Opinion | The Great Gulf Divorce: The UAE Has Broken From The Arab Order - But For What, Really?

Between May 4 and 10, the UAE was struck by drones and missiles, with vital installations, including the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone, being hit. Even though Iran's Revolutionary Guards formally denied these strikes on May 4, they occurred after the US made a fresh naval attempt to open the Strait of Hormuz (Project Freedom). But while the US suspended the operation by May 6 (after the strikes on Fujairah), skirmishes between US naval forces and the IRGC Navy led to the United States bombing Iran's Qeshm Island and Bandar Abbas port on May 7. Iran's retaliation has specifically targeted the UAE along with US naval forces; the Emirati Defense Ministry issued announcements on May 8 that it was “dealing with missile and drone attacks originating from Iran”. 

Iran's special focus on hitting the UAE has long been clear across this war. According to the Wall Street Journal's May 11 report, this had also led to unprecedented Emirati (unacknowledged) strikes on Iran's Lavan refinery on April 8 as the ceasefire began to take shape (which Iran had responded to with reciprocal strikes). Overall, the UAE has faced more drone/missile strikes than Israel - more than, in fact, what other GCC states have suffered combined. Among other aspects, these Iranian strikes represent a major challenge to the UAE's attempt at “strategic breakout” - a categorical break to decades of geopolitical alignment with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This attempt was crystallized on May 1, when the UAE quit the OPEC after spending 59 years as the second most powerful member of the world's largest oil cartel.

The Saudi Shadow

Since its formation in 1971, the UAE has had to contend between two foreign policy objectives - leveraging its economic might to project power and avoiding misalignment with Saudi Arabia on regional geopolitical choices. This equation was established firmly by Riyadh early, when it made the recognition of the UAE contingent upon the concession of the Buraimi Corridor - which otherwise made the UAE a border state to Qatar - through the 1974 Treaty of Jeddah.

For the UAE, this concession was necessary to pre-empt a dangerous rivalry, if not to gain an uneasy and considerably larger ally. Functionally, this meant that the UAE's geopolitical choices would necessarily have to align with Saudi Arabia or keep Riyadh in confidence. This meant that in the decades since, while Iran has been the UAE's most potent threat, the Emirates has consistently sought to build its bargaining power vis-à-vis both Tehran and Riyadh. Indeed, by 2009, US officials assessed that “while publicly expressing close ties with Riyadh, the UAE privately regarded the Kingdom as its second greatest security threat after Iran”. 

In the subsequent decade, the UAE kept Iran diplomatically and economically engaged, especially at times when Riyadh maintained distance (such as in 2013-14 during negotiations for the US-Iran nuclear deal), and has consistently ranked among Iran's top regional trading partners; the annual UAE-Iran trade reached roughly $29.2 billion (despite US sanctions) by early 2025.

However, ultimately, the Emirati objective was not to seek ideological reconciliation with Tehran but to craft an independent approach to enhancing deterrence against the Islamic Republic, without being held down by Saudi sensitivities. To offset its lack of geographic and military-industrial depth necessary to achieve this, the UAE's preference has long been to build a robust security relationship with both the United States and Israel. This has led to the UAE categorically aligning itself with Washington militarily, unlike the more partnership-of-equals strategy prioritised by Saudi Arabia, America's oldest Arab ally and a state that prides itself on its civilisational status and strategic depth. For Iran itself, this Emirati strategy has often caused discomfort, but Tehran has historically reciprocated the UAE's modus vivendi by keeping diplomatic and economic channels open.

MBZ Arrives

It is by 2017 that the UAE found fresh space to draw Saudi Arabia closer to the Emirati position vis-à-vis the US and Israel. Becoming de facto ruler of the UAE himself in 2014, Mohammad bin Zayed had already come to share a mentor-mentee relationship with Riyadh's Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who became Crown Prince in 2017 and is primed to become the first Saudi king from a new generation.

MBS's disregard for strict ideological rigor, unlike past Saudi kings, and preference for ruthless modernisation and economic diversification was a natural fit for MBZ, who leveraged his relationship with Washington to help sideline former Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef and personally lobbied for MBS with the incoming first Trump administration in 2016.

In subsequent years, both MBZ and MBS jointly launched the Saudi-Emirati intervention in Yemen against the Iran-backed Ansar Allah (Houthis), collectively criticised the final iteration of the US-Iran Nuclear Deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), formalised a quartet against Doha (with Egypt and Bahrain, which past Saudi Kings had opposed) that blockaded Qatar diplomatically and economically for nearly four years, and launched the Saudi-Emirati Coordination Council in June 2018 to bypass the GCC (which was also seen as favouring Qatar). 

That the Emirates has sought to be in control of this relationship has become evident over the years, such as in 2019, when the UAE diverged from Saudi Arabia in its response to Houthi attacks on Saudi and Emirati oil installations, by seeking diplomatic conciliation and restarting maritime security talks with Iran. 

The Yemen Flashpoint

In Yemen itself, the UAE significantly drew down its support to the Saudi-led effort to reinstate the internationally recognised Yemeni government in exile (in Saudi Arabia) but maintained its support for the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC). That the UAE's gamble with MBS was paying off was proven by the fact that both states survived this period of friction. Indeed, after the UAE itself formally established ties with Israel in 2020 through the Abraham Accords, MBS-led Saudi Arabia was primed to follow suit, having also reconciled with Iran by March 2023.

