Why the UAE is wreaking havoc across the Arab world and Africa

Meanwhile, Trump's international force for Gaza remains stalled

Welcome to the first of our new series, West Asia Focus. This section aims to provide essential insight and context on a region that is often misunderstood – cutting through shallow and misleading headlines to tell the full story. We hope you find it both informative and engaging.

“Why are you interfering in our internal issues?” the Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, indirectly asked the United Arab Emirates in October.

The UAE is rapidly gaining notoriety as a wrecking ball across Arab and African states.

Its backing of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan stands out as one of the most brutal examples, with the group said to have massacred as many as 27,000 civilians after capturing El Fasher in Darfur last month.

The UAE’s nefarious activities stretch from Libya to Yemen, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Analysts describe the UAE as a “sub-imperial” power. Central to this status is its overt alignment with the US and Israel, allowing it to project its power beyond its borders and exert outsized influence.

Far from a simple lust for power, this aggressive posture stems from a deep paranoia. Like Israel, the UAE sees its primary enemies coming from within the Arab and Islamic world.

The enemy within

The Arab Spring protests of 2010-2011 ignited an Emirati campaign to crush the democratic tide. The UAE’s rulers saw popular movements as existential threats to their autocratic grip. In the years since, they have spearheaded counter-revolutionary efforts to thwart democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, and turned uprisings in Libya, Yemen and Sudan into theatres of war.

Fear of democracy in the Arab world is one shared by all regional autocrats, but for the UAE, it takes on an added level of paranoia.

The UAE’s tiny native population denies its rulers a powerful social base to legitimise its rule internally, unlike Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi establishment. The nation’s very title – United Arab Emirates – belies the reality that the majority of the population is in fact South Asian, not Arab. The UAE ceased conducting population censuses in 2010 due to the sensitivity of Emiratis constituting a minority in their own country.

But estimates from the International Labour Organisation in 2019 suggest that of 9.5 million residents, only 1.25 million (or 13%) were actually Emirati. Pew Research in 2017 found that 5.5 million migrants were from India and Pakistan alone, the majority of whom were working class, representing 58% of the population. The UAE also has sizeable migrant communities from other Arab countries.

And herein lies its weakness. Large expatriate Arab communities mean ideas and movements taking hold in other Arab states can be easily transmitted to the UAE, while its non-Arab majority working class – who hold no loyalty to the state or its rulers – makes it susceptible to popular agitation.

Limits of power

Despite towering sovereign wealth funds placing the UAE third globally behind the US and China, these riches do not translate into traditional state power. Its small native population means a small army and limited domestic market, leaving it vulnerable to regional giants like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt.

To compensate, the UAE has adopted three militaristic pillars:

• aligning with a great power – the US – for defence

• upgrading with high-tech capabilities – see its AI-chip deal with the Trump administration and closer military ties with Israel

• backing non-state actors and recruiting mercenaries to do its bidding.

But neither AI (yet), smart drones nor mercenaries can supplant the necessity of manpower in times of war. The world has been reminded of this fact with Russia’s grinding gains in the Ukraine war, owed to superior manpower (outnumbering Ukrainian forces 3-to-1, and in some battles 10-to-1). Israel, too, has encountered this limitation – despite its technological superiority and air power – with its failure to fully occupy the Gaza Strip or enter Lebanon without sustaining serious casualties.

The UAE’s own campaigns have encountered the same constraint. Its invasion of Yemen in 2015, alongside the Saudis, failed to dislodge the Houthis. Its support of warlord Khalifa Haftar in Libya was not enough to defeat the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU). Even its support of the RSF in Sudan has so far only resulted in a devastating conflict of swinging momentum.

In all these wars, the Emiratis have also experienced the limitations of their power vis-a-vis other regional heavyweights. In Yemen, its technological prowess was not enough to overcome Iranian support for the Houthis. In Libya, Turkish backing of the GNU placed a check on Emirati ambitions. And in Sudan too, RSF gains in Darfur have only prompted Egypt and Turkey to increase their support for the Sudanese army.

Angering a region

Emirati tactics have succeeded, at least temporarily, in halting democracy and Islamist movements in the region. But chaos alone bears its own consequences, and its aggressive regional posture is spawning new enemies and alienating key allies.

Two incidents in recent weeks provide a glimpse of rising regional anger toward the UAE. The first was Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the White House, where he reportedly took the unusual step of asking the US president to impose secondary sanctions on the UAE for its support of the RSF.

The second was a drone attack last week that struck an Emirati-owned gas facility in Iraqi Kurdistan. A warning, perhaps, that the fires the UAE is spreading across the region may soon return home.

Other important West Asia news

• Is war about to resume in Lebanon? Lebanese outlet Al Jadeed reports that the US informed Beirut of an end-of-year deadline to disarm Hezbollah, and that “things will not be the same” after Pope Leo XIV concludes his current visit to Lebanon. US envoy Tom Barrack, who was named in the Epstein files, also warned Iraq to prevent Iraqi Shiite militias from supporting Hezbollah in the event of an Israeli attack.

• Israel’s retreat from Beit Jinn in southern Syria, after killing 13 Syrians, appears to have been due to local resistance efforts. Israel originally tried to blame a Sunni Islamist group in Lebanon, al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, which then denied responsibility. It then sought to pin the blame on Syrian security forces connected to the new Sharaa regime, but Israeli media conceded that there was “no indication so far that al-Sharaa’s people were directly involved”. The resistance appears to have been purely a local effort to defend their homes from an invading colonial force.

  • Disagreement has surfaced between Trump and Netanyahu over Syria. Trump posted on Truth Social urging Israel to “maintain a strong and true dialogue with Syria”, and is concerned continued Israeli incursions and strikes could destabilise the Sharaa regime.

  • “We are trying to tell Bibi he has to stop this because if it continues he will self-destruct,” a US official told Axios.

• As I suspected a few weeks ago, it doesn’t appear the US-led International Stabilisation Force for Gaza is getting off the ground. The Washington Post reports that no Arab country has committed to contributing soldiers, and Indonesia and Azerbaijan have back-pedalled. Unsurprisingly, governments are not too keen on having their troops “put in a position where they may be required to use force against Palestinians”.

  • Even egregious plans to build housing compounds for “screened Palestinians” in the Israeli-controlled zone of the Gaza Strip appears to be facing stumbling blocks. The primary hurdle? Money. “It is not yet clear how the project would be funded,” a New York Times report read. The plan was conceived as “an outgrowth of the Trump administration’s peace plan”, and is primarily the work of US rabbi Aryeh Lightstone.

  • Gaza, thus, appears to be left in genocide limbo. Aid is still trickling in, with Israel withholding 6,000 aid trucks filled with food supplies, tents and blankets, according to UNRWA. Israeli forces are still occupying more than half of the strip, shooting at those in the vicinity of the Yellow Line, including two brothers last weekend, aged between 8 and 11. Israel defended killing the children, saying the young boys posed “an immediate threat”.