UNAPOLOGETIC: w/ Andreas Krieg on Saudi-Emirati Cold War (Transcript)

I mean, there’s a lot of opportunities. The ideological element is a problem.

Israel’s Strategy: Divide and Rule

But for Israel, it’s very different. For the Israelis, this is about Iran. If it doesn’t become democratic, actually for Israel, it doesn’t really matter if it becomes democratic or not. They’re actually more favorable of a regime that is in itself fighting itself from the inside.

Division, divide and rule is really what the Israelis are all about. The attempt of trying to create a bit of chaos because it wouldn’t have any ripple effects for Israel. If Iran is internally weakened in a civil war, it would be conducive to Israeli long-term interest.

Quite obvious why it would create massive problems for the Arab Gulf states. And they are obviously the ones who have been working on Trump to say don’t follow down the Israeli path because it will lead to chaos and it will have ripple effects for us. It will be difficult. It will be bad for hydrocarbons, oil business in particular, trade, logistics.

But it will also mean that we cannot put tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars into the US economy because we will be preoccupied with fighting or defending against the ripple effects of that chaos. And so the US position is probably closer aligned at the moment with the Gulf states of trying to contain this rather than creating a potential sort of ripple effect or unintended consequence of chaos that will just suck everything in the region into that sort of hub of chaos, if you will, if that’s what is created in Iran. And that’s very different from what Israel wants.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, so you mentioned that the US position for now is closer to the Gulf states. Where’s the UAE’s position on this? I mean, do they differ to Saudi and Qatar and Oman and Kuwait and the other Gulf states? Where do they sit on Iran?

The UAE’s Hawkish Stance and Insurance Policy

ANDREAS KRIEG: The UAE is probably the most hawkish of the GCC states towards Iran as of late because obviously the Saudis have reconciled and obviously have been trying to have invested quite a lot in that relationship with the Islamic Republic because they understand pragmatically it’s not going to go anywhere. Chaos is not serving Saudi interests. So some sort of stability is in Saudi interest. So you need to make a deal, you strike a bargain.

Even Bahrain, who’ve always had a long-standing problematic relationship with Iran, has kind of been more pragmatic. The UAE, again the odd one out here because on the one hand they don’t want chaos. The UAE’s business model is based on stability, making money. It’s about interconnectivity, it’s about attracting inward investment. For that you need stability. You can’t have missiles flying around or drones attacking the UAE.

But the UAE would like to see that regime gone. And obviously there’s a long-standing history between the UAE and Iran over territory, over these islands that were captured on the night when the UAE declared independence from British protection. The islands were captured by the Iranian military, have not been returned. And this is a long-standing thorn in the Emirati side.

But it goes beyond that. Obviously the UAE are very, very scared of the axis of resistance, the various non-state actors that Iran has empowered across the region. And obviously the UAE has had a very intimate relationship with the Israelis and have offered the Israelis their sort of jurisdiction, the Emirati jurisdiction to spy on Iran or conduct operations against Iran.

The UAE’s Complex Relationship with Iran’s IRGC

Likewise, the UAE have offered their jurisdiction to Iranians to kind of launder money and especially for the IRGC elites to use the jurisdiction of the UAE to kind of keep financially afloat. Which is a very interesting insurance policy if you think about it. It doesn’t add up with the sort of perception in Abu Dhabi that Iran is the greatest threat to the UAE or one of the greatest threats to the UAE. Why would they do business with especially shadowy business with sort of intermediary companies from Iran which are close to the IRGC? And it’s an insurance policy, basically.

So by allowing the IRGC, which controls most of the Iranian economy and obviously have needed to find a way to bypass sanctions that have been put upon the Islamic Republic for nearly 47 years, the IRGC has been using the Emirates as a jurisdiction to launder money, to having used different oil companies in the UAE to kind of smuggle oil out of Iran.

And in order to keep this inner core of the regime in Iran, which is the IRGC and its sort of splinter groups, to keep that afloat, they needed to have a jurisdiction that offers them access to open international markets. And Dubai, Sharjah and other sort of entities in the UAE have become their sort of supply line, their umbilical cord, if you will, to keep them alive.

And so at the same time, and the Emiratis would like to continue this, they would like to see a transformation and a change of the regime in Iran, because it would allow them to use the networks they already have into the inner core of the economy in Iran to basically uplift their own prosperity.

The UAE’s Balancing Act

So they have a very similar thinking in that way to the United States of seeing this as an opportunity. They don’t want, they certainly don’t want chaos. And I think here is where the Emiratis are trying to stand somewhere between the Israeli position that wants chaos, an American position that’s more pragmatic of saying, how can we generate money? How can we make money through these relationships? How can we prosper? And the Emirates are somewhat in between the two.

They do want to, on the one hand, exploit that relationship with the Israelis. They also want to exploit their relationship with the Iranians, and they also do want to exploit their relationship with the Americans. It’s part of that thing that we, I think, discussed on the last podcast. It’s this weaponized interdependence where the UAE want to elevate themselves, their relevance in global affairs through their connectivity. And so that connectivity with Iran is certainly something that they’re trying to use for their own advantage.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Very, very interesting. I mean, the thing is, you answered a question that I was going to ask. I was actually going to ask while you were speaking, would you say the UAE is closer to Israel on Iran or closer to the USA? And you kind of said it’s in between and it’s walking that fine line.

The Saudi-Emirati Cold War: A Strategic Collision Course

Now, I also want to discuss, I mean, it’s a great opportunity to discuss the Saudi relationship with Iran, where it stands in all of this, the Qatari, the other Gulf states. But before we get there, because obviously the UAE and the Saudis are kind of on a collision course. They’ve been on a collision course with Yemen recently that kind of inflamed a lot. And our own editor has written a column on it and even did a video on it, which has gone viral.

Where he speaks, he himself says that he thinks the Saudi sort of disintegration relationship with the UAE and then being on a collision course is arguably not as big in terms of its impact, but in terms of its strategic impact, probably even bigger, possibly bigger than the Arab Spring. Especially now with hindsight, we know, knowing what happened there.

What’s your thoughts on that? What would you respond to that? Do you think it’s that significant? And also give us some background as to what this collision course is all about and where the front lines of it are. The fault lines. It’s not just in Yemen. Where else are the other fault lines?

ANDREAS KRIEG: That’s quite a big question to be…

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Yes, it is. It’s actually the essence of the podcast.

The Saudi-Emirati Divergence on Regional Order

ANDREAS KRIEG: It is very much, it goes to the heart of regional order and who is dictating the regional order. And for that we probably have to go back to the Arab Spring because obviously the former ancien regime sort of based order in the region that was about authoritarian stability, obviously started to crumble in 2011, disappeared by 2012, and then was replaced by some pseudo order based around trying.

And again, I think we talked about it last time. It’s about how the Emiratis were trying to exploit that vacuum to kind of try to build a new order that’s based again on authoritarian stability, building up, trying to build up authoritarian strongmen who could run the region.

I think the Arab Spring opened a vacuum that initially the countries were trying to fill as well with their idea of liberalization. They realized they didn’t have the bandwidth. They also realized that they would be up against quite a lot of pressure from outside forces and internal forces and then gave up. The countries really gave up that project in 2013 of saying, we’re more interested in regional stability, and if whatever returns us to a sort of equilibrium of stability, we’re quite happy to work with our neighbors to do this.

And that left the UAE alone to kind of shape the outcome of the Arab Spring. And they’ve done it quite successfully. They’ve done it in Egypt through the state, but they’ve done it in Libya, and they’ve done it in Sudan. They’ve done it in Yemen through non-state actors. Hence my argument about what I see as the “axis of secessionists,” which is quite similar in terms of its setup to the axis that the Iranians have developed, which is an axis of non-state actors as well.

But the Emirati axis was one that was operating and was quite successful because they were operating in a vacuum. So obviously the United States had gradually withdrawn under Obama. But then obviously Trump won, continued this, Biden continued this. Trump, too, is continuing this by saying, we’re pivoting away from the Middle East. We’re still very much interested in it, but we don’t want to get our hands dirty. We don’t want to put our boots on the ground, and we don’t want to manage the chaos on the ground. We want to delegate this.

And the Emiratis were quite happy to absorb a lot of that burden of statecraft, if you will. And they did it in their own way. They did it with their own interest in mind. They didn’t care about other countries around. It was not a sort of consensual project. It was a coercive, compulsive project. It’s a project that primarily serves Emirati interests and the Emirati, or Abu Dhabi interests, I should say.

The UAE’s Attempt to Co-opt Saudi Arabia

And what I mean by that is they didn’t really reconcile with their neighbors. They didn’t really engage their neighbors in trying to build this consensus on how this region is going to look like. They initially tried this with Mohammed bin Salman when he became, when he came into the limelight as the defense minister in 2015, later became the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia.

They’ve been trying to drag him into their sort of thinking and into their order, trying to get Saudi to become a junior partner in this Emirati project. And obviously, it’s an Emirati project that since 2020, since the Abraham Accords came in, also included the Israelis.

And what you had, or what you still have, is the attempt by the Emirates to build a regional order where Abu Dhabi is the hub in a hub and spoke system, but where all the nodes around the hub of Abu Dhabi are connected, but are somewhat subservient to Abu Dhabi. And in many ways they’ve been trying to use that interconnectivity and the influence that they’ve been generating, the strategic depth that they’ve been generating, to also manipulate and shape affairs within Saudi Arabia.

