The UAE and Israel are getting closer, while Saudi Arabia is enhancing cooperation with Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. The new alliances represent a rift in the Gulf, as approaches to the Iran war and the region diverge.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Israel and the UAE were establishing a joint defense fund, which would see the two countries buying weapons together. The report, first published by the media outlet Middle East Eye , cited two unnamed US officials and has not been confirmed by either government.
The fund was apparently agreed to during a secret visit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to the UAE, which he made public on the evening of May 13. A few hours later, the UAE denied the visit ever happened.
The day before, at an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee confirmed that Israel had loaned the UAE aerial defense weaponry in order to help defend against air attacks from Iran.
Major regional changes All that — combined with the UAE's late-April announcement that it was leaving the oil producers' syndicate OPEC , to which it had belonged for 59 years — caused a rash of analyses stating that the Middle East was changing radically.
"A decades-old Gulf order is fading, and another is taking shape," Cinzia Bianco, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a mid-May commentary .
But there are also other pragmatic reasons for the partnership. "For the UAE, Israel offers resources, networks, defense capabilities, technological prowess and influence in capitals around the world," Bianco continued.
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, more recently their behavior has changed because they need stability in order to achieve their economic objectives.
"It's a more transactional approach," Schneider said of the grouping of four nations. "As in, 'we have a common interest in engaging Iran because we are the ones who suffer' and 'we also have an interest in Israel, because of this Israeli thinking that they can somehow bomb everything, everywhere, all the time, and we basically want to bring that into consideration too.'" Saudi Arabia's growing concerns about Israel were outlined in a May op-ed by Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of the Saudi intelligence agency, in the London-based newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat . The commentary was characterized as representing the Saudi government's point of view.
"Had the Israeli plan to ignite war between us and Iran succeeded, the region would have been plunged into ruin and destruction," al-Faisal wrote. "Thousands of our sons and daughters would have been lost in a battle in which we had no stake. Israel would have succeeded in imposing its will on the region and remained the only actor in our surroundings." Picking a side Even before the UAE's moves this month and before the Iran war , there had been a rift in the Gulf , as evidenced by disagreements between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over Yemen.
However, analysts also say that the idea that the UAE or Saudi Arabia have "picked a side" is the wrong way to look at these changes. This isn't about unresolvable ideological differences, such as those seen during the Cold War. The Saudis and Emiratis are still working together in other areas, despite recent changes.
"We are in an era of what's being called geopolitical promiscuity ," Schneider explained. "And these are not rigid alliances." "The alignments we see in the Gulf do not reflect a calculated, permanent grand strategy," Ibrahim Öztürk, a professor of economic development at the University of Duisburg-Essen in central Germany, told DW. "Rather than picking sides, these states are in a frantic scramble to navigate a highly volatile environment." Could one side dominate?
"If we analyze the region solely through the lens of short-term military escalation, the US-backed Israeli axis appears dominant," Öztürk said. But, he added, these are superficial, temporary alliances that will eventually be overwhelmed by circumstances.
"I have the feeling that 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 UAE.
"Abu Dhabi wants to be a kind of Sparta — so, like the ancient Greek state, very militaristic, highly belligerent," he explained. "Meanwhile, Dubai wants to be more like Switzerland: an island of stability where airlines can land, influencers live and Iran does its banking. But you can't really be both at the same time." Can Gulf nations close the gap between Iran and the US?
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