Instead of choosing sides, these states are in a frantic struggle to deal with a highly volatile environment.”
Can one side prevail?
“If we analyze the region only from the perspective of short-term military escalation, the US-backed Israeli axis appears dominant,” Ozturk said. But, he said, these are superficial, temporary alliances that will eventually be overwhelmed by circumstances.
Consider the Sunni quartet, he said: “It is historically, religiously, structurally and economically impossible to maintain this coalition,” he argued. “These countries have very different governance types, internal vulnerabilities, and varying degrees of dependence on global superpowers like China and the US.”
And the UAE-Israel alliance also has flaws. “[It] It is formidable from a financial, intelligence and technological perspective,” wrote Rachel Bronson, a senior non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs a may analysis. “But they are two small states that are facing enormous retribution. Turkey is a member of NATO with a large military; Pakistan is a nuclear power; and Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and speaks for the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. The UAE’s sovereign wealth, north of $1 trillion, is a real force multiplier. But wealth does not equate to strategic depth.”
Schneider also feels that there are internal contradictions in the UAE that could hinder a partnership with Israel.
“I think they want to be two things at the same time,” he said of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two largest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates.
“Abu Dhabi wants to be a kind of Sparta – so, like an ancient Greek state, very militaristic, very belligerent,” he explained. “Meanwhile, Dubai wants to be like Switzerland: an island of stability where airlines can land, influential people live and Iran banks it. But you can’t really have both at the same time.”
Edited: A. thomas