Picture this: Colombian mercenaries, flying in an Emirati aircraft, shot down over Sudan. What sounds like a cinematic opening to a Hollywood blockbuster is, in fact, a glimpse into the UAE’s shadowy reach. How do we make sense of this entanglement? Roger Adelson in “British and US Use and Misuse of the Term ‘Middle East’” laments the polarising camps of ‘specialists’ and ‘generalists’ on Middle Eastern geopolitics. The latter’s reductionist framing flattens the kaleidoscopic realities of the region into singular questions of oil or militancy. It is through this one-dimensional prism that the ‘petrostates’ of the Gulf would be misconstrued. In reality, the capitals of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) are scripting a new type of geopolitics, cloaking sinister self-interest in the veneer of curated, state-managed power projection: the UAE is leading the charge, despite seeming like an unlikely candidate for regional dominance.
From Timidity to Audacity
Professor Fred Halliday theorised that the Arab World is decennially rocked by seismic conjunctures fundamentally reconfiguring the region. The misnamed 2011 ‘Arab Springs’ was the inflection point for the UAE. What emerged from that crucible were self-confident, yet simultaneously paranoid, Gulf polities smelling the coffee of an increasingly capricious US and a pantheon of noisy neighbours risking spillage into the oil-rich Peninsula.
Before that, the UAE was one of eight states fringing the north-western waters of the Indian Ocean, known as the shallow, inland ‘Persian’ or ‘Arabian’ Gulf. As the British East India Company (EIC) strengthened its noose around India in the late 1700s, the treacherous waters of the Gulf provided a vital sea link, though infested with piracy. The Brits launched a series of naval operations in an attempt to transform this ‘pirate coast’ into a British lake. From 1809, punitive expeditions were led against the seafaring shaykhdoms of Ras al-Khaima and Sharja (in the modern UAE). A truce was struck after British military muscling, granting economic benefits to the Gulf leaders in exchange for their adherence to a set of maritime protocols to preserve peace on the high-waters. With these terms ratified in the 1853 Perpetual Treaty, the mini states inhabiting the Arabian Gulf came to be known as the ‘Trucial States’.
This Pax-Britannicus rendered the Gulf littoral de-facto British protectorates. ‘Non-alienation bonds’ preventing the sale of Gulf land to anyone but the British all but sealed Her Majesty’s paramountcy. The conversion of the Royal Navy from coal to iron in 1907 invested the region with a new strategic role involving concessional oil prospecting. The British lingered in the Gulf until its departure in 1971, when their empowered client-shaykhs pivoted to sovereign statehood.
The emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharja, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Quwain federated in 1971/72, birthing the United Arab Emirates, largely as a security response to the British retrenchment ‘East of the Suez’. Such a prospect exhibited the regional trepidation of exposure and life without a protecting patron.
The UAE is structurally idiosyncratic; a federation of seven emirates, each ruled by different families. The apex emirate is Abu Dhabi, by virtue of its hydrocarbon endowment (possessing 94% of the UAE’s oil), allowing it to politically dominate the federation with its shaykh acting as the unified president.
As the British receded, America stepped into the void as protector. Following the quadrupling of oil prices after the ‘1973 Embargo’ and the loss of the close petroleum country of Iran to the ‘Islamic Revolution’, America proclaimed the ‘Carter Doctrine’ promising military force to secure interests in the Gulf. Reagan midwifed the GCC in 1981, encouraging Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar to band together in a neighbourhood security alliance. However, the American security umbrella always afforded the comfiest shield.
The US footprint ballooned in the Gulf. Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm after Saddam’s audacious incursion into Kuwait heralded the deployment of 700k troops to the region with permanent military bases maintained afterwards. Today, there are dozens of US facilities across the Middle East. The Al-Dhafrah Air Base hosts a significant US presence of around 5000 personnel.1 The US Fifth Fleet routinely showcases its might in Gulf waters.