And for a long time, Mohammed bin Salman, because he was preoccupied with domestic issues and himself being very inexperienced, obviously when he came in in 2015, he didn’t know anything about governance or statecraft. He had been a second order sort of prince. He was not groomed for the job, acted quite erratically, impulsively, made a lot of mistakes. Obviously the worst one obviously was the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, which is a very different Mohammed bin Salman from who he is today. And we can talk about this later.

But my point being is the Emiratis were trying to get the Saudis to buy into their project. And the Saudis did buy into it for quite some time. And then we see after 2018, the killing of Khashoggi changes who Saudi Arabia is. I think Mohammed bin Salman is becoming more introverted, less impulsive, less erratic, more pragmatic, saying, okay, we’re not going to win the war in Yemen on our own. And we’re certain, I think engagement and diplomacy, that’s what he thought was kind of the way forward.

The First Cracks in the Alliance

And the first rift we see between the UAE and Saudi is probably around 2019 with the Riyadh agreement was a way of trying to patch this over. But in reality it showed already that Saudi and the UAE were on completely different trajectories, but again, Saudi for the most part being introverted.

So that vacuum, you had no other regional leadership. You had the old regimes, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, they were all weakened or disappeared. And that vacuum had to be filled by the Gulf. Like I said, the countries were stepping back. The Saudis were introverted. And that left the Emiratis as the only proactive force to build and shape regional order.

And that came to the first frictions we see over Yemen happening in 2019, where it becomes clear for the Saudis that actually the Emiratis are not serving the Saudi-led war against the Houthis, but they’re actually serving their own interests by creating their own sort of enclave in the south of Yemen and to serve again further their own economic, logistical and whatnot interests.

And that obviously then expands across the region. And the Saudis are waking up to this, realizing that they’ve been increasingly ring-fenced or encircled by this kind of axis of secessionists. And really what we’ve seen over the last six weeks is the Saudis not just waking up to it because they have woken up to it for a while, but then to say actually we need to do something about it.

The engagement and negotiation, mediation, speaking behind closed doors, trying to reconcile with Abu Dhabi is not going to change their behavior because it hadn’t. And hence they kind of became more proactive. And this is where I think now in terms of regional order, we’re seeing a transformation of Saudi Arabia as well, potentially with far-reaching consequences far beyond Yemen.

MBS’s Evolution: From Impulsive to Pragmatic Leader

Where MBS went from being very impulsive, erratic, somewhat subservient to an MBZ-led Emirati region, to becoming introverted, focusing on domestic development after the Khashoggi murder, an assassination, to now saying actually we want to take over leadership and we have the capacity capability to do it, we have the convening power to do it. Let’s be more assertive and also push back against that axis of secessionists also.

And that’s very important I think, because that axis of secessionist approach, the Emirati project does include the Israelis and it does include the Israelis not just as a junior partner, but in many ways as an equal partner. And it allows the Israelis to implant their sort of outpost across the region. And that goes against obviously Gulf interests and most importantly Saudi interests as well.

And I think this is where we are right now, where I think we have now the third phase of the reign of Mohammed bin Salman, which is pragmatic, it is about engagement, it’s about using convening power and diplomacy to engage the Iranians, for example, maintain good relationships with the west, most importantly the United States, but at the same time establishing red lines.

Competing Visions: Sovereignty vs. Secessionism

And I think where the project fundamentally differs, the Saudi project and the Emirati project, is that the Saudi project is built around sovereignty, territorial integrity. It’s about UN-backed governments, it’s about formal processes. And the Emirati project is one that is about abandoning weak states and weak governance and instead building substate entities and enclaves that can contest the central government in these states.

That’s what we’ve seen in Libya. In Libya, they’re not working. The Emiratis are not working with the UN-backed government they worked with through Haftar and the Libyan, what they call the Libyan National Army, which is a network of different militias.

In Sudan, they worked with the RSF against Khartoum and the SAF, again with a breakaway component. In Somalia, they’re not working with Mogadishu, but they’re working with Somaliland, Puntland and to an extent Jubaland as well against the central government.

In Yemen, the same thing. They were obviously kept up the facade of working with the Saudis in the Presidential Leadership Council, but obviously under the surface continued to work with the southern cause and the STC.

And this is where I think Yemen is just the beginning of a much bigger sort of rollback of that axis. And we’re seeing, because we’re seeing the Saudis taking over a leadership position, convening position over Somalia with the Arab League and the African League as well, also again pushing back against the Somaliland recognition.

They’ve done it in Yemen, in Yemen, they’ve quite successfully rolled back the territorial gains of the STC. But now we’re also talking about Libya, we’re talking about Sudan as well, where the Saudis are willing to actually back the SAF quite considerably, even with planes to actually help them fight the RSF.

And so that’s a regional conflict that is just opening up now which will hopefully transform the region and return us to a sort of equilibrium of stability. But I don’t think it’s going to be that easy, I think because the means that the Emiratis have, the strategic depth they have makes them a very, very cunning sort of regional actor and they’re extremely Machiavellian and extremely sort of zero-sum game oriented. While the Saudi nature, strategic culture we talked about last time is very, very, very different in that respect.

Historical Context: From Sykes-Picot to Trump’s Iran Policy

ASHFAAQ CARIM: I want to zoom in on Somaliland and Yemen. But before we actually do that, if we just go back like we go back like 25 years ago, even more than that. So 100 years ago or more than 100 years ago, there was Sykes-Picot and this whole region, which is one son of Ottomans and a few other entities, was divided into like 24 countries.

And when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, my recollection is that one of the strategic aims for the USA was actually to divide Iraq in three: Kurdistan, the south and then the central sort of Sunni, Sunni capital of Baghdad. They failed in that.

And right now I think it’s quite clear, and this has been talked about a lot, is the Israelis are trying to get the northern part of Syria become an autonomous region while simultaneously engaging Sharaa and trying to sort of have in Sharaa, sort of a Jordan or Egypt state, which is has no power and is just subservient to Israel in some way.

This has also been to a large extent a U.S. strategy for the last 60, 70 years. And what you’re saying now is that the way Donald Trump is engaging Iran, at least it’s my understanding that that’s the case. Maybe I’m wrong and please correct me if so, but Donald Trump’s looking at Iran, which has been like the biggest enemy of the USA since 1979. I mean, at least is, is like the way they speak about it is like it is, if not, not necessarily strategically or realistically is.

So that seems like a change in policy. And it now seems like Donald Trump, what you’re saying, I mean, the idea that he wants to kind of have Iran build strategically or allow them to build strategically so that he can extract what the US Administration and his partners can extract from them, their big markets, their amazing human capital, et cetera, it seems like a massive shift. It seems like a very, very big shift in policy.

Just tell me more about that, but tell me more about how, what this means. I mean, are you saying that sort of the Saudis and the USA are now turning a new leaf in how they think about the region in terms of, instead of creating instability and puppet governments, but creating stable business entities, which sounds like it will be really great for the region. I mean, just is.

The Shift Toward Economic and Network-Centric Statecraft

ANDREAS KRIEG: It goes much deeper than that. And I think the Emiratis are not necessarily on the other side of that. So the means of statecraft rather than the ends might differ in terms of what’s the ultimate outcome, but the means that are being used to achieve these ends are fundamentally changing, in my opinion.

We’re going more into economic and financial statecraft in what I call network-centric statecraft. I think I talked about it last time. The idea that you’re trying to mobilize all the networks that the nation has at its disposal, not just the civil servants, not just the military, but kind of mobilizing merchants, logisticians, commodity traders, private companies, private security companies, private military companies, using the market to basically expand influence or generate influence, which is what strategy is all about.

I think we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the world in terms of how we do things, how statecraft is being done. For obviously, for thousands of years, I think the primary tool of statecraft has been, at least the focus has always been on the military, on coercion, on force. I think that is changing and the beginning of that goes probably back to the beginning in the postmodern period is probably the Chinese model.

The Chinese model is very rarely built around military force. It’s built through coercive interdependence, weaponized interdependence, creating trade relationships that then over time create some sort of financial economic dependence on to China where the Chinese can then use that co-dependence to extract concessions from what then become effectively client states, client companies and whatnot.

That’s the BRI, this bigger idea that the Chinese have, the Belt and Road Initiative, is about injecting cash, injecting massive loans into the developing world and then extracting concessions from that. It’s a neo, some people call it a neocolonial project. That’s the Chinese model and it’s worked very well because it looks benign on the surface but is actually quite extremely coercive below that. And if the Chinese don’t get what they want, they’re quite able and willing to use whatever sort of levers they have at their disposal to extract that concession that they need.

And they’ve been doing it while the West has still looked at Afghanistan and Iraq was very much a military-centric, very much a failed military-centric and very, very costly act of statecraft that didn’t generate any returns. I would even say Iraq is what broke America. I mean American, the unipolar moment that America had to lead the world was broken in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so the idea that, and I think the neoconservatives in America have been always pushing for it, lose military force to transform and change the world. I think that has these new conservatives are being sidelined and MAGA, making America great again. America first is about, it doesn’t mean we’re all going to be happy and friends and we’re going to build consensus. It is coercive as well. But the means that they’re using are very different. It’s about economic dependencies.

