Saudi Arabia presents itself as the Middle East’s proactive peacemaker. But on Dec. 30, 2025, the kingdom launched a major airstrike on supply lines linked to what was once one of its closest Gulf partners, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Yemeni conflict reveals a deeper rift. The two Gulf nations no longer share a vision on regional order but are pursuing divergent paths to seizing and projecting power, with Riyadh grounding its authority in formal bilateral relations, while Abu Dhabi seeks leverage in proxy networks. This divergence transcends mere policy disagreements; it reflects a fundamental structural shift in how each state competes for regional dominance.
For much of the 2010s, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi operated as a unified front in a post-Arab Spring counter-revolutionary alliance. The two nations coordinated support for strong, stable autocrats across the Arab world, creating a union bound by three crucial pillars: opposition to political Islam, hostility to Iran, and American security guarantees. Within the alliance, institutionalized under the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia asserted itself as the Gulf’s central power broker, and the UAE accepted Saudi leadership while exporting soft power through financial authority.
Their two interests collided, however, in Yemen, where Riyadh views Yemeni sovereignty as critical to maintaining its border security, while the UAE seeks a fragmented Yemen in order to extend its maritime influence through secessionist proxies.
Saudi Arabia has consistently framed its intervention in the Yemeni Civil War as an effort to preserve a stable, unified state under the internationally recognized government of Yemen. However, the UAE’s backing of the secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC) is an attempt to exert influence via substate actors, directly undermining Saudi Arabia.
Seeking to reassert its authority over the war’s trajectory, Saudi Arabia attacked Emirati supply lines to the STC and forced a mass withdrawal of Abu Dhabi’s forces from the war. These strikes (one of the most overt displays of hostility by Saudi Arabia toward another Gulf partner since the 2017-2021 embargo on Qatar) did not just escalate a nearly 12-year civil war but also exposed substantial cracks in Gulf unity.
The GCC framework can no longer stop Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s competing strategic agendas from rising to the forefront in today’s political climate. This divergence stems not merely from who should lead the Middle East but from fundamentally different models of regional power.
Saudi Arabia’s recent adoption of state-centric realism prioritizes working with recognized governments and preserving state authority rather than maintaining counter-revolutionary or other ideological convictions that defined its identity in the past. A driving factor behind this shift is Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s reform plan centered on economic diversification and development over military force, which creates incentives to resolve conflicts diplomatically. This shift, part of Saudi Arabia’s “niche diplomacy” strategy, seeks to present the kingdom as a regional stabilizer and bolsters its legitimacy as a middle power via multilateral institutions.
As part of this recalibration, Riyadh has become increasingly willing to cooperate with states it once held cold or even overtly hostile relations with, such as Türkiye and Iran, framing its more open attitude as serving regional stability. This includes greater tolerance for Islamist groups tied to these states, such as the Syrian transitional authority and Hamas, as Riyadh begins to treat political Islam as a manageable strategic variable rather than an existential threat.
The Emirati approach, however, is centered around informal alliances and proxy networks that effectively assert the UAE’s regional influence. Flush with financial resources, Abu Dhabi’s commitment to its zero-tolerance policy toward political Islam has driven its support for non-state actors across the region’s fractured states. This approach reflects a coherent Emirati strategy: From the STC in Yemen to the Libyan National Army (LNA), various anti-Islamist Somali forces, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, the UAE has made multibillion-dollar investments in separatist groups to secure maritime hubs and suppress Islamist movements.
The UAE’s interest here is to secure economic and military assets in a region where bilateral agreements with weak central governments may be slow or unreliable. The strategic value of these agile proxy networks is crucially centered around access to ports (such as the Port of Berbera in Somaliland), resources (such as Sudanese gold), and ideological leverage (such as countering Turkey-backed Islamist groups in Libya). This all ties to a model of networked power rooted in maritime economic ambitions and contrasts sharply with Riyadh’s interest in regional security upheld diplomatically via state-to-state relations and ideological noncommitment.