Emirati statecraft was, thus far, defined by bandwagoning, limited autonomy, mild-Arabness, and a careful, donor-driven soft-power profile, as a result of their ‘small status’ burden.
The Arab Springs engendered immense consternation amongst the GCC. Fearful of revolutionary sentiment bleeding into the region, aghast at Obama’s facilitation of the overthrow of longtime-ally, the Egyptian dictator Mubarak, and reeling after a decade of tensions following the Iraq Invasion, especially after Bush urged domestic and democratic reforms in the Gulf, the conservative autocracies decided to diversify their international options to ease ties with the US, reinvent themselves robustly and harden red lines domestically.
The Shift to Assertive Statecraft
Broadly, post-2011 UAE policy unfolds in two distinct phases, although a gradual shift began to appear after the death of the federation’s president, Shaykh Zayed (r. 1970-2004): a maximalist period of coercive activism during the 2010s, followed by a partial post-COVID recalibration until 2023, placing a premium on de-escalation and economic diplomacy.2 One cataclysm, however, demonstrated the irresistible sub-imperial penchant of the UAE, and how the more aggressive predilections of the state can resurface, in spite of the recent mellowing.
From the federal unification of the emirates in 1971 until 2011, Emirati influence rested on soft power, materialising in benign foreign aid programmes, with close to 10% of its GDP earmarked for this, becoming the third largest regional donor. As a ‘small state’ with limited capabilities and resources, the cards of hard power and coercion were never on the table.
Over the last decade and a half, the UAE has emerged, emblazoned with a determination to extend its footprint and enhance prestige, through hard-edged methods unusual for small states: expeditionary deployments, proxy formation and forward basing from the Red Sea to North Africa. What is unique about this realignment within the grander game of Middle Eastern relations is that this Emirati pragmatism is not driven by a vaunted ideology, like the Pan-Arabism, Nasserism, Baathism or Islamism of yesteryear. Instead, Emirati assertive statecraft is calculated and methodical, with an underscored by cynical malevolence. The sobriquet ‘the Middle East’s Little Sparta’, punching above its geo-political weight, captures this pitch.
The demographic deficit mattered: a population of 10 million, of which only 10% are citizens, as well as being demographically dwarfed by its neighbours, the Emirates has resorted to a tentacled-strategy of curating networks of local thespians through convoluted, polyvalent avenues, whilst expending little political capital: a ‘network-centric’ model primed for opacity and aloofness.
During the turbulent infancy of the 2011-upheavals that swept the Arab World, the Gulf monarchies and shaikhdoms were sat at the edge of their leafy seats petrified of the revolutionary tide arriving at their doorsteps. The mentality of survival saw the UAE adopt an incrementally muscular posture, refusing to shy away from robust intervention, dramatically breaking free from the constraints of small state dynamics.
Neighbourhood stability and the perceived threat of Islamism, on the rise since the 80s and manifesting strongly in post-2011 Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, were discomfiting stimuli that catalysed the shift. The domestic affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood Al-Islah, began to court external support, despite not posing a major hazard due of a lake of grassroots support. Nonetheless, a cross-section of Brothers, political reformists and elite petitioned for the changes in the Federal National Council’s electoral process after the revolutionary spring. Emirati authorities cracked down hard, arresting 132 nationals and stripping some of their citizenship. The UAE, in a move unprecedented for a small state, approved a sweeping list of proscribed terrorist organisations in 2014, appropriated new anti-terror powers for itself, and then inked multiple defence pacts with a dozen other countries, codifying an increasingly securitised state.
Cast in the mould of counter-terrorism, these operations reflected regime security calculus. They also show how the UAE has incrementally naturalised the ‘War on Terror’ and domesticated CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) in an ostensible bid to ingratiate itself to America and its allies.
Hence, across multiple fronts, the UAE has been the region’s foremost counter revolutionary force, supporting regimes to contain civil society, champion military rule and ensure political Islam remains marginalised.
