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Saudi Arabia and the UAE: From Allies to Rivals
- THE GEOSTRATA
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
In September 2015, Saudi and Emirati forces were coordinating airstrikes together over Yemen. In December 2025, Saudi Arabia was bombing ships sent by the UAE. That reversal, one of the most dramatic shifts in Gulf politics in a generation, did not happen because of a single dispute or a single miscalculation. It happened because two countries that once needed each other have spent years building incompatible visions of what the region should look like, and those visions have finally run out of room to coexist.
Illustration by The Geostrata
For years, Western governments treated Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as a unified bloc. The two countries coordinated on oil policy, shared military coalitions, and presented a common front on regional security. That assumption no longer holds. Over the past several months, the two Gulf powers have moved from quiet competition to open confrontation across multiple theaters, and the consequences are already reshaping the Middle East.
HOW YEMEN BROKE THE ALLIANCE OPEN
The most concrete fracture occurred in Yemen. In March 2015, the UAE and Saudi Arabia launched a joint coalition to push back the Houthis, who had seized control of the capital city, Sanaa, and were advancing south. The coalition held together in name, if not always in spirit, for about ten years. In December 2025, it finally came completely unstuck.
On December 2, 2025, a Southern Transitional Council-backed force staged a significant military offensive across southern Yemen under the name "Operation Promising Future." The STC is a secessionist movement, aimed at establishing an independent state of South Yemen that had existed until unification with the north in 1990. Within days, STC forces had captured almost all the former territory of South Yemen, including the port city of Aden and its presidential palace. Senior members of the internationally recognized Yemeni government, including President Rashad al-Alimi, fled to Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia retaliated with military force. On December 26, it launched air strikes against STC positions in Hadhramaut. Then on December 30, Saudi-led coalition warplanes bombed the port of Mukalla after two ships arriving from the UAE port of Fujairah had unloaded what coalition officials described as more than 80 vehicles, weapon containers, and armored cars destined for the STC.
Saudi Arabia characterized the UAE's actions as "highly dangerous" and called them a red line for its national security, backing a demand by the Yemeni government for the removal of all UAE troops within 24 hours. The UAE announced its withdrawal.
By January 10, 2026, the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council announced it had regained full control over areas that had been held by the STC. On January 9, representatives of the STC in Riyadh said they would dissolve the council, although the group's spokesperson in Abu Dhabi denied the claim. The separatist movement was, at least for the moment, on the defensive.
The underlying logic of each country's policy towards Yemen had always differed. Saudi Arabia sought to prevent a failed state on its most vulnerable border, a safe haven for adversarial forces. The UAE, for its part, established a distinct presence, aimed primarily at port access, coastal infrastructure, and the arming of local proxies; the STC was the most potent embodiment of that policy. The collision between those differing paradigms, once again, took place in Yemen.
THE RIVALRY ACROSS MULTIPLE FRONTS
Yemen was not the only place where Saudi Arabia and the UAE have taken opposing positions. Civil war has been ongoing in Sudan since April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces. The Saudi Arabian government backed the SAF, seeing them as the legitimate military of the country. US Intelligence, United Nations reports, and multiple independent analysts have documented UAE military support, including weapons, to the RSF, although Abu Dhabi denies it.
As a result, the two nations that combined forces a decade ago in Yemen are now supporting opposing sides in one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. This was reinforced when the Sudanese government filed suit against the UAE at the International Court of Justice in 2025, accusing Abu Dhabi of violating the Genocide Convention by supplying weapons to the RSF.
In Somaliland, the UAE state-linked company DP World owns 51 percent and operates the port of Berbera, which has made the UAE a crucial player in that disputed territory.
On December 26, 2025, Israel officially recognized Somaliland as a sovereign state, the first UN member to do so. Saudi Arabia condemned the move. The UAE declined to comment publicly; the contrast of the two nations' responses reverberated across the region and intensified tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
All these theaters intersect with the Red Sea basin, stretching from the Strait of Hormuz, through the Bab al-Mandab, to the Horn of Africa. The area accounts for approximately one-fifth of the world's oil and gas supplies. What began as a shared Gulf security objective has now evolved into a competition for dominance.