This theoretical divide has translated into a volatile geopolitical reality. The most striking manifestation is the conflict in Yemen, which has become the litmus test for Gulf unity. However, the Saudi-UAE conflict has also crossed the Red Sea into Africa, where it is splitting the Horn of Africa into two emerging blocs as the Gulf nations compete for dominance
Northeast Africa is of great significance to the strategic goals of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE since access to the Red Sea is critical to both nations’ economies. For Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea handles half of the nation’s exports and nearly a third of its imports, making its security vital for Riyadh’s economic growth and its Vision 2030 goals. Meanwhile, the UAE hopes to protect and reap the benefits of the heavy investments it has made in Red Sea ports, where the majority of its proxies are strategically located. These overlapping dependencies drive both monarchies to deepen investments and political engagement across the Horn of Africa, as they compete for ports, infrastructure corridors, natural resources, and leverage over emerging markets.
At the 2026 African Union summit, the Saudi-Emirati rivalry dominated proceedings, revealing a struggle for influence over Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Emirati military, financial, and diplomatic networks have given Abu Dhabi significant leverage over the Horn of Africa that it has been using to strong-arm regional actors. In a counterbalancing act, Riyadh has begun cultivating greater ties with Egypt, Turkey, and even Qatar, which it had blockaded no more than five years ago. The competition for Africa is clear in the case of Sudan, where Saudi support for the official Sudanese Armed Forces against the RSF has become more intense, deeply entangling the Gulf rivalry in one of Africa’s deadliest civil wars.
The rivalry has extended beyond geopolitical proxy contests and has begun to sour bilateral relations in ways that unsettle the Gulf’s economic fabric. Several Emirati companies have reportedly withdrawn from a large annual defense expo in Riyadh held in February 2026, an event that is traditionally a cooperative showcase of the Gulf’s military and industrial ties. These expos are far from symbolic. Rather, they reflect how Gulf integration has historically relied on defense-industrial coordination and cross-investment between sovereign wealth funds, making a pullout from the event significant. If defense collaboration and capital flows start to fragment, it risks eating away at the material foundations of bloc cohesion.
The fact that these tensions are rising at this specific moment is not arbitrary. The key components that kept the Gulf alliance strong in the 2010s — ideological opposition to political Islam and popular revolution, a common enemy in Iran, and confidence in American security guarantees — have lost their relevance today. Now, the threat of popular or Islamist uprising has lost momentum, Saudi Arabia has normalized ties with Iran following a 2023 deal brokered by Beijing, and both nations have increased arms purchases from China and Russia to hedge growing unpredictability in Washington’s foreign policy. The structural foundations that once sustained Gulf cohesion have largely eroded.
The erosion of Gulf solidarity is a direct symptom of the two nations’ structural incompatibility. As Riyadh and Abu Dhabi champion rival models of power, the GCC has become an outdated framework. The divergence weakens collective pressure on Iran, complicates the chances for diplomatic resolutions to proxy conflicts in the region, and reduces the credibility of the council as a whole. The lack of a coherent bloc further fragments regional stability and makes the path toward peace in two of the world’s most lethal civil wars, those in Yemen and Sudan, even more difficult — Saudi Arabia’s need for stable, unified neighbors would require dismantling the proxy networks the UAE has spent billions to secure.
The Gulf rivalry also poses a new challenge for the United States, whose regional strategy has long relied upon Gulf unity and stability to maintain its regional security apparatus. As Riyadh and Abu Dhabi drift further apart, the U.S. cannot treat the Gulf as the coherent bloc it once was and must adjust accordingly via individual bilateral management. Reduced cohesion limits Washington’s ability to coordinate burden sharing, while the emerging Saudi-Emirati rivalry may put the United States’ longstanding goal of normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel on the backburner as managing intra-Gulf conflict may take priority.
Open hostility between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi remains highly unlikely, but the simplistic bloc frameworks that once defined Gulf politics appear to be coming to an end. In its place, a managed rivalry is likely to emerge, characterized by intense competition for maritime chokepoints in the Red Sea and influence across the Horn of Africa. The new order will be defined by parallel spheres of influence rather than a collective consensus as the two Gulf nations race to secure regional and economic dominance.
Featured Image Source: The New York Times