For most of the past decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates presented themselves as a single strategic organism: two ambitious monarchies bound by kinship, converging threat perceptions, and a shared determination to remake the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring. Disagreements, when they arose, were carefully managed behind closed doors. Action, when taken, was coordinated. Yemen became the emblem of this partnership - a war launched in 2015 to roll back the Houthis and restore a regional order hostile to both Iran and political Islam.
That façade finally cracked on December 30. Saudi aircraft struck targets at the Yemeni port of Mukalla, accusing the UAE of funneling arms to southern separatists. Within hours, Abu Dhabi announced the withdrawal of its remaining forces from Yemen. What had long been a disciplined, if uneasy, alignment slipped into open confrontation.
The rupture was not sudden. It was the culmination of diverging ambitions, incompatible theories of power, and fundamentally different answers to a central question: how should influence be exercised in a fragmented regional order?
At the outset, the Saudi-Emirati partnership rested on a functional division of labor. Saudi Arabia played the role of heavyweight - custodian of regional legitimacy and aspiring leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds. The UAE acted as the agile junior partner, willing to experiment where Riyadh hesitated. During the Arab uprisings, both sought to blunt democratic momentum and crush Islamist movements, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood. They aligned in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and jointly imposed a blockade on Qatar in 2017. For a time, overlapping interests obscured deeper strategic differences.
As the region grew more chaotic, those differences became harder to ignore. Saudi Arabia’s worldview has remained fundamentally territorial and existential. Border security, regime survival, and the containment of Iran through state-centric diplomacy sit at the core of its strategy. Yemen, for Riyadh, is not a distant theater but an extension of domestic security policy. Any armed actor exercising sovereign control along its southern frontier without Saudi consent is, by definition, intolerable.
The UAE evolved in a different direction. Abu Dhabi developed a more experimental, networked approach to power - investing in ports, islands, militias, and informal alliances stretching from Libya to the Horn of Africa. Rather than working through fragile central governments, it cultivated influence through what one analyst described as an “axis of secessionists”: non-state or quasi-state actors capable of delivering access, leverage, and plausible deniability. In Yemen, this translated into backing the Southern Transitional Council (STC), whose objective was not reform of the Yemeni state but its partition.
For several years, these approaches coexisted in an uneasy parallel. Saudi Arabia absorbed the diplomatic costs of a grinding and increasingly unpopular war against the Houthis, while the UAE quietly consolidated control over southern ports such as Aden and strategic nodes like Socotra. The arrangement endured partly because Riyadh was distracted, and partly because Abu Dhabi assumed Saudi reluctance to escalate would persist indefinitely. However, that assumption proved mistaken.
The STC’s December advance into Hadramaut and al-Mahra crossed a Saudi red line. Hadramaut is oil-rich, sparsely populated, and directly abuts the Saudi border. Its capture by a UAE-backed secessionist force was not merely embarrassing; it struck at Riyadh’s vision of a unified Yemen serving as a buffer against Iranian influence. The Saudi strike on Mukalla was, therefore, more than a tactical move. It was a political declaration: whatever latitude Abu Dhabi enjoyed elsewhere, eastern Yemen was non-negotiable.
Based in Karachi, the writer is a political-economic analyst and can be reached at syzainabbasrizvi@gmail.com
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