The Emirati Model of Strategic Influence

The Emiratis have adopted the same model. And I think why the Emirates are so successful in comparison to Saudi or the Gulf states is because they’re able and willing to use these sort of fairly benign means of financial and economic statecraft to create interdependencies that over time pivotal to become weaponized into co-dependencies where Abu Dhabi is the main investor.

We see that with Egypt for example. Egypt is surrounded by the UAE’s interest and the friction that they have with the UAE exists in Libya, it exists in Ethiopia, it exists in Gaza, it exists in Sudan. So Egypt is completely surrounded by Emirati interests, but the Emirates are the most important cash injectors and investors into Egypt. So the regime in Egypt has no ability to actually go overtly against the Emirates without causing a major backlash.

Hence why the Egyptians were trying to diversify, trying to get other sources of income from Qatar or Saudi Arabia because they’re so beholden to the Emirates. It’s just one example. And that happens in Somaliland, it happens in southern Yemen, it happens in Sudan, it happens in Chad, it happens in Algeria, where the Emirates have injected massive cash, creating co-dependencies where the Emiratis are underwriting or paying for logistics infrastructures and trade corridors, where they’re using their port companies to build ports and thereby creating and building choke points that make an entire nation and entire economy dependent on an Emirati asset.

And so that is the same sort of playbook that the Emiratis that the Chinese have been using. Now, Donald Trump has been, we kind of saw some of it happening already in Trump 1, but Trump 2 is very much about what can we do for business. Venezuela is about, it’s about petrodollars, it’s about access to oil, it’s about maintaining America’s status as the primary power and the primary economy. And whatever it takes to maintain this, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to do.

So obviously in Venezuela they use military force, but very quick in, quick out, and then let’s bring in the oil companies to manage Venezuela. This is a very sort of 16th century, 17th century approach.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: That’s East India Company kind of thing.

The Return of East India Company-Style Statecraft

ANDREAS KRIEG: Yeah, absolutely right. And so the East India companies for me is, in the book that I just finished writing on network-centric statecraft, I use the history of that of the East India Company as a model for postmodern statecraft. As states are disintegrating and states become weaker and weaker, you can mobilize networks to create business relationships that over time you can then weaponize to actually create a deep strategic influence across not just the developing world, also the developed world, mind you.

One of the greatest forces of American empire and powers of American empire is the US dollar. And it’s also the AI industry. If you look at the UK right now, we are entirely dependent on the United States. We’re dependent on their financial system and the US dollar. We’re dependent on their AI infrastructure, their data centers, their software companies and whatnot.

If the Americans were ever going to go head to head with US over Greenland, for example, we had no way of actually pushing back against it. We would be, we are beggar states to the United States. We are already entirely dependent on them and so our strategic autonomy has been compromised.

So I’m not trying to single out the Chinese, I’m not trying to single out the Emiratis here. I think the Emirates are playing a very sophisticated game that the Americans are starting to play as well. The Europeans have not woken up to it and they don’t understand how it works. But that kind of is the context in which the Gulf or the Middle Eastern regional project has to be understood as well.

We have a Saudi project which is still very much state-centric. It’s state-on-state relationships, UN-backed governance and formal following international law. The Emirati approach is saying scrap all that. Let’s try to build networks through interdependence, commercial interdependencies, commodity trading, interdependencies, trade corridors, logistics, to make ourselves the key hub in this and then weaponize that interdependence into a co-dependence. So the Emirati project I think is a lot more in tune with where the world is going as opposed to the Saudi project.

US Extractive Relations and Implications for Israel

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, a lot, a lot, a lot. You’ve said a lot to unpack. Right. So as you were talking, all these questions sort of came up in my mind and I just, I hope I remember all of them. So the first is it sounds like the US is moving towards a development and extractive relationship with the region. It’s always been extractive and in terms of it hasn’t been development, it’s been security, security for the leaders or insecurity for the leaders if they don’t like them. And it’s been extractive.

Does this, I mean it sounds like this could be, it’s a gamble because we don’t know where it’s going to go. But it sounds like this could be a nightmare for Israel potentially. What’s your response to that?

ANDREAS KRIEG: No, the Israelis are still security, security, security. Right. They look at the world as terrorists and terrorist supporters and everything is through security. It’s the opposite of pragmatism. Now the network-centric statecraft approach that the Americans are taking for example the Emiratis is one that is at times quite pragmatic. As in you’re trying to strike a deal with Al Shara despite the fact ideologically you might not align with him. But Syria has a lot of opportunities for investment, important strait corridors. Let’s strike a deal with Al Shara because it’s good for business. Right.

That’s the Emirati approach as well. The Emiratis hate Al Shara, right. They’ve been obviously the Arab state there has been supporting the Syrian regime for as long as possible and were really taken aback by Al Shara winning this battle. But they’re the ones, the Emirates are the first ones who kind of strike a very significant strategic deal over the management of the port of Tartus, which is the kind of choke point that allows you to get everything in or out of Syria that shows a degree of pragmatism in order to business and create some sort of interdependencies.

They’ve done the same with the Taliban in Afghanistan, mind you. I mean, Afghanistan, the Taliban, ideologically speaking, should be the polar opposite of the sort of project, the ideological project that MBZ has been pushing for. But they’re happy to strike a deal with the most conservative, most problematic part of the Taliban movement, the Haqqanis, in order to get a deal to manage the airports in Afghanistan. Again, it’s about choke points, about controlling the ways in and out of Afghanistan.

Israel’s Bunker Mentality and Lack of Regional Connectivity

The Israelis are the opposite of pragmatism, right? They are just, it’s a world of black and white. And it’s a world of black and white that I think means that the Israelis have never really understood of how to build relationships, how to build connectivity and how to expand networks beyond their own small realm, that they have their own little enclave that they’ve carved out in the Middle East.

So if you look at the connectivity, Israel has no connectivity outside of their relationship with the UAE and the US and the UAE and I think with the UAE that’s, it’s important. That’s the only sort of trait that goes out of Israel. The bit they’re doing with Egypt and Jordan obviously happens on the fringes. But beyond that, most of the relate most of it for the most part it’s a bunker mentality where the Israelis are, have dug in without a relationship with the Lebanese, without a relationship to Syria, without a relationship to the Gulf, without a relationship to Iraq or any other player in this part of the world.

They don’t understand of how to build connectivity because in the end of the day it’s that ideology, that victimhood narrative, that very deep seated trauma of saying we can’t trust them, they’re our enemy. And that enemy mindset always kicks back in and that kind of defeats all the pragmatism and so what Israel then does saying, okay, we can’t conquer them, we can’t conquer Syria, we can’t occupy Syria, we can’t occupy Lebanon, we can’t occupy Egypt.

Let’s try to basically divide them up, but not through economic means, but through security means. Striking a deal with the Kurds, hoping that the Kurds might kind of create a bit of trouble in northern Syria, creating a relationship with the Druze and other minorities in southern Syria in order to carve out another enclave in a buffer zone. Everything is a buffer. So it’s not positive engagement, it’s very negative engagement, actually.

It’s a zero-sum game, but it’s a zero-sum game that doesn’t deliver. I mean, the Emirati zero-sum game at least is one that does deliver because it’s based on markets and economy and some sort of interdependence. The Israeli project has no interdependent element to it. It’s just one-way channels and it’s not sustainable.

And the Israelis need to learn that they can actually trust. There’s quite a lot of people in the Arab world who wouldn’t mind having a relationship with the Israelis if the Israelis became a normal country. But they’re obviously not a normal country. They’re becoming more theocratic, they’re becoming more right wing. But my argument be Israel of the 1990s and the early 2000s would be now in a position to have deals and relationships with all the countries around, because they’re quite pragmatic. The problem is Israel has changed so fundamentally that it no longer fits into that architecture.

Can Israel Become More Pragmatic?

ASHFAAQ CARIM: I mean, I just want to spend more time discussing Israel because I think what I want to, I’m going to ask for sort of a forecast, but just before we get there, it’s, I mean, yes, they’ve become autocratic, I think, largely. I mean, I think it’s a internal security mentality. But also they, unlike the Emiratis, also rely on the USA. But the Israeli reliance on the USA is they’ve just had a much more bankable relationship in terms of they can act a lot more responsibly and the US will bail them out.

And it’s clear that they’ve overreached. And I think it is unsustainable. Do you think that the Israelis will become more pragmatic over this next decade, or do you think they’re just too ideological at this moment, too concerned about pretending to be a victim, and just too blinded by that, or do you think they’ll kind of be able to become more pragmatic and somehow realize that they need to kind of diplomatically and sincerely engage the region in a more mutually respectful way.

The Israeli Strategic Mindset and Regional Relations

ANDREAS KRIEG: For Israel, everything is a means to an end. The Arab Accords and the relationship with the UAE is a means to an end. The relationship with Somaliland is a means to an end. It’s always, and the end is always security. Right?

I mean, Somaliland is important because it allows them to have some control in the Horn of Africa, monitoring and potentially launching strikes and potentially building a military base there. It’s all again goes back to military and security. That is a very deep-seated strategic culture that I don’t think fundamentally is going to change. And I think the 7th of October has just added another layer of deep-seated, of a deep-seated insecurity complex.

