In a move that certain observers saw as an effort to undermine the Kuwaiti emir, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced a new partnership with Saudi Arabia. The announcement came only hours before the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait on Dec. 4, which fell apart after two hours and was only attended by two council members’ heads of state: the Kuwaiti and Qatari monarchs. The summit will be remembered as the worst GCC summit to date. In addition, the Kuwaiti efforts to mediate the six-month-old Qatar crisis have thus far proven futile.
This new UAE-Saudi partnership represents an alternative to the GCC while the Qatar crisis continues. Yet it is premature to conclude that it intends to be a substitute for the subregional organization founded by six Arabian Peninsula monarchies in 1981. Regardless, the UAE-Saudi partnership’s purpose is to achieve between these two nations essentially what the GCC was intended to accomplish among all six of the GCC members: enhance transnational cooperation in the areas of military, economics, culture and politics.
The formation of this new partnership is truly illustrative of the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s close alliance. As Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed put it, the UAE and the kingdom have “passed beyond the usual diplomatic ties and could be considered as one.” At a time when much turmoil besets the Middle East and security threats loom large in countless areas, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh see the region through prisms that are extremely similar, both being focused on security and opposed to Iran and Qatar. The two countries share the same threat perceptions of the region’s dominant nonstate actors: Yemen’s Houthi rebel movement, Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and Islamic State and al-Qaeda franchises.
Zayed and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, have an extremely close relationship, which has largely driven Abu Dhabi and Riyadh into closer alignment. Decision-making authority has also consolidated substantially under both Zayed and Prince Mohammed in recent years, underscoring how these two leaders are truly at the helm of the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s increasingly muscular foreign policies.
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