In recent weeks, the Saudi-Emirati rivalry has literally exploded into the open. It happened in Yemen, where Saudi airstrikes targeted arms shipments bound for the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) in late December. Riyadh then leaned heavily on Abu Dhabi, which belatedly gave up its ally when the STC agreed to dissolve. The stark contrast with 2015—when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a joint intervention in Yemen to curb Houthi influence there—was obvious for all to see.
But the split goes beyond Yemen. Elsewhere, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had long backed opposing sides in Sudan’s civil war but somehow managed their competition. Now, all understandings are apparently frozen: In late 2025, the Saudis allegedly lobbied the United States to sanction the UAE, arguing that it was complicit in Sudan’s appalling internecine violence. Riyadh also pressured Somalia to throw out the Emirati military and cancel all its existing financial contracts with Abu Dhabi. The UAE struck back by inking a $3 billion gas deal with India, which observers saw as a move to cultivate a counterweight to Saudi Arabia’s long-standing friendship with Pakistan.
In recent weeks, the Saudi-Emirati rivalry has literally exploded into the open. It happened in Yemen, where Saudi airstrikes targeted arms shipments bound for the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) in late December. Riyadh then leaned heavily on Abu Dhabi, which belatedly gave up its ally when the STC agreed to dissolve. The stark contrast with 2015—when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a joint intervention in Yemen to curb Houthi influence there—was obvious for all to see.
But the split goes beyond Yemen. Elsewhere, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had long backed opposing sides in Sudan’s civil war but somehow managed their competition. Now, all understandings are apparently frozen: In late 2025, the Saudis allegedly lobbied the United States to sanction the UAE, arguing that it was complicit in Sudan’s appalling internecine violence. Riyadh also pressured Somalia to throw out the Emirati military and cancel all its existing financial contracts with Abu Dhabi. The UAE struck back by inking a $3 billion gas deal with India, which observers saw as a move to cultivate a counterweight to Saudi Arabia’s long-standing friendship with Pakistan.
Behind these headlines lies a deeper divide between two rival visions of the regional order. Under Mohamed bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi has long pursued a revisionist grand strategy, employing military force and supporting secessionist groups within weak states to complement its significant soft power. This approach has brought influence—but also long-term entanglements that the UAE has yet to fully resolve. Saudi Arabia has traditionally been a status quo power that stresses stability above all else. This changed under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, when Saudi statecraft briefly looked more like Abu Dhabi than Riyadh. But faced with significant blowback, the Saudis reverted to type. The Emiratis, however, stayed the course. This created an unsustainable dynamic where both sides remained ostensible partners while using very different tools of statecraft to pursue diametrically opposed visions of a regional and indeed global order. That’s why the current inter-Gulf discord was a long time coming. It is also why it is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
Geography finds the UAE in an unenviable position. It is a small state in the heart of the Middle East, a region where violent conflict remains all too common. It is also sandwiched between two far bigger and more powerful rivals—Saudi Arabia and Iran—both of which have historically coerced Abu Dhabi into ceding territory. The Emiratis responded, as small states threatened by two competing powers often do, by ingratiating themselves with one to build a coalition against the other. In short, Abu Dhabi became Riyadh’s trusted, if junior, partner.
After Mohamed bin Zayed’s rise to power in 2014, the UAE sought to challenge the established hierarchy. When the 79-year-old Salman became Saudi king in 2015, younger members of the House of Saud sought to outmaneuver one another to be the country’s real power behind the throne. Mohammed bin Salman was the king’s seventh son, but he quickly became the UAE’s favored candidate. Abu Dhabi’s lobbying in Washington and Riyadh amplified his standing at a critical moment in the succession struggle.
Much has been made of their personal rapport, but Mohamed bin Zayed’s early backing for Mohammed bin Salman was driven by a pragmatic realpolitik that acknowledged Abu Dhabi’s own limitations. The UAE sought to turn asymmetry into advantage, by using Saudi Arabia’s far greater economic, political, and military assets as a force multiplier for its own ambitions. Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, summed up this approach when he claimed that because Abu Dhabi had “more bad history with Saudi than anyone,” backing Mohammed bin Salman presented a unique opportunity to get “the most results we can ever get out of Saudi.”
This strategic foresight was soon vindicated. The upstart prince woke the Gulf’s sleeping giant by sending Saudi troops into Yemen and Bahrain while spearheading a boycott of Qatar. Yet it was the UAE that was in the driving seat. The boycott began in 2017 after Qatar’s news service posted a speech by Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani praising Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. There is no evidence that the emir said any of these things; observers have speculated that Emirati hackers planted the report, though the UAE has always denied the allegation.
In 2019, a New York Times article described Mohamed bin Zayed as “the most powerful leader in the Arab world.” While Mohammed bin Salman reshaped his country’s grand strategy, it was Mohamed bin Zayed who acted as his “mentor,” nudging Saudi Arabia in a more assertive direction. What makes this more impressive is how counterintuitive this was. Within the Gulf microsystem, Saudi Arabia is a hegemon, which bakes in a pro-status quo proclivity. The Saudis have long felt that regime change abroad could augur the same at home and have accordingly eschewed military force for behind-the-scenes diplomacy and the pursuit of stability. Accordingly, Western countries sold the Saudis billions of dollars in cutting-edge weapons under the assumption that these would be—in the words of a French official—“used not for offensive means but for defensive purposes at the border.”