Regional containment of the Brotherhood constituted the Emirati categorical imperative in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. Egypt’s first democratic experience was sabotaged as the UAE backed the coup of General Sisi against the elected Morsi, having offered $14 billion in aid to the usurping government. Emirati media manipulation and amplification of small opposition groups assisted the military’s eventual takeover. After the NATO-led coalition to oust Gaddafi, the Emirates backed the renegade General Haftar, one of the two coalitions in Libya’s post-Gaddafi civil war, against the internationally-recognised Government of National Accord. The Emirates publicly framed this as necessary to thwart Islamism, but in fact projected their own domestic insecurities. Haftar’s self-proclaimed Libyan National Army was supplied with 3000 tons of military equipment, buttressed by Emirati precision strikes and afforded Emirati diplomatic leverage to prompt Western alliances with Haftar. The Emirates were hellbent on propping Haftar, to the extent that they were willing to extensively engage with the anti-Arab pariah, Israel, purchasing Israeli air defence systems and even contacting Mossad to provide Haftar’s militia with intelligence support. Finally, its 2017 embargo of Qatar, in league with Saudi, Egypt and Bahrain, constituted an attempt to subjugate the Brotherhood’s Gulf champion. The Brotherhood’s engagement with representative politics is assessed as a political peril vis a vis Emirati ultra-authoritarianism.
Pivoting more belligerently to its trans-Gulf neighbour, Iran, the UAE has resorted to hard power to curb its alleged-local influence. Emirati officials accused Iran in 2011 of meddling in Gulf affairs when the next domino to be hit in the revolutionary ripple was Bahrain. The GCC then dispatched its military arm, despite US opposition, to quell dissent in the micro state. The UAE contributed the second largest share to this task force, second only to Saudi.
Abu Dhabi was also the most willing contributor in Saudi’s Yemen-intervention. Launched in 2015, the aim was to restore the authoritarian regime and to suppress the Houthis. Despite being a Shiite faction, the Houthis were not wholly materially reliant on Iran. In an ironic twist, Gulf assertion that Iran was puppeteering the Houthis only served to rope Iran more intimately into the conflict. The UAE assumed a leading role in the ground war to pacify Aden, Operation Golden Arrow.3
The UAE also began bankrolling and coordinating local allies, before withdrawing its ground troops in 2019, transforming the conflict into a proxy war. The coalition’s erratic intervention has led to 377k deaths as of 2021,4 whilst its air strikes alone have resulted in 20k civilian deaths and maiming. UAE-backed forces have been credibly implicated in a litany of human right’s atrocities:5 arbitrary arrests, gang rape, sexual abuses by UAE forces at a secret detention facility in Aden,6 targeting of civilian and welfare infrastructure and torturous restrictions on food and medical imports.
A discernible trend emerges: the UAE prioritises bolstering secessionist, quasi state thespians in a bid to achieve control of strategic enclaves within existing sovereign nations. Haftar’s LNA (Libyan National Army), the Yemeni STC (Southern Transitional Council), Hemedti’s RSF (Rapid Support Force) in Sudan, as well as federal states Somaliland and Puntland in Somalia are all cases in point. These fragments of territory allow minimum Emirati exposure, as well access to ports, economic infrastructure and rebuffing civil/Islamic society.
The transition to aggressive regional assertion makes the UAE a sub-imperialist power, according to the framework of Ruy Mauro Marini. It exhibits all the hallmarks of this category of states: a peripheral nation dependent on the US, a core imperialist power, while engaging in imperialist practices within its own sphere of influence.
Post-COVID Downscaling
From roughly 2021, Abu Dhabi pivoted to diplomacy-first hedging. It began rebuilding ties with Turkey, another regional challenger, patron of the Brotherhood and key ally of Qatar, while economic ties were augmented during, and after, the 2017 blockade. Reduced friction with Iran has also been on the agenda, along with mensing rifts with Qatar, and even re-am racing Assad’s Syria. An economy-first reset honed in on trade, investment and reputational repair after years of expeditionary activism.
