Long-simmering tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates burst dramatically into the open in the last week. The immediate crisis began last month, when Emirati-backed forces in Yemen moved inland from their stronghold in Aden, capturing several Saudi-controlled oil-rich areas with seemingly little resistance. In mid-December, Saudi Arabia launched a fierce counterattack that drove the UAE not only from the captured areas but potentially from all of Yemen.
The confrontation was more than a local scrimmage. Saudi and Emirati media figures launched ferocious propaganda wars. Emiratis blasted Saudi Arabia for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and bullying a smaller neighbor. Saudis lambasted the UAE as anti-Islamic and pro-Israel and recklessly backing secessionists across the region. The language of mutual recrimination and accusation between longtime allies recalled the worst of what they used to say about Qatar during their joint 2017-21 blockade.
The stakes this time are just as high. The confrontation is about more than Yemen. And it’s more than just an ordinary squabble among Gulf allies. The Saudi move against the UAE represents not just an effort to restrain Emirati adventurism but to balance against an increasingly reckless and threatening Israel. The potential regional alignment lines were laid out clearly by the Saudi foreign minister’s sudden trip to Cairo, where Egyptian officials affirmed their total support for Riyadh’s views on Libya and Sudan after more than a decade of closer alignment with and economic dependence on the UAE.
That’s a dramatic shift in regional order—and one that puts the region at a crossroads at a moment when Iran is reeling from another wave of domestic protests and when the United States’ role remains unclear.
The UAE has long been pursuing an aggressively independent policy in the region. During the 2011 Arab uprisings, it worked closely with Saudi Arabia in pushing back against potential democratic changes across the region. It joined the 2011 intervention in Libya and the 2015 Saudi intervention in Yemen, though it was never fully on board with the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed played a key role in shepherding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ascent to de facto power. In 2017, the UAE and Saudi Arabia joined forces to impose a blockade on Qatar, allegedly over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and support for Islamist and democratic forces across the region.
Cracks began to appear in the Saudi-Emirati coalition, though. In Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt backed the Sudanese military led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, while the UAE took on Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—culminating in the horrific massacre at El Fasher last October. In Libya, the UAE and Egypt backed Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s bid, only to see it get bogged down in interminable civil war. In Yemen, while the Saudis failed to unseat the Houthis and paid only intermittent attention, the UAE quietly carved out a series of ports (including Aden and the island of Socotra) in support of a broader Red Sea maritime strategy.
The UAE’s 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords with Israel transformed the Saudi-Emirati relationship, though it took time for the divisions to fully manifest. Unlike all previous peacemaking efforts, the Abraham Accords pointedly detached normalization from the Palestinian issue. The UAE pushed forward with high-level security cooperation, intelligence sharing, and political alignment with Israel with no regard to Israeli-Palestinian developments. That approach seemed to be working for several years, as the Biden administration ignored Palestine and put all of its energy into pushing Saudi Arabia into its own normalization agreement with Israel. The UAE and Saudi Arabia quietly ended the blockade of Qatar, reconciled with Turkey, sought a rapprochement with Iran, and generally sought to reduce the intensity of regional conflicts.
That all came crashing down on Oct. 7, 2023, with Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and the war that followed. Israel’s devastation of Gaza galvanized Arab public opinion and changed Saudi calculations about normalization. The UAE maintained its relations with Israel, positioning itself as the key Arab interlocutor for a post-Hamas Gaza and hoping to claim vindication for its strategy of tight alignment with Israel and Washington. Saudi Arabia, with a much more challenging domestic environment and its own ambitions for regional leadership, reverted to its traditional position of conditioning normalization with Israel on a credible path toward a Palestinian state. Unstated, but well understood, was that Riyadh never had any intention of joining an Abu Dhabi-led initiative.
These simmering tensions came to a boil over a number of intersecting dynamics. Israel’s dramatic military escalation across the region alarmed the Saudis. While Riyadh appreciated the destruction of Hezbollah, it worried about the potential fallout of the attack on Iran, deeply opposed Israeli meddling in Syria, and was shocked by its bombing of a Hamas meeting in Doha. A weakened Iran was good news but not enough to overcome Saudi fears of an unrestrained Israel carrying out military strikes at will across the region, continuing its devastation of Gaza and escalating in the West Bank, and openly seeking Middle Eastern hegemony. In this context, the UAE seemed a critical part of a deeply threatening Israeli-led regional project.
The crystallization of a divide between Saudi Arabia and the Emirati-Israeli alliance would force everyone in the region to take sides—something smaller states usually prefer to avoid. Most of the other Gulf states, such as Egypt, seem to be falling in line with Saudi Arabia. The competition could inflame civil wars, just as it did a decade earlier. The UAE-backed RSF is already escalating its atrocities in Sudan, while Haftar’s Libyan National Army could soon break the fragile but enduring Libyan status quo. The UAE is reportedly promoting a push for southern secession in Yemen (though the rebel leader appears to have fled Yemen this week) and secessionist moves by the Druze in Syria, which deeply undermines Saudi- and Qatari-backed efforts to stabilize the new, post-Assad regime.
That project is not just Middle Eastern. The Horn of Africa and the Red Sea must be understood as an integral part of the Emirati-Saudi competition. Israel’s recent recognition of Somaliland (which the UAE and other potential partners have not yet emulated, despite rampant rumors) could work alongside the UAE’s control of Aden to establish a dominant position over the critical Bab el-Mandeb and access to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. The brutal civil war in Sudan is not a war about nothing, as some baffled Americans seem to think, but one whose outcome has critical implications for Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and the entire East African warscape. The potential alliance partners also extend into India, which is sympathetic to Israel, and Pakistan, which recently signed a strategic partnership with Riyadh.
Washington’s position remains alarmingly ambiguous. The baffling attack on Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro have been read in the region as another setback for Iran and as a possible road map for a regime change attempt against the Islamic Republic. Israel is lobbying hard to make that a reality. Some hawks view the UAE’s plans as an effective way to put pressure not only on Iran but also on China, by establishing a grip on Red Sea shipping. But Saudi Arabia enjoys close relations with this White House, and Mohammed bin Salman just concluded a successful visit. A distracted and dysfunctional Trump administration might just watch the unfolding regional transformation from the sidelines. But it’s all too easy to see the administration taking an impulsive gamble that accelerates regional conflicts and pushes the new order in unexpected directions.