Saudi Arabia’s dispute with the UAE exposes a deeper regional power struggle
By Abbas Al Lawati, CNN
(CNN) — Saudi Arabia has publicly accused the United Arab Emirates – a fellow Gulf Arab state and former partner in the Yemen war – of undermining its national security, an unusually blunt charge that exposes a rift long kept behind closed doors.
The language is among the sharpest Riyadh has used against its ally and reflects growing Saudi unease with the UAE’s increasingly independent foreign policy, tensions that last week culminated in Saudi strikes on a UAE-linked shipment in Yemen.
CNN has learned that Riyadh is particularly concerned about the UAE’s role in Yemen, which shares a long border with Saudi Arabia, and in Sudan, which lies across the Red Sea from the kingdom’s west coast. Saudi officials worry that instability or state collapse in either country could have grave consequences for its own national security.
Those concerns extend beyond Yemen and Sudan. Riyadh is also wary of the UAE’s policies in the Horn of Africa and in Syria, where it believes Abu Dhabi has cultivated ties with elements of the Druze community, some of whose leaders have openly discussed secession.
A UAE official told CNN that the country’s foreign policy prioritizes international cooperation and long-term prosperity, framing it as part of a broader commitment to “responsible leadership” and “enduring progress.”
The official didn’t address allegations regarding Abu Dhabi’s role in Syria. The UAE has not publicly endorsed Druze aspirations for autonomy or secession in the country.
For the UAE, southern Yemen’s strategic importance lies in its location along key maritime trade routes and Red Sea shipping lanes, as well as its proximity to the Horn of Africa, where Abu Dhabi has built both military and commercial interests. The UAE says its role in Yemen has to do with its broader strategy of combatting extremism. ISIS and Al Qaeda have long had a presence in the country.
But Yemen, Sudan and the Horn of Africa lie far closer to Saudi Arabia than to the UAE, magnifying Riyadh’s sense of exposure.
While analysts do not expect the rift to escalate into direct conflict, even a limited deterioration could carry far-reaching consequences. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among the world’s largest oil exporters and are positioned near two of the most critical maritime chokepoints in global trade – the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab – through which a significant share of the world’s seaborne oil flows and much of the shipping bound to and from the Suez Canal passes. Even a limited confrontation between the two US allies would be closely watched by energy markets.
They are also the largest and second-largest Arab economies respectively, with long-term investment pledges to the US running into the trillions of dollars, particularly in defense and technology, alongside access to some of Washington’s most advanced military systems.
A fraying alliance
Just a decade ago, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were closely aligned around what they saw as the region’s most pressing threats: Islamism, Iran’s expanding influence and the challenge to the regional status quo posed by Arab Spring–inspired uprisings. Together, they launched a military intervention in Yemen to roll back the advance of the Iran-backed Houthis, backed counter-revolutionary forces in the region and imposed a punishing blockade on fellow Gulf state Qatar over its alleged support for Islamist movements.
That alignment has since frayed. As some of those threats receded, Saudi and Emirati priorities began to diverge, bringing competing agendas to the fore. In recent years, the two have found themselves backing opposing sides in regional conflicts, most notably in the civil wars in Yemen and Sudan.
Saudi Arabia is now leveling against the UAE the very accusation that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi once made of Iran: that backing non-state actors in the region threatens security – a reversal unfolding as Tehran’s influence weakens and competition for power intensifies.
“How does an action undertaken to defend shared security come to be reframed as a liability?” Ali Al Nuaimi, an influential lawmaker, wrote on X, referring to the Abu Dhabi’s role in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. “How do those who assumed risk and cost become objects of suspicion rather than partners in outcome?”
The UAE official also noted the “substantial sacrifices” that Abu Dhabi made in Yemen “at the request of the legitimate Yemeni government and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Dozens of Emirati troops were killed in Yemen during the campaign there.
Alleged call for sanctions
Competing interests in Sudan and Yemen are what led to the rift finally coming out in the open after Yemen’s UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) overran the south of the country in early December, taking swathes of territory and expelling Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces from those areas.
CNN has learned that Saudi Arabia believes the UAE mobilized Yemeni separatist forces in provinces bordering the kingdom after being falsely informed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had asked US President Donald Trump during a White House visit in November to impose sanctions on Abu Dhabi over its alleged support for a warring party in Sudan’s civil war. Riyadh has reached out to the UAE to explain that it made no such request.
