UAE’s Opec exit signals aim to accelerate foreign policy diversification

The United Arab Emirates is expected to continue making high-risk geopolitical moves with potentially high rewards, following its exit from the Opec oil cartel, as the small but extremely wealthy Gulf state strives to become a global power. Framed by Emirati officials as an orientation towards strengthening economic autonomy, the UAE’s decision to leave the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) on Tuesday coincided with the downgrading of its diplomatic participation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a Saudi Arabia-led alliance of the region’s six monarchies. Rather than sending its president or vice-president to attend an emergency GCC summit in Jeddah on Tuesday, the UAE was represented by Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, in what was widely seen as a snub to the event’s host, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Speaking at a conference in Dubai on Monday, the UAE president’s diplomatic adviser, Anwar Gargash, said the Gulf states’ policies of trying to “contain” Iran either through diplomatic or economic engagement had “failed miserably”. “We are facing an important reassessment,” Gargash said, referring to the hundreds of air strikes launched against the UAE and other GCC states by Iran after Tehran came under attack by the US and Israel on February 28. “The first part is that this brutal and pre-planned [Iranian] aggression poses a vital threat for decades to come, and the second part is that our containment policies have also failed.” The current position of the GCC – which also includes Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain – was the “weakest in [its] history, considering the nature of the [Iranian] attack and the threat it poses to everyone”, Gargash said. Stung by the lack of regional support for collective retaliation against Iran for carrying out hundreds of drone and missile attacks against the GCC states during its war with the US and Israel, Abu Dhabi could also leave – or suspend its membership of – the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), according to Emirati analysts close to the UAE government. Instead, the UAE has signalled its intention to draw closer to Israel, with which it normalised relations in 2020 under the US-led Abraham Accords, and to further strengthen its recent strategic partnership with India to diversify its political, defence and economic relationships beyond the Arab-Islamic world. In a research paper published by the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute on April 24, Emirati scholar Tareq al-Otaiba said the lack of Arab support for collective action against Iran had “exposed … who the UAE’s real friends are and which states make only empty statements”. “Primarily”, the US and Israel had “proved to be true allies [of the UAE] by offering support through extensive military aid, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic backing”, said Otaiba, a Middle East fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Centre. According to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of Centres of Power in the Arab Gulf States, “Emirati leaders believe that the UAE is more than a regional or middle power and are calibrating policymaking expectations accordingly”. “This process has been evident for some time,” Ulrichsen noted, pointing to the UAE’s hosting of the Cop28 UN Climate Control Conference in Dubai in 2023, as an example of Emirati leaders increasingly seeing the country “not just as a middle power in the international system, but a state with connections and interests that transcend the region”. In doing so, analysts said the UAE has apparently decided to move on from the region’s Saudi-led diplomatic architecture, which has been expanded in response to the Iran conflict to include Nato member Turkey, nuclear-armed Pakistan and Egypt. Closer relations between the UAE, Israel and India were likely to happen “regardless of the return of bloc rivalries, but will doubtless be a part of the realignment of regional and international dynamics”, said Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. While these competing alignments were in early stages of development, they could develop into rival blocs, although both groupings would remain tied to the US, the Middle East’s security hegemon, due to shared concerns about the threat posed to them all by Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies like Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis. “All the GCC countries are basically aligned with the United States above all others when it comes to national security, and I don’t expect that to change for any of them,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar of the Arab Gulf States Institute. Nor did he think that the UAE would want to take sides in the event of further conflict between enemies India and Pakistan, or in a theoretical future clash between Israel and Saudi Arabia. “Strategic diversification is the name of the game, and all the Gulf Arab countries are practising it right now,” Ibish said. Some GCC states had been moving in that direction for over a decade, “largely because of disappointment with Washington and a sense that the US is not as reliable a guarantor of security as perhaps it once was, or was perceived to be”. “I think you can expect them to be reaching out broadly, therefore, to many different states and groups of states,” Ibish added. The UAE’s foreign policy – in particular its backing in recent years of separatist groups in Yemen, Sudan and Somalia – would continue to put Abu Dhabi at odds with Riyadh and other regional powers that favour the preservation of the status quo, according to analysts. For instance, the UAE was widely considered to be responsible for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Somaliland, the breakaway region of Somalia, last December. The move came shortly after the UAE’s withdrawal from Yemen, following harsh Saudi criticism for Abu Dhabi’s backing of territorial seizures by the Yemeni separatist Southern Transitional Council. Israel appointed its first ambassador to Somaliland last month, drawing a joint statement of condemnation from GCC, Arab League and OIC members, with the notable exclusions of the UAE and fellow Abraham Accords signatories Bahrain and Morocco. “There has been a regional backlash against aspects of Emirati regional and foreign policies,” Ulrichsen said. “The backing of non-state groups in Yemen and Libya as well … exemplifies the high-risk, potentially high-reward components of Emirati statecraft over the past decade and more,” he added. The UAE has also been accused by some critics of “weaponising economic interdependence” of its trading partners through investments in port terminals rivalled only by China. Abu Dhabi has also positioned itself as a leading global investor in renewable energy projects, which are tied both to technology initiatives such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Ibish saw much of the criticism levelled at Abu Dhabi as “overblown”, but he expected to see more of its ambitious manoeuvring. “The UAE has an advantage over competitors like Saudi Arabia insofar as it is a small country that does not seek regional Arab or global Islamic leadership,” Ibish said, adding that Abu Dhabi “acts in its own interests only, and does not have to take into consideration the views of others”. “It comes to a conclusion about what would be best for itself, and proceeds in that fashion.” In contrast, Saudi Arabia has to calculate how any significant shift in policy would impact its role in Arab regional or Islamic global leadership. “Basically, the UAE is a small country with a lot of economic and military capabilities, and a strong alliance with Washington, that believes it can – to cite a famous cliché associated with Silicon Valley – move fast and break things,” Ibish said.

UAE’s Opec exit signals aim to accelerate foreign policy diversification

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Iran’s attacks on Gulf states have forced Abu Dhabi to rethink its place within the Saudi Arabia-led diplomatic architecture, analysts say

Iran’s attacks on Gulf states have forced Abu Dhabi to rethink its place within the Saudi Arabia-led diplomatic architecture, analysts say