However, in light of the 2023 Sudan crisis, this did not amount to strategic renunciation, rather, a foreign policy lull and a redistribution effort.
Hearts and Minds Programmes
The UAE’s soft power arsenal – luxury tourism (Dubai), education (NYUAD), culture (featured in blockbusters like Mission Impossible and Star Wars and the Louvre Abu Dhabi), sports ownership (Manchester City takeover) and mega events – advertises a cosmopolitan brand. However, it’s self-styling as a prophet of tolerance amidst an ocean of fundamentalist intransigence, and its interfaith pageantry, scores points with regional and international actors, whilst serving as a clerically-rubber stamped bulwark against popular mobilisation.
Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar were hosted in 2019 during the signing of the document on ‘Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together’.
However, no other venture engenders more incandescent feelings of betrayal and visceral indignation than the Abraham Accords. Signed in 2020 as a normalisation agreement between the UAE and Israel, the Trump-brokered blockbuster deal constituted a diabolical desertion of Palestine, thinly veiled as a pursuit of national interests.
The Gulf and specifically, the UAE, had seen thawing relations with Israel, specifically after the Iraq Invasion of 2003 and the Arab Springs, with one insidious example being Emirati deployment of Israeli spyware to hound local dissidents.
No Palestinians were consulted before the deal was signed, whilst the UAE tried vindicating its cosy accommodation with Israel asserting that one of the preconditions was for Israel to halt annexation in the West Bank. No such clause could be found in the final text of the Accord, whilst Netanyahu, with characteristic braggadocio, claimed Israel has only temporarily suspended its land grabbing and hopes to resume the acquisition of ‘Judea and Samaria’ soon.
However, as articulated by Dr. Andreas Krieg, normalisation was flaunted for strategic Emirati goals, tying into its post-2011 rebranding: “The UAE provided Trump with a foreign policy victory in exchange for more sophisticated military hardware to be sold to the Emirates”.7 Also, where Abu Dhabi is at odds with Washington, like in the Libyan arena, the deal eases American pressure, providing Emirati hard power with more manoeuvrability. With America’s tacit approval, alongside purchasing more advanced armed drones and F-35s, the deal was successfully leveraged as an important pebble on the path towards achieving their regional ambitions.
Despite expectations of frosty relations between a Jewish supremacist state and a self-proclaimed champion of the Muslim cause, the UAE and Israel have forged an unholy alliance based on their ideological convergence and mutual resentment of Iran and Muslim civil society, represented by the Brotherhood and Hamas. Both regimes prefer authoritarianism over the strong force of the ‘Arab Street’.
The Emirati ideational crusade against political Islam involves the promotion of its own brand of attenuated Islam: innocuous Sufism.8 This iteration of statist quietism (not so quiet in reality) ties into the Emirati policy pillar of depoliticising civil society, the locus of political Islam’s grassroots that could upset the status-quo of non-representative politics.
The UAE’s Jeffersonian separation of state and mosque was also designed to appeal to a post-9/11 West. The philosophical underpinning is a deep-seated fear of Islam’s ability to mobilise civil society. Therefore, as one of a dozen measures, Friday sermons are carefully scripted to strip the civilisational prayer of its inherent galvanising, mobilising capacity.9 This ties in with its wider programme of omnipresent surveillance and clamping down of dissent.