The other problem is you need to have a more—if you look at the region and that’s what the Israelis do through a lens of threat rather than opportunity, then you can’t possibly strike a relationship with anyone because you can’t trust anyone. And that’s the problem for the Israelis. They have—and what happened since the 7th of October is that a lot of people were at the center of Israeli politics on the political spectrum who might have been pragmatic, who might have thought, okay, maybe there is a relationship we can build with the Arabs, have now pivoted to a more far-right position where they’re saying all the Arabs are out to get us, out to kill us.

I think they don’t even trust the Emiratis to that extent. And I think the Emiratis are maybe a bit naive to think that this is a genuine warm friendship and partnership. The Israelis are there to get what they need from the Emiratis. And obviously the Emiratis to an extent also say, okay, we get from the Israelis what we need, which is an out-of-jail card in Washington with particular neocons and AIPAC and the pro-Israel groups. And we’re going to get some access to technology. But it’s not a friendship in that respect.

Can Israel fundamentally change? I don’t think so, because anyone on the political radar right now, anyone who has the chance of becoming prime minister in the next five years or 10 years maybe, with the exception of Yair Lapid and even he has his reservations, obviously. But all the other ones who have a chance to take over from Netanyahu, if Netanyahu was actually voted out ever, not ever. But you know, it doesn’t look like he’s going to lose the next election.

All these people pursue the same approach when it comes to the Palestinians. They pursue the same approach of saying, okay, we can’t trust them, hence we need more buffer zones. More buffer zones means you encroach on sovereignty. You basically carve out territories as buffer zones in Lebanon, in Syria. You basically not just violate the sovereignty of other states, but you violate international law. You’re willing to use any coercive means through Washington to get your way and get a cover for the sort of stuff that you’re doing.

There is a broad consensus in the Knesset for these sort of policies. There’s a broad consensus, I think, in Israel, as in, I think a majority or at least, you know, 40% of the population would support something like this. They wouldn’t call it Greater Israel. I think that’s the Greater Israel narrative is really—that’s where the religious far-right, the ideologues are, which by the way, are also no longer fringe groups. A lot of them are sitting in the Cabinet. Right. So that is no longer—we can’t just say, oh, that’s just some lunatics. That has become quite mainstream in many ways.

But it doesn’t matter what sort of narrative you put on it, whether you make it ideological or you make it pragmatic, security-related. There are a lot of people in the IDF who say we can’t possibly surrender that Mount Hermon or southern Syria to the Syrian regime, let alone discuss the Golan Heights, because it’s all about security. We need it. We need it for strategic depth. And that was always the problem that the Israelis had. They never had strategic depth.

And so for them, it’s a pragmatic security argument that they can sell to Europeans and Americans by saying, you understand what happened to us on the 7th of October, if you don’t want this to happen again to Jews, we need to have that territory as a buffer. That’s kind of their argument.

So I don’t see that pragmatism that is needed because a country that keeps violating the sovereignty of their neighbors, keeps on taking their territory illegally, tries to kill individual civilians with impunity, as they do in Lebanon, as they do in Syria, as they please, is not a country that can have a relationship with the Arab world and is also not a country that will have a relationship with Saudi Arabia, by the way, because it very much fundamentally speaks against what Saudi Arabia stands for. And if Saudi Arabia becomes more assertive, then Israel is together with the UAE, the odd one out, in that order.

Saudi Arabia’s Evolving Position

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, so you mentioned that the Saudis are kind of, you know, I mean it’s a bunch of things. There’s geopolitics and reality, but also it’s about MBS just kind of maturing, understanding what it means to actually do statecraft and run a country.

We’re going to get to Somaliland, Somalia and Yemen and discuss in depth there just sort of how the UAE, what their strategic interests are and how it’s in conflict with the Saudis and other actors in the region. But just the last question on Israel, I mean, hopefully the last question, maybe it’ll come up again. But to what extent have their, you know, the hawkish, crazy, completely irrational behavior of the last two and a half years driven the Saudis into this more rational position where they are more diplomatic? Because it’s not just Emirati actions. I think there’s also, there’s more to it. So to what extent—

ANDREAS KRIEG: No, Israel is the factor in this spat between UAE and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia in 2023 was seriously entertaining a normalization track with Israel, which wasn’t the Abraham Accords. They never wanted to be part of that Emirati project. The Abraham Accords is a UAE-led project. If you subscribe to it, you become subservient to an Emirati vision and Emirati order.

The Saudis would have carved out their own sort of avenue. It would have been tied to very vague, ambiguous things about Palestinian statehood. But in early 2023, pre-7th of October, there was an opportunity to potentially see a two-state solution. I would be very critical and say probably there wasn’t, but you know, it was far less unlikely than it is now. I mean it’s impossible now basically.

And so I think the 7th of October changed all this. Israeli behavior, erratic behavior, impulsive behavior, the strike on Qatar, you know, the strikes on Yemen, on Lebanon, Syria, Iran, all of that erratic behavior has created insecurities within Riyadh. And Riyadh now says, okay, this is an unleashed, unhinged entity, Israel under Netanyahu that has the somewhat ambiguous backing of the United States, and it’s become the major threat for regional stability.

That is kind of a consensus across the Gulf, minus the UAE. I mean all the other five Gulf states see Israel as the greatest threat to regional stability, more so than Iran. So a contained Iran that is domestically focused doesn’t externalize, you know, their sort of revolution to the axis of resistance, because the axis has been slightly degraded as well, is something that the Saudis can manage and can work with. They have a relationship with Iran.

The problem is even when you have a relationship with Israel, you can’t contain it. It’s not like the Emiratis with all their commercial political relations with the Israelis had any sort of positive impact on containing Israeli aggression or maybe sort of moderating Israeli approaches towards the Palestinians or Gaza. Quite the contrary. So you know, in many ways the Emirati support for Israel has more emboldened the Israelis.

So in that respect, I think fundamentally the Israelis now are acting in the way that they do also because they think this whole potential of having a relationship with Saudi Arabia in the mid, short to midterm is just not going to happen. So we might as well do whatever we need to do to establish a status quo and we revisit this further down the line. And then there we see the hard-liners who really don’t give—you know, they don’t care. The hard-liners, the ideologues in the cabinet couldn’t care less about, you know, about Saudi Arabia.

And so the Saudis are saying, okay, we can’t just wait for Israel to become normal again. And the prospect of Israel pivoting back to pre-7th of October or going back to the early 2000s or the 1990s, that Israel is gone, it doesn’t exist anymore, it won’t come back. And so the Saudis are saying maybe that is, you know, maybe we have to then proactively share. And I think that’s what I think the wake-up call with Yemen is all about is going from strategic drift and you know, waiting and seeing, being patient to being more proactive, determining and leading on a regional order also, and especially because Israel needs to be contained.

The Yemen Question

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, now I’ve done a previous episode with you where you go in depth into sort of the history of Emirati actions in Yemen, Emirati actions in Libya and in Sudan and how they destabilized and worked against that. So I’m not going to ask you the same thing to go into that. But just specifically with Yemen. Let’s start with Yemen, we’ll get to Somaliland later and maybe we’ll deal with Sudan.

But just give us a summary, very brief one of just what happened in terms of, you know, why did the Saudis get upset and what have they done? Sort of the history again. But specific to what’s the fault line in Yemen with Emirati and Saudi Arabia. And then we’ll deal with the other fault lines more specifically as well.

ANDREAS KRIEG: Yeah. So Yemen obviously going back to, we can go back to—well, we can go back very far in history because, you know, most of the tribes come from Yemen.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Right.

The Saudi-Emirati Divide Over Yemen

ANDREAS KRIEG: So Yemen has a very, very important position in the lieu de memoir, if you will, of Gulfi culture and tradition. It is the root cause of, you know, if you’re Muslim as well. Yemen is mentioned in the Quran. It is a very special place.

But for the Saudis in particular, it’s a special place because obviously it’s their underbelly, right. It’s their access point potentially to the Indian Ocean. It’s their way out of the Gulf into open waters, if you will. And there’s always been a very intimate tribal relationship with Yemen. There have been hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, millions of Yemenis moving into Saudi Arabia, becoming Saudis and vice versa. So it’s a very intimate relationship.

You know, as one Saudi once said, it’s not an external issue. Whatever happens in Yemen is not a foreign policy issue. It’s a domestic policy issue for the Saudis. And so when for decades the Saudis have been trying to manage the relationship, working with different interlocutors at some point with the royalists who were the Zaydis who are now Ansar Allah against the Egyptians in the 1960s, working with Southern tribes, Hadramoti tribes, tribes highlanders, as well as people who live in the coastal areas. The Saudis have done it all. They’ve played with everyone because for them it was something they needed to manage.

And when in 2015 or 2014 the Houthis took over Sana’a as an Iranian proxy, that was a situation that the Saudis couldn’t tolerate. And so they embarked on this Saudi-led war against the Houthis. And the Emiratis came along as other GCC countries to support this effort.

But it became quite clear around late 2015 that the Emiratis didn’t want to bear the burden directly because they lost in one incident more than 55 people, I think. And they started to delegate a lot of their activity in southern Yemen, the Emiratis did to local proxies as well as to private military and security companies.