But Riyadh’s revisionist turn soon backfired. Western weapons were killing hundreds of Yemeni civilians, leading then-U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden to call Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and accuse it of “murdering children.” The blowback was not just rhetorical: From 2015, the Houthis hit back with rockets and drones, marking the first time that Saudi Arabia had been directly attacked by a foreign actor since the 1991 Gulf War. Riyadh was isolated and its oil fields burned, while the Houthis were emboldened. Mohammed bin Salman had reversed a decades-old dynamic by turning himself and his country into the UAE and Mohamed bin Zayed’s junior partner.
This was when the Emirati-Saudi alignment began to unravel. In 2021, a Saudi about-face ended the Qatar blockade; 2023 saw a Chinese-brokered detente between Riyadh and Tehran. In Yemen, Riyadh ended its airstrikes and adopted a traditionally Saudi approach: lobbying all sides to de-escalate and form a unity government. Reports of a dramatic Saudi-Emirati and royal split began to emerge in 2021. The Saudis and Qataris drew closer, and relations between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi frayed.
Divergent outcomes fueled this shift. Force-centric revisionism was always an odd fit for Saudi Arabia, while the UAE did it better. Riyadh feared that Houthi attacks would undermine Vision 2030, Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious plan to wean the kingdom off its oil dependence and rehabilitate its image by turning into a tourism and investment hub. The UAE, by contrast, absorbed Houthi attacks without much damage to its soft power, which is unparalleled anywhere else in the Gulf. The UAE’s military performed well in Yemen, whereas the Saudis overrelied on airstrikes.
Another divergence was over Israel. In the early 2000s, Saudi Arabia made clear that it would establish full diplomatic relations with Israel so long as the latter agreed to Palestinian statehood. But when the UAE and Israel signed the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, it undermined this conditional approach. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the accords meant that the “concept of ‘peace through withdrawal and weakness’ has passed from the world.” To add insult to injury, the United States pressured Riyadh into giving Emirati-bound Israeli passenger planes overflight rights over Saudi airspace, and the UAE successfully incentivized the traditionally pro-Saudi Bahrain into also normalizing ties.
The Israelis believed that the Emiratis would deliver the Saudis. They were wrong. The bad blood with Abu Dhabi means that any Israel-Saudi normalization will be sold as a stand-alone deal, outside of the Emirati-led Abraham Accords framework.
Subsequently, the turmoil following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack has brought Israel and the UAE closer, making any Saudi normalization with Israel or rapprochement with Abu Dhabi less likely. Previously, Israel and Saudi Arabia were status quo powers. But the shock and brutality of the Hamas attack transformed Israel into a force-centric revisionist. The UAE has long shared this vision. Writing in 2019, an Emirati academic described his country’s approach as “if we don’t go after the bad guys, they will come after us,” which sounds eerily reminiscent of Netanyahu’s recent rhetoric.
In 2025, Netanyahu likened his country to Sparta because of its drive for self-sufficiency and military supremacy, an analogy that Gulf-watchers have long applied to the UAE. While Saudi Arabia backs Syria’s new government, Israel and the UAE are reportedly cooperating to support secessionist Druze groups there. Equally, Israel’s recent recognition of Somaliland—with which the UAE has long enjoyed clandestine ties—has left the Saudis feeling encircled. This high-risk move could backfire and reinforce the impression that Israel is taking sides in an escalating inter-Gulf rivalry.
The UAE’s critics argue that its grand strategy exacerbatesinstability. This is nothing new: Abu Dhabi is doing what it has always done under Mohamed bin Zayed. But it will make any rapprochement difficult. Indeed, the Mohammed bin Salman-Mohamed bin Zayed “bromance” lasted a very short time, from 2017 until 2021. Now, their falling out means that U.S. allies—such as Egypt and Bahrain—that previously enjoyed robust ties with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi alike must walk a delicate tightrope to stop either party from pulling its financial assistance.
While Israel has rolled back Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, it has shown little proclivity to consider a “day after” that turns these military victories into long-term political consolidations. This is where the Gulf states—with their regional connections and vast wealth—could step in. Instead, they are squabbling. This is creating a new fault line that pits UAE-aligned states, such as Israel and India, against a Saudi-backed informal grouping, which includes Turkey and Qatar.
Yet rivalry need not mean rupture. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE wants an Iranian resurgence. Nor is it in either side’s interest to destabilize its near backyard. Recent Gulf history shows how quickly dynamics can reverse. In 2017, Saudi Arabia seriously considered sending troops into Qatar; four years later, Riyadh and Doha reset relations. Today, they are closer to being partners in a shared vision than ever before. Managing Saudi-Emirati competition will require a similar pragmatism from both sides that contains the rivalry and acknowledges divergent approaches for the time being, in the hope that this can lay the foundation for future reconciliation.
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