The soft power of pseudo-Sufi Islam allows Abu Dhabi to whitewash political crackdowns as ‘counter-terrorism’ and denounce foreign actors who do not align with their programme as un-Islamic hardliners. For the UAE, this strategic mobilisation of ‘moderate Islam’ sees the deployment of the ‘enlightened’ Mauritanian cleric, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, the so-called pacifist soul in the good Muslim versus bad Muslim false bipolarity, Bin Bayyah, and his erstwhile acolyte, American Hamza Yusuf, the chief and deputy, respectively, of the UAE-based Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies (FPPMS), have dovetailed with Emirati foreign policy, calling for the separation of mosque and state, de-politicisation of civil society and pietistic obedience to the political elite. Both have provided Islamic laundering for normalisation with Israel, hailed as the “supreme good”, and other state-aligned programmes.10
Both have nurtured a ‘theology of obedience’ that maps neatly onto the Gulf’s counter-revolutionary computations, resulting in the criminalisation of genuine dissent, the lambasting of the Arab Springs, further centralisation of juristic authority and normalisation with Israel.11
Other instances include the 2016 Grozny Conference organised by close friends, Chechen President Kadryov and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince, Bin Zayed. The message was policy-orientated: advocate a return to ‘dovish’ Islam and eschew political activism.
The inherent hypocrisy in eulogising the UAE as champions of tolerance whilst they simultaneously prosecute Kafkaesque ventures abroad is a paradox that betrays the Emirati weaponisation of faith as a tranquillising agent to placate international audiences.
As an anecdotal testimony to the efficiency and potency of this highly glamorised, yet subversive, PR campaign, Muslims in the West laud the UAE as a ‘Halal’ holiday destination and applaud its Muslim cosmetics. A slight scratch beneath this veneer will expose a systematically repressive and Machiavellian state, seeking to neutralise any semblance of representational and accountable Islamic governance at home, through a convoluted web of foreign forays.
The Sudanese Quagmire
Emirati hyper-activism had opened the curtains on a new stage, the Horn of Africa. Sub-imperially, the UAE has invested $60 billion over the last few decades in African countries across sectors like mining, infrastructure, agriculture and logistics, gaining control of significant portions of these national economies. In the last two years, it has pledged $97 billion in new investments, three times more than China’s commitment.
The core of its geo-strategy focuses on acquiring port concessions and logistical nodes around the circumference of the continent to dominate global sea routes. This is achieved through AD Ports Group and DP World. The ports, alongside 70 other logistical hubs, play into Emirati sub-imperialist strategies of land acquisition, resource extraction and to serve military ambitions.
The shady involvement in the carbon-market, the ecological detriment of agricultural projects in Africa, major gold import-export discrepancies prompting allegations of smuggling and its significant role in the global illicit gold trade, and the transfer of value and surplus-value from weaker African economies fits the bill of a labour-exploitative state that centralises and concentrates wealth, fostering national monopolies that resemble advanced capitalist economies.
However, there is an insidious agenda prosecuted with Emirati influence in the Ethiopian Tigray War and other loci in the Red Sea region of East Africa drastically altering the course of developments. Most heinous is it’s crypto involvement in the Sudanese Civil War, circuitously patronising the feral RSF (Rapid Support Forces) accused of genocide, systemic sexual ravishment and crimes against humanity, resulting in a case brought against the UAE at the ICJ, accusing them of genocide complicity.
A series of military bases have been established in countries like Chad, Eritrea, Libya and Somalia, used by UAE forces and local militias in ongoing conflicts.
No single arena showcases, micro-cosmically an aggregation of all of the UAE’s despicable sub-imperialist machinations like Sudan: regional dominance, economic exploitation, mercenary warfare, military intervention and atrocity abetting.
Before the ousting of dictator Al-Bashir in 2019, both Saudi and the Emirates enlisted Sudanese soldiers to fight in their unforgiving Yemeni campaign. After the December Revolution of 2018, precipitating Al-Bashir’s fall, Emirati eyes preyed upon a new opportunity to expand its interests. The two Gulf hawks and Egypt began to mediate a liberal peace-building initiative promoting a rapprochement between the Sudanese military and the civil society, resulting in the creation of a transitional government. Derailment began when the Arab-triad began supporting the military with political leverage, hardware and lobbying, at the expense of the civilian element. In a bid to lasso Sudan into its regional orbit, the UAE browbeat Sudan into securing normalisation with Israel through the Abraham Accords.