The UAE’s Southern Yemen Strategy

And over time, the brigades that the Emiratis were building up as their proxies started to build—I think it was a fairly smart move for the Emiratis to do—to embed that security sector reform effort into the southern cause. The cause for southern Yemen. Yemen used to be divided for decades, was reunited, but under the pressure of the north. So a lot of southerners still hold that grudge of saying, you know, we have a legitimate cause to be independent. We are different from the north, and we don’t want to have a dictate from Sana’a or from the northerners.

And so the Emiratis very smartly, intelligently embedded their security sector reform effort into the southern cause, thereby emboldening the southern cause and over time, creating a momentum for the southern movement to say, actually, we now have our own brigades, we have our own governance structures. We get a lot of funding from the Emirates, which is—and this is, I think, the biggest accusation that the Saudis make against the Emiratis—is that they don’t work inclusively, but the Emirates have really just focused on the southerners and the southern cause and have put a lot of material support into it.

So over time, the Saudis realized that the Emirates are in Yemen to fight their own war for their own interests, for their own influence. You know, it was about Aden, trying to get DP World into Aden and getting access to Aden as a very, very important strategic port along that sea route around the Bab El Mandab, but also getting access to hydrocarbon extraction areas in southern Yemen.

And the Saudis start to feel in 2018, 2019, that they were abandoned by the Emiratis, where the Saudis have to fight the war against the Houthis, where the Saudis bear increasingly the burden of that conflict, while the Emiratis in the shadow of the whole world saying, “This is the Saudi war and Yemen is a humanitarian catastrophe.” It was always the Saudis who were accused of leading this, and they basically had to absorb a lot of that negative press as well, while the Emiratis were able to expand through their proxy networks.

And then over time, I think the Emirates are realizing this is no longer—you know, they’ve basically created a fairly robust governance section in southern Yemen based on the southern cause with an organic narrative, while the north was basically falling into complete chaos.

The Southern Transitional Council

And the Saudis, obviously, on various occasions, have tried to bring the Southerners back in, into the PLC, the Presidential Leadership Council. And despite the fact that the STC, the Southern Transitional Council that the Emiratis created in 2017, I think it was, as an umbrella, a political umbrella for all these southern brigades—when they brought them back into the PLC, it was really just on paper.

In reality, the STC already pursued their quest for secession and that I think we’ve seen that really in the last two years. We’ve seen the STC having their own lobbying networks paid for by the Emiratis through Emirati-based PR companies to go out into London, go into Washington and lobby for a cause of secession, of saying, you know, we really should have our own state.

And so for the Saudis, it was quite clear at this point that the Emirates were not just helping and stabilizing southern Yemen, but they’re actually there to create an enclave that then would be beholden to the Emirates, would be trading through the Emirates and would be basically one of their proxies that they can use in a very, very important geostrategic choke point.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, the Saudi response—I mean, I think it surprised many people. It also was quite efficient. Can you just speak a bit to that before we move on to Somalia?

Saudi Arabia’s Red Line Response

ANDREAS KRIEG: Well, so warnings were given already. So we see in early December last year, 2025, we see that the STC are pushing into Hadramout and Mahra, the eastern provinces of Yemen, seizing territory that used to be traditionally part of southern Yemen, but ones that have a very important strategic relevance to Oman because the Omani tribes on the southwestern part of Oman and of Mahra Province are very closely interlinked.

Hadramout as well, large open area, was kind of a key. These tribes there had very key connections, always had very close connections to the Saudis. And Hadramout for the Saudis was always a gateway to the Indian Ocean. So they thought that was their hinterland. And so them seizing their territory unannounced, the Saudis obviously directly, obviously speaking to the Emirates, saying, “You need to stop this.” And the Emirates are saying, “Oh, we can’t stop it because they’re doing what they’re doing. They’re independent.”

There is an element to it where I think the Emiratis never had full control over the STC, right. They fund them, they do the PR and information warfare for them. But it’s a very hands-off approach. And I think the STC very much overreached. It went further than the Emiratis had envisaged. But then they are like, “Okay, well let’s see what the Saudis do about it because they’ve been complaining about this issue for six years and they haven’t done anything about it. Maybe we’ll get away with it.”

And so warning after warning. And then there was one shipment in—I think it was in late December—a shipment of air defense systems from Fujairah in the UAE to Mokalla in the south of Yemen. Air defense systems, where obviously, Saudi intelligence picked this up and said, “How the hell can they now provide air defense systems to the STC?” Because what that means effectively is the Saudis control the air in Yemen, right? That was their way of using air power to coerce others into submission.

If they now have air defense systems, that means the STC can go and do whatever they need to do and get away with it, and they will be out of reach for Saudis. So that was crossing a major red line. And obviously, quite clearly, the Emiratis don’t listen to any of their warnings. They’re not listening to any form of constructive engagement.

So the Saudis said, “Okay, this is a red line. We have to enforce it.” And so they struck this shipment as it arrived in Mokalla, which was a major shock to the Emiratis because that was almost a direct attack on an Emirati entity, Emirati ship, certainly on an Emirati delivery. And that was really, it was a shock to the core of the Emiratis because they realize, “Okay, the Saudis mean business.”

And after all, the Saudis being who they are, despite them being not as agile and the fact that they’re quite bureaucratic and hierarchical, they do have a massive military. And if Saudi Arabia wants to mobilize countries, including the United States, that stabilization, that convening power that Saudi can bring to the table, the Emiratis can’t match.

At the same time, mind you, and this has to be seen in the context of what happened in early December in Yemen, is that is going on as the Saudis are trying to rally support in Washington against the RSF and against UAE support to the RSF in Sudan. So the two are linked. So the Emiratis also are saying, “Okay, you’re trying to throw us under the bus in Washington over the RSF. We’re going to throw you under the bus in Yemen.” And obviously that failed.

And so a lot of that is not the sort of way you would see two Gulf countries who used to be quite close, used to have a strategic alliance of sorts, would go about doing business. Usually these things would be solved behind closed doors between the Crown Prince and the President of the United Arab Emirates, you know, MBZ and MBS meeting, sorting it out, and that’s it.

But it became quite clear that the Emirates are willing to stand their ground, take a risk and play a very coercive, high-risk game, which I think the Saudis have won the battle this time around in Yemen, but they haven’t won the war.

And if we go back to this point I made earlier about the networks, is that the Emiratis still retain quite a lot of ways into the southern movement. And you know, commodity, trade, logistics, all of that still runs through intermediaries in the UAE. So I don’t see how even the Saudis trying to attempt to reconfigure and reorchestrate the network in the south, which is what they’ve tried to do—I don’t think that this will be sufficient to just say the STC is over and the southern movement is now realigned with Saudi.

It’s a very organic, very volatile process where I think the Emiratis still have a lot of leeway to exploit. They keep their feet still for the moment, but I think this is not over yet.

The Somaliland Question

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, it’s very interesting. Let’s talk about Somaliland. Right, so Israel wants to build a base there or they’re already in the process of building a base there. The UAE has been promoting the secessionist movement in Somaliland. Almost everyone else in the region is against it. Turkey has a lot of investment in Somalia and they’re pushing against this in a big way. So are the Saudis.

It does seem like right-wing commentators specifically in the UK, less so in the USA because the USA I think is just—Somalia is like, it’s just anti-Somalia racism if anything makes it to the airways. But specifically in the UK there’s a lot of support for Somaliland among right-wingers. What’s this all about? I mean, how much of this is organic to, you know, what’s actually happening between all the Somalis who live in Somalia and what constitutes Somaliland? And all these foreign actors?

ANDREAS KRIEG: You know, when you have people from Reform UK, you know, Nigel Farage suddenly becoming an expert on Somaliland, it does, you know, it makes you wonder whether this is coming from—and it might not be a coincidence that he’d been in Abu Dhabi for the Formula One in December, after which he started posting about the STC. What does Britain have to do with it? British policy on this is, I mean—

ASHFAAQ CARIM: What does Reform have to do with it?

The UAE’s Strategic Outreach and Somaliland’s Independence Movement

ANDREAS KRIEG: Yeah, what have reform have to do with it? And obviously you have people like Tommy Robinson, for example, was speaking out for the southern movement. This is not organic, I don’t think. Because what do they care about? You know, most mainstream British analysts, if you work on security and foreign affairs, don’t necessarily know anything about southern Yemen or Somaliland. It’s a very fringe topic, isn’t it? Unless you’re a regional expert. And so why do they care about it?

And it’s clear that there has been some outreach by the Emiratis to reform and to some of the far right people in the UK because they align on the issue of migration, the issue of Islam as well, trying to push back, of saying, you know, we need to push back against Muslims taking over our country. That kind of feeds that whole narrative, this sort of boogeyman that the Emirates have tried to create of the Muslim Brotherhood. Basically Muslims who pray too much, are too politically active, are basically tarnished as the Muslim Brotherhood. And we see these narratives being copied by the far right in Britain.

Now, Somaliland goes back, you know, a long time. Somaliland has a fairly legitimate cause, as did the southerners in Yemen, to say we want to be independent. Right? Their movement for secessionism is nothing new. The problem with Somaliland, obviously, is what the Emiratis have done there. So the engagement Somaliland, I think starts in the 2010s quite early on. It’s about commercial interests, it’s about agriculture, it’s about basing rights and, you know, about building a port.