The UAE official who spoke to CNN didn’t directly address the matter when asked.
Driving home its message of zero tolerance for instability at its border, Riyadh launched airstrikes on a UAE shipment in Yemen on Tuesday and backed the Yemeni government’s call for UAE forces to leave the country. The UAE pledged to withdraw, but anti-UAE rhetoric in Saudi state media and among influential commentators has only intensified.
CNN understands that further Saudi strikes targeting the STC remain on the table should the separatists not withdraw. After the UAE pulled its troops from Yemen last week, the STC moved toward secession, but under intense military pressure from Riyadh and its local allies, it lost territory and was forced to concede to entering dialogue with Saudi Arabia, a potential setback for Abu Dhabi.
‘Illusion’ of an equal partnership
The message from Riyadh is clear: Saudi Arabia sees itself at the apex of the Arab and Muslim worlds and expects others to align accordingly.
“There is a recurring phenomenon in the (Gulf Arab states) that stems from a structural imbalance between one very large state – Saudi Arabia – and a number of much smaller ones,” Ali Shihabi, a prominent Saudi commentator wrote on X. “As these smaller states acquire great wealth, they often begin to operate under the illusion that they are equal partners of the kingdom rather than beneficiaries of a system ultimately stabilized by it. To assert their individualism, they periodically adopt contrarian political positions to signal independence.”
The UAE, in particular, has sought to emphasize its independence from regional heavyweights in recent years, pursuing policies that have broken with traditional regional consensus, including normalizing relations with Israel before the establishment of a Palestinian state and intervening in countries well beyond its immediate neighborhood to confront perceived Islamist threats.
In an interview with CNN’s Becky Anderson late last year, the UAE president’s diplomatic adviser, Anwar Gargash, outlined Abu Dhabi’s geostrategic vision for the region in the context of Sudan, framing it in terms of countering extremism and promoting regional stability.
“We are an influential country in the region,” he said. “Maybe somebody doesn’t like it but matter of fact, we are, and as a result I think we have a regional view on what we want to see in countries around us.”
Gargash has previously said Abu Dhabi’s independent approach stems from a belief that “if nations of our size isolate themselves, they risk marginalization.”
‘Illuminating a dark land’
The UAE sees itself as an exemplar of Arab modernity – a self-styled island of stability in a turbulent region – and has built a record to support that narrative. In the 54 years since its founding, the state, roughly the size of Austria, has grown into the Arab world’s second-largest economy, diversified more successfully than many of its oil-rich neighbors and emerged as a major global investor with influence in Washington, Europe and beyond. It is home to some of the region’s most cosmopolitan cities and, in a reflection of its ambitions, has even set its sights on space.
Surveys consistently rank the UAE as the top destination for Arab youth seeking opportunity abroad, eclipsing Western countries that once dominated those aspirations.
“We are in an unstable region, a difficult region that has challenges, has different points of view,” UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, said in an address to Emirati youth in 2019, when he was crown prince of Abu Dhabi. “But I am convinced that our country, the UAE, today is like the light that is illuminating a dark land, an example for others, with my respect to all our neighbors.”
Despite the unprecedented nature of the rift between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, experts don’t foresee it escalating significantly – at least not to the scale of the last intra-Gulf crisis, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE led a blockade of Qatar between 2017 and 2021.
“We can see more economic competition, and there will inevitably be competition in how their respective foreign policy approaches are explained and finessed to the White House,” said Karen Young, a senior research scholar at Columbia University. “Both will seek US support, and this will be a tension point in any future escalations between the US (and) Israel, and Iran.”
Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has made economic transformation its top priority, a shift that has increasingly shaped its foreign policy calculations. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a research fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says that focus is likely to temper Riyadh’s appetite for escalation.
“Both countries have financial muscle and economic leverage that could be deployed against each other, but one lesson of the Qatar blockade is that the attempt to isolate Qatar was a failure inasmuch as Doha was not forced to make concessions,” he said. “The fact that both the Saudis and the Emiratis have invested so heavily in deepening relations with the Trump administration means that Washington may become a proxy venue for competitive rivalry if the situation escalates.”
The-CNN-Wire
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