A Rivalry within a Rivalry
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia find themselves at the verge of full-blown confrontation as their conflicting interests abroad have become increasingly irreconcilable
While Saudi Arabia’s pre-eminence on the Arabian peninsula is unarguable, their small yet economically affluent neighbor in the U.A.E. possesses the autonomous internal political compass which has become so typical among the Gulf States. And, while both parties have largely stuck together in their efforts to counter the looming threat of Iran, newly developing regional dynamics have thrown this peninsular equilibrium into a state of uncertainty.
Before the summer of 2025, Middle Eastern politics were rather ironically “held together” by the looming fear which Iran long presented to regional security. As ideologically opposed as Israel and the Arab States may have been, they were largely able to find common ground on who the region’s biggest security threat was: the Iranians and their terrorist proxies. When Israel utterly wrecked the Iranian regime last year, however, Tehran no longer looked like the threat it had long presented itself to be. Its proxies, too, were methodically and decisively decimated by the Israelis throughout 2025, creating a vacuum in the Middle East left by an Iranian regime which is trying to quell growing civilian unrest as we speak. So much for building a web of foreign proxies when you can’t even sustain your own nation…
The new shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East have primarily manifested through Saudi Arabia’s panicked efforts to consolidate its own regional situation. The Israelis have clearly distinguished themselves as the region’s most formidable military actor, but they’ve also had to dial back on their assertive stance against foreign terrorist threats in order to avoid unraveling the ever-so-fragile American-Israeli-Saudi defense triad that keeps the region afloat. Israel’s poorly received strike against Qatar last year, in particular, brought America into a panic to keep its Arab partners content with their American security backing and prompted the Saudis to reassess their own self-deterrence capabilities.
Now to the Emiratis…
With the uniting fear of Iranian Armageddon now at least somewhat off the table, the impetus for Saudi-Emirati partnership has lost one of its key pillars. As both nations have increasingly leaned into asserting their own conflicting interests throughout the region, tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have even translated into direct military force—an unprecedented development for two longtime regional partners.
The still-raging civil war in Sudan, by far one of the worst humanitarian crises gripping the world at present, has particularly become a medium through which the Saudi-Emirati rivalry has manifested. The civil war’s primary actors include the Republic of Sudan and the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, the latter of which is a paramilitary organization that ignited the conflict after launching an attempted coup d'état in 2023. As the de-facto leader of the Arab League, Saudi Arabia has naturally supported the government of Sudan, while the Emiratis have allegedly (and with substantial proof) been in support of Sudanese paramilitaries for years in order to strengthen their control of gold deposits in the resource-rich nation.
In an even more acute instance of Saudi-Emirati confrontations through proxy conflicts, Saudi armed forces have directly launched armed strikes against Emirati—backed separatists in Yemen over the past week. For its part, Yemen has been engaged in civil war for years between the northern, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and a southern government which has long been jointly supported by a Saudi-Emirati coalition. However, as of recent, the Emiratis have taken an interest in diverting their resources to a third faction of Yemeni separatists in the country’s southwest who wish to unilaterally secede from the nation. For Abu Dhabi, such a move plays into its aspirations at expanding its commercial and political influence in the ever-important Red Sea region, but it has also served to advance its strategic position against a nation which it now sees as a direct regional competitor: Saudi Arabia.
In what likely represented a red line for a Saudi governance which has long sought to keep Yemen within its immediate sphere of influence, Saudi warplanes struck Emirati proxies on January 2nd. Those targets struck included military supplies directly transported from the U.A.E., and an unspecified number of military casualties were also reported.
Implications for the Region:
The faltering unity of the Arabian Peninsula on account of Iran’s strategic withdrawal threatens to compromise the entire political framework on which the region has stayed afloat for decades. The United States has seemingly exercised little effort to mitigate this growing rift between two important allies, while the growing Saudi-Emirati rivalry sets a precedent for other audacious regional players like Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to pursue their individual interests more boldly.
Many have long viewed Middle Eastern politics through a rather linear perspective of “Iran vs. everyone else.” This perception may have very well been appropriate a year ago, but the Middle East is rapidly changing in ways that necessitate new perspectives on how regional stability is to be achieved. After all, if all of those countries which formerly worked together to counter Iran were to splinter and fight amongst themselves like we’re now beginning to see, then perhaps the region is already heading in a direction far more precarious than the even the most harrowing of outlooks ascribed to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s rise in years past.