And Somaliland again has this natural organic movement of a group that’s quite coherent, wants to secede from Mogadishu. Abu Dhabi realizes they will never have a, will never be able to monopolize the relationship with Mogadishu because obviously the Qataris are there, the Turks are there. And so the Emiratis look for an enclave where they can monopolize the relationship. And with Somaliland, they can do it. And Somaliland is obviously where it’s positioned on the map in Somalia, very strategically positioned to have that relationship.

The Emirati Model: Building Influence Through Development

And the Emirates engage Somaliland early on and investments are growing and they’re also curating relationship with political factions, particularly with certain clans. I mean, Somalia has to be seen as a, you know, it’s a country of different clans really. And Somaliland is not a homogenous one clan sort of entity. But what the Emiratis have been creating in Somaliland is a one clan reality where other clans who are not aligned with the Emirates are basically not part of the inner circle.

But Somalia has an organic cause. What I think what most people in the Saudis have a problem with is that that cause has now been weaponized to further Emirati interests. So the Emirates have built a base there, a very significant one, a commercial port, but also a military one, a military base very close to the Bab el Mandab. And it connects Somaliland to a trade corridor inland into the Horn of Africa, into Ethiopia, Eritrea and so on. Again, where the Emiratis have logistical and business interests.

And so it’s become a sort of enclave, very, very similar to how the East India Company started out initially. Right? You build an outpost, a port for trade, and then you go into the hinterland and develop sort of trade routes. But you need interlocutors on the ground. England at the time, in the 17th century had the same problem the Emirates had. It was a country of 4 million people. How can they possibly rule 25% of the world within 150 years of the East India Company being created?

It is because a lot of it is delegated. You need to work through intermediaries on the ground. And the Emiratis are quite good at seeking these out, these intermediaries. And there’s this one clan in Somaliland through which they have primarily worked, have created business interdependencies where a lot of these clan members have their private finances in the UAE being directly paid for by the UAE, have companies, Emirati companies coming in, not just logistics companies, to help build and develop Somaliland. And that’s what the Emiratis have done fairly well. It’s a development project as well. And on the back of that development project, you kind of build a foothold.

The Push for Recognition and Saudi Resistance

The Emiratis have been pushing for Somaliland independence for quite a while. They’ve been lobbying in particularly in Washington for the Trump administration to recognize Somaliland as an independent entity. In return, Somaliland promised they would normalize with Israel and, you know, allow Israel to have basing rights. Now, that recognition didn’t come from Trump also, because obviously it’s been a lot of pushback from the Saudis and from the Arab League and the African Union saying that must not happen because we’re all about territorial integrity.

And by the way, this is not a binary sort of choice, right, where you say you either have territorial integrity or you have secession. I think there’s quite a lot that happens in between. There is a push for an argument to be made for more autonomy. It could be an autonomous region within Somalia and the same for Southern Arabia or the STC held territory in Yemen. They could be an autonomous region within Yemen. You don’t need to completely secede.

Obviously, the Emirates have been pushing, have been lobbying for years for that to happen. They didn’t have the balls in the current context to do it, the Emiratis. So the Israelis made the first move and recognized it. And I think we’ll see other countries probably following that lead. Unless the Saudis can really use the convening power of saying, you must not do this or else. And that’s what the Saudis are working on right now. They’re really trying to establish a precedent of saying, you must not recognize Somaliland as an independent entity, because that’s part of the Emirati project. And it’s an Emirati project that very clearly has an Israeli component to it. And we don’t want an Israeli base right on our doorstep to the southwest of our borders in north, in Somalia.

The Sudan Crisis: A Humanitarian Catastrophe

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Let’s take a break. Can we get Andreas more water, please? Thank you. Okay, great. We’ve discussed how the Saudis and Emiratis are butting heads in Yemen and in Somalia. How are they butting heads? And I mean, in Sudan and there, it’s not just with the Saudis, it’s with the Egyptians as well. We’ve discussed this a bit in the last podcast, but just, I think, in light of the actual confrontation between the Saudis and the UAE. What’s your thoughts on that?

ANDREAS KRIEG: Same problem, same pattern again. The Saudis accused the Emiratis, quite rightly, of their exodus of secessionists via the RSF to kind of create another enclave in Sudan, one that threatens territorial integrity. And obviously, Sudan is worse than Yemen, it’s worse than Somaliland, and even Libya in terms of the level of violence and the atrocities that have been committed. I think it’s right now the worst humanitarian crisis in the world is in South Sudan, and it’s been triggered and maintained by the RSF.

You know, there are estimates in that in al Fasha, nearly 100,000 people were killed within days, slaughtered by the RSF. And it’s enabled by the Emirates. And what is through their funding of the RSF, the delivery of arms to the RSF. And what is particularly problematic is, despite all the negative publicity, all the things that you’ve been talking about, other podcasts have been talking about, the media has been talking about, you know, Saudi was really in the limelight for quite a while. The Emirates haven’t backed down. They’ve actually continuously delivering arms to the RSF. This is going on as we speak. There is intelligence in there. There is evidence in there.

This evidence has been provided to the Americans. The American government is extremely concerned about it. Especially, you know, we’ve seen Marco Rubio the Foreign Secretary or Secretary of State to come out to say we know who’s funding the RSF and it’s still ongoing. We want them to stop. He didn’t directly name the Emirates because he didn’t want to cause a major explosion. But it’s been the Saudis very strongly lobbying, saying this must stop now.

And I think this is where the international community is really in consensus. You know, we can debate Somaliland, we can debate southern Yemen, but I think that the atrocities being committed and enabled by the Emirati proxy, the RSF in southern Sudan, is something that nobody can tolerate. And so I think causing a bit of problem in Yemen has worked well for the Emirates because again, limelight has shifted from Sudan to Yemen. Yemen is far less problematic, but Sudan is still ongoing and we still need to talk about it.

Regional Powers Push Back Against UAE Influence

But the Saudis are seeing the same problem. Beyond the humanitarian issue and the genocide that’s going on there, the Emiratis are undermining regional security and stability because the RSF enclave is part of that network that the Emiratis have created, the corridor that connects them to Chad and to southern Libya. I mean, we see a lot of the arms flights at the moment going from the UAE into a base in southern Libya from which they’re being transported by land into Darfur and into Sudan. So that’s all connected. And the Saudis want this to stop and the Egyptians want this to stop.

What’s quite interesting is that the Egyptians and the Saudis are supporting the SAF, the Sudanese armed forces, with material support, strategic support, and they’re likely going to increase that. The Saudis are likely going to now help the SAF to acquire better fixed wing fighter jets to have a better shot at getting at the RSF. We see the Egyptians now striking arms deliveries directly. I mean, this is the Egyptian Air Force using armed force on their border between that triangle between Chad and Sudan and Libya, and striking these arms deliveries that are going through the land route, which is again a direct striking Emirati supply chains in the same way that the Saudis were striking Emirati supply chains into Mukalla.

So there is a major escalation happening there as well in the information space where the Saudis are pushing that narrative. I’ll be using this to lobby the Americans, but also in the military space where they’re saying we need to win this. The RSF must not get further hold of particularly the very oil rich because it is also about commodity, it’s about gold and oil. As we talked about before the Saudis don’t want the RSF to consolidate their control over these parts of Southern Sudan where, you know, which are the oil rich parts of the country.

The UAE’s Resilience and Saudi Arabia’s Challenge

And I think that war is the one that’s probably going to get the most heat. It is very much a proxy conflict. But when the, obviously nobody is trying to, you know, you don’t have to have a PR campaign against the RSF. They’re kind of, you know, the thing is there is, you know, there’s no way you can polish that turd if you want, you know, as using PR lingo. But the problem is you, you know, the PR campaign has to be directed at the sponsor, at the patron, which is the UAE. And that’s what the Saudis are doing. And that’s a thorn in the side of the Emiratis.

And I think that causes most of the rift that we have between the UK government and the UAE is about Sudan. This is fundamental, not just a disagreement. And the funny thing is, or the interesting thing is the Emiratis, despite all that pressure, are not backing down. They’re continuing, they’re basically doubling down. And that’s where again, Abu Dhabi is. That’s very problematic. And that’s why I don’t have a lot of confidence that the Saudi pushback is really going to change, make 180 degree difference. And this regional order has suddenly been established and the Emiratis saying, oh, we lost, far too much investment has gone into building that network of networks, the axis of secessionists, for the Emiratis for them to just surrender this, plus they don’t need to surrender it.

Networks are very agile, they’re very resilient, they can sustain pressure, they can sustain degradation and then basically bounce forward or bounce back into some sort of stability. So the Emiratis have a lot of patience in this. And my question is, do the Saudis have enough patience and willpower to not just convene other actors but also take action themselves, be proactive, take risk as well, owning the outcome of that pushback?

Because the Emiratis are quite willing to own this. They’re quite willing to own the atrocities committed by the RSF, even if not overtly, covertly. They’re basically recognizing that, you know, it’s part of this project that, you know, we have to sustain a bit of pressure, but as long as we get to secure our interests, we’re quite happy to sustain it.

The Saudi-Emirati Divergence on Regional Stability

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, now, I mean, the last time I spoke to you on the podcast, we spoke about how the UAE, a big part of why they’ve done what they’ve done is to kind of oppose opposition movements that were sort of rising up under Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood. And in that battle, their most overt sort of, I wouldn’t say enemy or foe or challenge was Qatar. Right.