Saudi Arabia joining the Accords would undoubtedly have proven to be the crown jewel of Abu Dhabi's regional strategy. However, MBS - who is still not the de-jure Saudi ruler - remained cautious, given that Saudi Arabia was the custodian of Islam's holiest sites and the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world, and had to be cognisant of Israel's non-fulfilment of its commitments towards Palestine, made both in the Abraham Accords and the first Trump administration's Israel-Palestine peace plan. Thus, any space for MBS to push through normalisation was decisively erased after Israel's wars on Gaza - which Arab states officially deem a genocide - Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen began in 2023.

Did The Abraham Accords Backfire On UAE?

Saudi Arabia's cold feet vis-à-vis Israel left the UAE with little choice but to compensate by reinforcing its own partnerships with Washington and Tel Aviv. Crucially, rather than bring Saudi Arabia in line, the 2020 Abraham Accords significantly worsened the UAE's relationship with Tehran. In that year, then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called the UAE a “traitor to Arab states and to Palestine”, IRGC leaders asserted that the Emirates would be held responsible for any regional threat to Iran's security, and the Guards' Kayhaan newspaper termed the UAE a “legitimate and easy target” for Iran. Across 2021 and 2022, as the UAE further institutionalised its security partnership with Israel and the US through joint military drills, Khamenei continued to urge the UAE to return from its path of “sin”, the IRGC warned that countries inviting Zionists were “living in glass houses” and state-affiliated media continued to characterise the UAE as an “outpost for the enemy” (language reserved for the UAE given the scale of its military alignment with Washington, compared to Saudi Arabia). Through 2024, the year Israel and Iran traded unprecedented direct attacks, the IRGC specifically characterised Israeli presence in the UAE as a potential reason for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz in self-defense.

Ultimately, the UAE-Iran modus vivendi broke decisively with the February 28 US/Israeli war on Iran. Already on the eve of February 27, the UAE faced a twin threat - an Iran that had publicly declared the UAE a principal target for its retaliation to US-Israeli attacks, and a Saudi Arabia that, while under the same US security umbrella, had gone the farthest from the UAE's regional posture.

A Strategic Breakout

As Iran carried out its promised threat in response to US-Israeli attacks, the UAE faced a debilitating poly-crisis in the initial weeks of the war across sectors, but especially its prized tourism sector centered around Dubai, which it championed as an island of stability and economic growth. As of May 8, hotel occupancy in Dubai was projected to fall to 10% of its pre-war figures.

From Iran's perspective, it had already created an implicit Overton window in the Arab world for greater strikes on the UAE, compared to Saudi Arabia, which Iran characterises as a civilisational partner in the Islamic world, and which has not yet normalised ties with Israel. In any case, Riyadh was still able to export oil through its Western ports and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait remained open (with Iran not having urged the Houthis to close it, yet). Moreover, by December 2025, the Saudi-UAE rift in Yemen had blown open in the public domain, shattering the convention of keeping differences quiet, as Saudi forces struck UAE-backed STC targets. Similar differences had erupted in both Sudan and in the Horn of Africa, while later in 2026, Saudi Arabia also effectively replaced the UAE as Pakistan's principal economic backstop.

Rock And A Hard Place

Faced with a Tehran that ultimately proved its ability to punish the UAE and a Saudi Arabia that remained aloof despite Iran's unprecedented attacks across the Gulf, Abu Dhabi was arguably faced with a singular choice - to remove itself from the traditional political and economic architectures of the Gulf and to complete its integration with the US and Israel, or rather, ‘strategic breakout'. The UAE surpasses Saudi Arabia in GDP per-capita, Emirati firms such as DP World operate at least 82 ports in over 40 states (handling roughly 10% of global shipping), it has a larger sovereign wealth fund than KSA, and has the second highest spare production capacity within the OPEC - all of which theoretically allows strategic breakout. The Emirati exit from OPEC is the first decisive marker of such a breakout, with Abu Dhabi arguably gambling on its spare-production capacity to push up supply (and also help the US partially mitigate oil price spikes caused by Iran's blockade).

Since Gulf Arab states have refrained from delivering a decisive response to the Iranian strikes (which now occur almost exclusively against the Emirates), the UAE's continued membership of other regional or multilateral organisations (GCC, Arab League, OIC) is now also suspect. For perspective, on April 27, Anwar Gargash, Diplomatic Advisor to MBZ, asserted that the GCC was at its weakest point in history, having failed to act in the face of Iran's “ferocious” attacks. Specifically, apart from the debilitating impact of Iran's closure of the Strait, the strikes on the UAE's Fujairah pipeline also threaten the Emirati ability to push out oil through its Easternmost ports (just outside the blockaded Strait). Hence, while misalignment with Saudi foreign policy is the long-developed trigger for the UAE's strategic breakout, it is Iran's proven ability to hurt the UAE economically and militarily in response to Abu Dhabi's partnership with Israel, which represents the principal challenge to fully operationalising it. 

(Bashir Ali Abbas is a Senior Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi. Views are strictly personal.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author