THE EXTERNAL PLAYERS
The Saudi-UAE schism is not remaining localized in the Gulf. It has, and continues, to draw in foreign powers, which inevitably fall on one side or another depending on the nation's own geopolitical concerns.
America finds itself in the least comfortable situation. It has operated for the past decade with a model that sees both Saudi Arabia and the UAE as a single bloc for the security region. This assumption has been challenged by the developing crisis. Neither the Trump administration nor, seemingly, its successors has a policy on how to reconcile the two states.
Indeed, Mohammed bin Salman used his trip to Washington in November 2025 to highlight the Sudan situation, hoping to push the United States closer to the Saudi viewpoint over that of Abu Dhabi, although the UAE possesses no less a significant lobby in Washington. The outcome has been America's two most important Arab allies locked in competition in several theatres of conflict, with no clear means of resolving this difference.
That neutrality allows China a structural advantage over the United States. It remains the one key power with which both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are willing to engage without conditions attached.
South Asia has been a more direct reflection of the Saudi-UAE conflict, though striking in its symmetry. September 2025 witnessed a mutual defence cooperation agreement signed between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, while discussions were underway to have Turkey included. The UAE, on the other hand, moved into a strategic defense partnership with India. A letter of intent for a strategic defense partnership was signed during UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed's trip to India in January 2026.
Informal alliance structures are beginning to form around the Gulf split, with the UAE, India, and Israel in one camp and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey in the other, supported not by formal pacts but by arms sales, port agreements, and the inevitable calculus of a regional rivalry that neither side initially wanted to take global.
THE OPEC EXIT
On April 28, 2026, the UAE announced its withdrawal from OPEC and OPEC+, to take effect on May 1. UAE Minister of Energy Suhail al-Mazrouei declared that the UAE made no prior consultations with other countries. Saudi Arabia made no public statement in the immediate hours after the announcement.
The UAE's grievances with the production quotas of OPEC have been simmering for years. By the end of 2025, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) had already achieved production capacity of 4.85 million barrels per day, and planned to reach 5 million bpd by 2027. However, its OPEC quota kept actual production far below this level.
At a time of uncertain global demand for oil in the long run, Abu Dhabi reasoned it was more sensible to produce at its full potential capacity now and generate maximum revenue instead of holding back production under the cartel system.
For Saudi Arabia, the economic restructuring under its Vision 2030 initiative depends on a stable oil market, and uninhibited UAE production would further depress prices at exactly the wrong time. It would also undermine Saudi Arabia's long-held position as the cartel's de facto price anchor and a significant player in international affairs.
WHY THIS IS HARD TO REVERSE
The Qatar blockade of 2017 has been cited as a point of comparison, which ended three and a half years later after mediation from Kuwait and American pressure. But that dispute pitted one small Gulf nation against others and was resolved during one summit.
The current Saudi-UAE divergence is different in structure: two of the largest economies in the Gulf are in direct competition, and they draw power from genuinely different models of influence. Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is embracing stability-focused diplomacy, seeking normalized relations with Qatar and Turkey, as well as a China-mediated deal with Iran in 2023. The UAE has created a network of ports, proxies, and bilateral relationships that circumvent state-level agreements.
No other GCC country has the capacity to step in as a mediator between the two. Kuwait, which mediated the Qatar agreement, lacks the clout necessary to resolve the current conflict between the two largest Gulf powers.
The United States, traditionally seen as a guarantor of regional stability, now finds its two most important partners on opposing sides of the conflict in Sudan and in direct competition over energy markets.
The actions in recent months, the Yemen conflict, the Sudanese proxy war, the divergence over Somaliland, and the OPEC withdrawal are connected. They reflect a fundamental divergence in strategic perspectives between the two states that projected an image of unity for a decade. The architecture of Gulf security was heavily based on their cooperation, and the unraveling of that architecture has now become a reality.
BY GUNJAN
TEAM GEOSTRATA
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