And now it sounds like that’s changed and it’s becoming Saudi Arabia. And it’s very much because the UAE are taking advantage of weaker states and treating them, there’s no territorial integrity at all. It’s just building bases where it wants, it’s building movements where it wants, it’s funding militias where it wants, where it can get militias to extract resources. It’s doing that as well. It’s just there’s no regard for borders. Right.

And every country that is more strong, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, which is much further but is a strong state, Iran and even Algeria, right, is against all of this, right, and trying to push back against this. But this is why it’s Chad and Somalia and Sudan and Yemen, much weaker states.

Algeria has recently also launched a bunch of accusations against Emirates. They also seem very adamant. But the key question I want to come to, you can maybe talk about what those allegations are, but just the key question really is, 10, 15 years ago the Saudis and the Emiratis were aligned in pushing back against opposition movements in countries that would destabilize their regime or their friends who are also autocratic leaders. Now this is very much about territorial integrity. And so it’s a big, big, big game changer. But just first with the Algerian accusations and then your comments on that.

Algeria’s Accusations and the UAE’s Regional Strategy

ANDREAS KRIEG: Well, Algeria is making the same. A couple of weeks ago we had some comments in a government-aligned newspaper in Algeria that made very stark, very strong allegations against the Emirates and them supporting secessionist elements within Algeria as well.

Why I think this is interesting, and obviously this has to be explained and unpacked a little bit further by the Algerians themselves, these accusations. But we’re seeing a massive rift already happening between Algeria and the UAE for quite a while, also because the Algerians are looking at Emirati activity in North Africa as again, them being ring-fenced.

Obviously they work very closely with the Moroccans. A lot of Emirati money going into Morocco, a lot of money going into or Emirati activity in Mali and Chad and in Libya. So the Algerians see this as extremely problematic. And again, as you just mentioned, Emirates working through non-state actors to destabilize already unstable states, which again, goes against what the Algerian interests are.

And the Algerian military folk and generals I speak to kind of echo that. And it was quite a surprise to me that they made these allegations against the UAE as being a kind of divide and rule country trying to create instability to further their own interests, working across borders. And it does fit the pattern, right? It’s the same thing that we’ve been talking about already.

And yes, the Saudis and the Emiratis have been aligned on pushing back against non-state actors and revolutionaries during the Arab Spring. But I think what is fundamentally different now, and I think the Emiratis, the Saudis have been consistent. Why the Emiratis haven’t.

The Saudis have been consistent at pushing back against sort of revolutionaries, was about territorial integrity and maintaining the integrity of states. They didn’t want revolutions that create chaos. They wanted stability. The Saudis never knew how to get, they were clear about the vision, but they never knew what the plan was to get to this vision. They never had a clearly defined ends, ways and means to achieve this.

The Emiratis, on the other hand, did have that approach. And the Emirati end to more stability, quite paradoxically, is creating stability in smaller enclaves rather than stabilizing whole countries, because they understand stabilizing a country like Libya is impossible. So you just carve out a small space where you can build stability and let the rest basically disintegrate into chaos, which is what they’re doing in Sudan and in Somalia and in Yemen as well.

The argument, the pushback I get from a lot of Emirati commentators, they’re saying, what do you want? You want us to work with Mogadishu? It’s a failed state, so we rather create our own functioning state, even if it’s a small enclave.

The problem is what the Emiratis are not doing is building an inclusive, and that’s the more difficult part of development, creating stable sociopolitical relations, inclusive sociopolitical relations. That’s what the Saudis want. And it’s a massive challenge. The Emirati has given up on it. They don’t want inclusive sort of statecraft and inclusive nation building, as it were. They want to do their own little thing.

And I think that’s where the Saudis differ fundamentally from the Emiratis of saying, we always were about stability, territorial integrity, sovereignty. And the Emiratis have abandoned that entirely.

So a lot of the issues that the Saudis had in the early period after the Arab Spring were the same issues that they’re having now because it was about non-state actors on the rise that nobody could control. And the Emiratis are saying, well, non-state actors are on the rise, but we are controlling them because they’re entirely tied to us, they’re dependent on us. They’re doing business through the UAE.

The figureheads of these movements are doing their business in the UAE. They might be even registered. They might have, if you look at Zubaidi, for example, who ran the STC, allegedly has an Emirati passport as well and obviously residence, which is true for most of the other leaders that they’ve been working through, like Hemetti in Sudan or Haftar as well.

The entire, these families do all their business. They’re directly, personally, individually tied to the UAE. So the UAE is saying, yes, there’s a rise of non-state actors, but we control them. And that something is for the Saudis, an absolute nightmare.

The Sustainability of UAE’s Regional Overreach

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Okay, do you think, I mean, you mentioned that there’s been lots of investment in this, so it’s unlikely that the UAE is going to do a 180 or turn this around or anything else. But what do you think happens? I mean, surely they can’t continue overreaching. Surely there has to be some pragmatism or are they just going to, I mean, it sounds like they, for now they’re digging deeper and hoping that they have more attrition than the Saudis.

And almost in fairness, not just the Saudis in time, other states in the region as well. But I mean, that just doesn’t, that also doesn’t seem sustainable from the Emirati point of view. So what do you think they do?

ANDREAS KRIEG: There’s certainly overreach happening at the moment. But let’s go back to what we had talked about earlier. This sort of networked world of where even bigger states are working through non-state actors or commercial entities to achieve their interests. That is the context in which all of this is happening. It’s happening against the backdrop of a disintegration of a state-centric system.

And the new system is a hybrid of states next to non-state actors, private actors, all working together in a very chaotic sort of decentralized order. In this context, the Emiratis feel they can manage chaos because you don’t need to win. And this is where fundamentally it’s different.

The Saudis are trying to win a conflict, they’re trying to, in Yemen, for example, bring everyone together, create a holistic national dialogue, and then everyone is living happily ever after. That’s unlikely going to happen. It’s a very tough thing to do. I think we as the West have failed to do it in Iraq, we failed to do it in Afghanistan. It’s very difficult to do.

Managing chaos is much easier because you can disrupt, you can play around a little bit, and as long as you can do business, it’s fair enough. And that’s where the Trump administration is. If you look at Venezuela as well, you go in, you kind of create chaos, and then you’re trying to get all the benefits from it. And as long as you can manage that chaos, that’s fair enough. That’s where the Emiratis stand.

The Emiratis are overreaching. They’re overstretched, obviously, but because all of it is delegated, it’s not Emiratis working in there. Very few Emiratis have a footprint in all of these activities that were outlined. These are proxy companies. They’re working through advisors, private military and security companies, mercenaries, commodity traders who are not Emirati, who are people who have ties to the Emirates, who work with the Emirates, but they are private networks.

And so why would they now suddenly change? The only way that you could change this network is because networks are organic, is that you try to re-orchestrate them. The Saudis coming in and trying to tie these individuals to them rather than to the Emirates. That’s what they’re trying to do in Yemen. And I think in Yemen, the Saudis have a good way of doing it because they have that history with Yemen.

I can’t see the Saudis doing that in Libya or doing that in Sudan or in Somalia. And what the Saudis really need to do is work through intermediaries in order to have convening power, which they do have. They have a very unique moment, the Saudis now, to lead a region where most people are alienated with the Emirates.

The Emirates are the odd one out. They’re the elephant in the room, right? No one in the GCC aligns with the Emirates. Wherever you go in the GCC, including in Bahrain, by the way, where you think they used to be actually fairly aligned with the Emirates, Gulfies are very alienated with the Emirates and their project, also because they work so directly and overtly with the Israelis.

So being the odd one out has its disadvantages. But it goes back to the point I also made in our last podcast, where I’m saying the mindset, the strategic culture of Abu Dhabi is so fundamentally different. Under pressure, they push back, they don’t fold. Very different from Qatar or Saudi Arabia. They lash out rather than saying, okay, let’s try to accommodate.

They will come through some, there will be some sort of summit, MBS and MBZ meeting, maybe not soon, but further down the line. And they agree and they shake hands. But that will not end the project. The Saudis will, the Saudis have to be very, very careful because the Emirates have been very Janus-faced since 2011, since the Arab Spring, pushing through their interest without any sort of consideration for other people’s interests or community interests or other neighbors’ interests.

And unless something fundamentally changes in the calculation and the calculus within Abu Dhabi that they might be on the losing side, and that’s not happening at the moment, as long as Trump is going to be there, they still have that leverage. The Israelis seem to be on site.

Unless there is pressure from Trump and from Washington to change their ways in Sudan and actually not just saying you will have to change, but also enforcing it. That’s the key issue. Who’s going to go out into that sort of lawless space between Chad, Libya, Sudan and enforce borders and enforce anti-smuggling, anti-arms, countering arms proliferation? Who’s going to enforce this?

I can’t see anyone doing it. So the Egyptians are trying to do it, but it’s piecemeal. The Saudis are trying to do it here and there. It’s piecemeal. It’s such a massive network that the Emirates have built that I don’t think they necessarily realize that they might have to change. And I’m not sure they need to change. I think they can sustain this pressure, unfortunately.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: What does it mean for those countries in itself, those weaker states? I mean, Chad for example, I mean, how does Chad stabilize with all of this going on? Not that Chad is on the route to stabilization, but I mean, just what does it mean?