The inevitable military coup of 2021, backed by the three musketeers, fomented divergence within the military coalition. Seeking a horse in the race, the UAE bet on the RSF, partially catalysing the outbreak of civil war on 15th April 2023, between the UAE-backed RSF and the opposition, the SAF. What ensued was the world’s gravest humanitarian crisis, with tens of millions displaced and tens of thousands mercilessly slaughtered.
Dabbling in the dark arts of power projection, and in a bid to maintain plausible deniability, mercenaries are employed and insurgents are co-opted to allow the UAE to position itself as kingmaker by tipping the balance of power. Almost 2000 special forces veterans from Panama, El Salvador, Chile and Columbia have been dispatched by the UAE to the Yemeni front. Introducing a new element into the Sudanese quandary, Latin-American combat-hardened veterans of the drug wars have been discretely inserted into the fray. Costing a fraction of British or American guns-for-hire,12 this contingent of almost hundreds of ‘soldiers of fortune’ are shuffled through Libyan, Ethiopian and Chadian backchannels.13
The ‘Desert Wolves’ battalion are recruited through Columbian private sector firms contracted by the Emirati company, Global Security Services Group. In a recent scandal, Columbians complained of misleading advertisements and an operation which can only be described as human trafficking. Initially contracted to guard Emirati oil facilities, they were instead duped into fighting for the RSF in the Sudanese civil wars. Emirati military operatives allegedly confiscated their passports, threatening to keep them until their tour in Sudan was completed. In an audio note reported by La Silla Vacía, a Columbian soldier from Sudan lamented, “Things are ugly here; we’re being held captive”.
The UAE recently denied involvement when an Emirati transport craft shuttling South-American mercenaries to Darfur was shot down by the Sudanese army. The Columbian president pledged an investigation and vowed to clamp down on mercenary recruitment in Columbia. Whether true or false, this highlights the murky intersection on foreign fighters, clandestine logistics and deniable statecraft that defines the Sudanese war economy.
Even as the civil war rages, Sudanese gold is still smuggled to the UAE, with both the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces facilitating the production and smuggling. UN and investigative reporting describe gold smuggling routes to the UAE markets that monetise Sudanese ore, despite the war. This feeds the RSF, whose bottomless war chest is ‘blood gold’ and Emirati trade status.
From Reset to Relapse
The post-COVID diplomatic u-turn has, evidentially, not extinguished the UAE’s sub-imperial reflexes. Their involvement in the Sudanese conflict exposes its persistence, and, possibly, allure. As Abu Dhabi courted detentes with its Turkish and Iranian rivals, it has backed a non-state, para-militaristic actor in the RSF, accused of mass atrocities, while maintaining a mediator’s pose. The duplicity of simultaneous brokerage and backing, has become a signature of its new statecraft.
Conclusion: Branding Interest as Altruism
The UAE exemplifies small-state ultra-authoritarianism: agile, adaptable, well financed and media-savvy. With an efficacious cocktail of logistical capitalism, expeditionary leverage, the sacralisation of obedience, criminalisation of dissent, brokering peace whilst backing militias, and its soporific brand of tourism and entertainment, the it remains to be seen whether the UAE’s project is sustainable in the long term, considering its effrontery is being increasingly scrutinised by non-state actors, and its venture yielding huge human costs. For the time being, the pattern is unmistakable: tightening regime security at home, and sub imperial ventures abroad.
Disclaimer: Material published by Traversing Tradition is meant to foster scholarly inquiry and rich discussion. The views, opinions, beliefs, or strategies represented in published articles and subsequent comments do not necessarily represent the views of Traversing Tradition or any employee thereof.
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- Quisay, W. & Parker, T. (2019) ‘On the Theology of Obedience: An Analysis of Shaykh Bin Bayyah and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s Political Thought’, The Maydan, 8 January. Available at: https://themaydan.com/2019/01/theology-obedience analysis-shaykh-bin-bayyah-shaykh-hamza-yusufs-political-thought/ (Accessed: 23 September 2025). [↩]
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