The UAE’s Zero-Sum Approach to Regional Politics

ANDREAS KRIEG: That’s exactly the argument the Emirates would make. They’re not on route to stabilize. We’re not making things worse, we’re just managing that chaos and we’re doing it to serve our own interest.

And this zero-sum Machiavellian mentality of us against the rest of the world, this Abu Dhabi mentality of we don’t need to bring the Saudis in, we don’t need to bring the GCC in, we just do our own thing. That is the problematic bit that makes the Saudis so angry.

The Gulf states obviously have their problems, they have their feuds, but usually you kind of pivot back to some sort of consensus after a while and you try to manage things behind closed doors, not in the public. But the Emiratis are really—they don’t feel like they need to accommodate anyone at the moment, and that is so frustrating.

There will be an agreement, I do think, but that agreement will be on the surface only, as we’ve seen in Yemen. How many agreements have there been between the Saudis and the Emiratis? And they’re like, oh, there’s no spat, there’s no problem in North America to see, we’re all friends. But under the table, the Emiratis continued year after year doing what they wanted to do to advance their project.

And I’m not saying the Emiratis are winning, but the Emiratis don’t need to win. The Saudis need to win. The Saudis want complete, absolute outcomes which are unachievable. The Emiratis, they’re quite happy with smaller outcomes.

For them to secure Somaliland, that’s a win. For them to secure some sort of autonomy for the RSF, that’s a win. For them to have the LNA and Haftar to be the most important go-to in Libya, that’s a win. They don’t need to win the whole country. And so in a networked world, managing chaos and having smaller tactical victories and framing them as victories, that’s enough.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: It’s almost like guerrilla geopolitics, as opposed to conventional geopolitics.

ANDREAS KRIEG: Very much so. And that’s why I think the Emirates are quite similar. Their axis of secession is quite similar to the axis of resistance that the Iranians have. It’s very much a guerrilla mentality. It’s as long as we don’t lose, we win. But the Saudis need to win to actually say victory.

US Strategy Toward Iran: Transformation vs. Military Action

ASHFAAQ CARIM: I mean, early on in the podcast, very first, right at the beginning, first or second question, you said that the U.S. wants a transformative relationship with the Iranian regime. I came into this podcast thinking that I was a bit confused by Trump not attacking last night.

I mean, yes, of course, there may be any reason for that, because it’s Trump. But I did think that they may do an attack. And obviously Israel’s plan is very obvious. They want chaos in Iran.

But you mentioned that the U.S. sort of wants to possibly think about having a transformation where the country—they don’t care if it’s still run by the ayatollahs, but it becomes more open. And so the U.S. can extract in a positive way for the U.S. It may be positive or not for Iran, but for the U.S. at least. And it may definitely be positive for the Iranians if this happens.

But they can extract the human resources, the resources, the power and the talent in the country. How do you think the regime will respond to this? Because it does give them longevity, but it does mean that they need to change course, not be as guerrilla as they have been, not be as projecting their power and their ideology as much as they have been. What do you think they will do?

The Problem with Military Strikes on Iran

ANDREAS KRIEG: This is my great concern with the idea of Trump striking Iran, because what is he actually going to achieve?

First of all, Iran, the regime is very—it’s quite networked as well, where it’s polycentric, quite horizontal, which means decapitation, as such, doesn’t really work. You can take out the Supreme Leader, but it doesn’t mean the regime is going to collapse. This is not even like Sisi’s Egypt. The Arab dictatorships are very top-heavy, very hierarchical. That’s not Iran.

So the regime itself cannot be—there’s not a single strike you can make to kind of break the regime. Equally, if you had a sustained—and I don’t think Trump has it in him to have a sustained air campaign over Iran, to degrade different nodes in the network, to kind of bring down the regime and weaken it internally against the IRGC or the Basij.

So what he’s probably most likely left with is a single strike or several strikes over a very contained period of time overnight. Could happen tonight, could happen on Friday, could not happen at all. I mean, that’s Trump, right?

But what is the outcome of that? The outcome of that is likely going to be not elite fragmentation, which is the only way the regime is actually going to change—if the elites fragment. You can have more and more people coming to the streets, and they will be mowed down quite literally. I mean, thousands of people have likely been killed over the last couple of days in Iran. We will only know the figure later, but this is what it looks like.

And that is not going to change the regime unless there is elite fragmentation or a fragmentation in the security sector, which means you might have the regular military turning against the IRGC, which is very unlikely. Or you have more likely a fragmentation in the IRGC of saying, actually pragmatically lifting sanctions is what we should be after.

And there are some in the IRGC who are strongly advocating for it because ultimately, the way out for the regime, for regime survival, if you were smart in the regime—and that’s the problem where the Supreme Leader has been, he’s been really paralyzed over the last six months by not making a decision of saying we are negotiating or we’re not negotiating.

If you’re negotiating with the Americans to lift the sanctions, that will ease the economic pressure. That will mean most people might return to their homes. People in the bazaar will go back to selling whatever they’re selling. It can relieve the sociopolitical pressure on the ground as well.

So it is about socioeconomics and political grievances, obviously. But if you can relieve and arrest the economic grievances, which the regime cannot do under sanctions, you can transform the regime slightly. It doesn’t mean that people will be happy in Iran and say, okay, well, now the rial has stabilized and I’m able to purchase food, and now I’m really happy with the regime. That’s not going to happen, but at least it will kind of bring down the pressure that they’re under right now.

For this to happen, you need to have some sort of fragmentation in someone saying, actually, we need to change our course within the IRGC. My concern is that any military strike from the Americans right now will make—

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Them harden, will harden.

ANDREAS KRIEG: They will be rallying around the flag. And that rallying around the flag is what you’re trying to avoid, actually. So it will be quite counterproductive. And same with killing the Supreme Leader—it might just trigger this process of just changing the leadership.

But ultimately, the country isn’t run by the Supreme Leader anymore. It’s run by that level below, the IRGC in particular. The theocratic element of the Islamic Republic has been weakened anyway. It’s becoming—I think stratocratic is the right word—a country that’s run by the military. It’s a military dictatorship because the IRGC runs the entire economy. They’re also the ones who profit the most from these sanctions.

So these are the people you need to address. And I think Qatar and Oman are the two countries that have the most credible relationship with them as interlocutors. And I think if Trump is smart—and obviously he’s talking to the Qataris, he’s talking to the Omanis—he might find a way to try to get those people around the negotiations table.

Should Iran just play the long game of cat and mouse, of saying, oh, we’re going to come, inshallah, next week, but they’re not coming—Trump is losing patience and he will have to strike.

Best and Worst Case Scenarios for Iran

But the best case scenario of regime transformation, I think, is a negotiated deal with the Americans that lifts the sanctions gradually, where the IRGC will likely be empowered because they will make more money. Even when the sanctions are lifted, they own the economy. They will make money. You promise them that.

The theocratic element is increasingly sidelined. So you’re having a Supreme Leader, someone like Rouhani, someone who’s more pragmatic rather than a hardcore ideologue, rather than having someone like Khomeini’s grandson, for example, who doesn’t have a lot of political power with the IRGC, but is a hardcore intellectual and ideologue and Islamic scholar.

But have someone like Rouhani who is the arbiter on the top, who gives you this legitimacy, this ideological legitimacy, but who’s willing to pragmatically enter into talks and the IRGC stays in power. That could be a good outcome.

I think what would be a worst case outcome is military action, decapitation, infighting within the elites, infighting between theocrats and the military or IRGC elements, and chaos across Iran where you have also all these different breakaway factions in Balochistan and Khuzestan area, different factions of Arab minorities all rising up.

If that were to happen, that is the worst case scenario for the region and definitely for the Gulf, and should be seen as the worst case scenario for the Americans as well.

What Would Be on the Negotiating Table?

ASHFAAQ CARIM: What would be on the table in that negotiation? What would the IRGC have to do to get those sanctions lifted?

ANDREAS KRIEG: Primarily the first thing, nuclear. So we need to account for all the nuclear material there is. There’s still some material unaccounted for, highly enriched uranium. We need to have clearly an inspection regime that is enforceable and without any obstruction. To be honest, under the JCPOA, that regime worked. Actually, the Iranians were compliant.

Second thing is about the axis. That’s what Trump really wants. He wants the axis of resistance to break up. He wants the Iranians to stop funding. It’s very similar to the Emirati game. Are they going to stop? Once you have a network, it gives you plausible deniability. You can still do it, even though you’re saying, I stopped doing it under the table. There’s so many means and ways to do it, unlikely to happen.

But at least I think the Iranians can try to constrain, for example, the Houthis and kind of lead to a deal in Yemen and open up the Bab al-Mandab, these sort of things.

There will be a negotiation about ballistic missiles. Constraining the ballistic missile program. That is I think the key problem. That’s the one thing that the IRGC can’t really compromise on because that’s their last level of deterrence that they have against Israel. They give that up, they become Lebanon, where the Israelis, with impunity, just strike whenever they want because they don’t have to fear any retaliation.

But it can be framed in an ambiguous way by saying, okay, we give up the ballistic missile program or we supervise the ballistic missile program and we give in some concessions, we meet somewhere halfway. We retain a strategic capability, but we give up some of the tactical operational capability that we have. But that’s going to be a difficult one to negotiate.

ASHFAAQ CARIM: Andreas Krieg, thank you so much for your time.

ANDREAS KRIEG: Thank you.

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