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Cover Story

Gulf Within Gulf

What is emerging instead is a harsher reality: a Middle East defined less by shared Arab identity than by logistics corridors, transactional alliances, and overlapping cold wars

By Fathima Sheikh | June 2026


For nearly half a century, the Gulf’s political order rested on a deceptively simple premise: that despite rivalries, monarchies bound by oil wealth, American security guarantees and shared fears of revolution would ultimately cooperate when regional stability was at stake. Today, that assumption is collapsing.

The United Arab Emirates’ decision to leave OPEC, once unthinkable for a founding pillar of the Gulf energy system, was not merely an economic maneuver but a geopolitical declaration. Behind the technocratic language of “production flexibility” lies a deeper fracture reshaping the Middle East into three increasingly distinct power centers: a UAE-India-Israel axis focused on technology, maritime trade and hard security; a looser Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey-Egypt bloc seeking strategic autonomy and Sunni political coordination; and Iran’s battered yet adaptive “Axis of Resistance,” stretching from Iraq and Lebanon to Yemen. The result is the most consequential regional realignment since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

For decades, Gulf unity survived because oil demanded it. The Gulf Cooperation Council, established in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq War, functioned less as a true political union than as a security compact against revolutionary Iran. Even when member states disagreed, as they did during Qatar’s blockade from 2017 to 2021, the broader architecture held because Washington remained the ultimate guarantor of order and because oil coordination through OPEC imposed strategic discipline.

However, that order began unraveling long before the UAE’s exit. The Arab uprisings of 2011 exposed profound differences between Gulf states over political Islam, counterrevolution and regional intervention. The war in Yemen further deepened tensions. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh entered the conflict as allies in 2015, only to emerge pursuing competing agendas on southern separatism, ports, and Red Sea logistics. The post-October 7 Middle East dramatically accelerated those fractures.

As Israel’s war in Gaza expanded into a broader confrontation involving Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iranian-backed militias, Gulf states responded not with unity but with diverging calculations. The UAE increasingly prioritized strategic integration with Israel, particularly in intelligence, cyberwarfare, air defense, and maritime security. Economic ties between Abu Dhabi and New Delhi also intensified through the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, envisioned partly as a counterweight to both Chinese infrastructure dominance and Iranian-controlled transit routes.

This emerging UAE-India-Israel alignment is not a formal alliance in the NATO sense. It is something more fluid and perhaps more durable: a networked bloc organized around ports, artificial intelligence, logistics, surveillance technology, and anti-Iranian deterrence. The UAE’s growing investments in Israeli gas fields, defense technology and intelligence coordination reflect this shift. Its strategic logic is fundamentally maritime. Control of trade corridors, from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean, has become the defining geopolitical contest of the postwar Middle East. Emirati ports, Israeli technology and Indian manufacturing ambitions fit together with remarkable coherence. In this vision of the region, prosperity depends not on pan-Arab solidarity but on integration into global supply chains protected by advanced military systems and Western-aligned capital. Saudi Arabia, however, has hesitated to fully join this architecture.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman still appears interested in eventual normalization with Israel, but Riyadh’s calculus is more cautious in lieu of its ties to the greater Muslim world. The Gaza war intensified domestic and regional sensitivities surrounding the Palestinian issue, while Saudi officials remain wary of surrendering regional leadership to Abu Dhabi. Increasingly, Saudi Arabia appears to be pursuing a parallel strategy: balancing relations with Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan while maintaining selective engagement with the West and China simultaneously.


The inclusion of Pakistan in this emerging bloc is particularly significant. Islamabad, long financially dependent on Gulf monarchies, is repositioning itself as a military and diplomatic intermediary rather than merely a client state. Turkish-Pakistani defense cooperation has expanded considerably in recent years, while Egypt offers demographic and institutional weight. Together, these states form a Sunni-centered grouping less technologically integrated than the UAE-Israel axis but more politically anchored in traditional regional legitimacy.

This emerging UAE-India-Israel alignment is not a formal alliance in the NATO sense. It is something more fluid and perhaps more durable.

Their shared interests are pragmatic rather than ideological: preventing regional fragmentation, containing spillover conflicts, and avoiding total dependence on either Washington or Tehran. Yet the third bloc: Iran, China and Russia (CRINK) along with the Axis of Resistance remains central to the region’s instability.

Although Western and Israeli officials frequently describe the Axis as weakened or fragmented following extensive Israeli operations against Hamas and Hezbollah, political analysts increasingly argue that the network is evolving rather than collapsing. Instead of functioning as a centralized Iranian command structure, it is becoming a looser constellation of semi-autonomous actors linked through shared deterrence objectives, smuggling economies, and ideological cohesion. Adding fuel to the fire, the new CRINK bloc aims to deepen anti-Western alignment, with China providing economic support and Russia offering military intelligence to support Tehran.

This transformation matters because it complicates conventional deterrence and reveals an uncomfortable truth for Gulf monarchies: modern regional conflict is no longer defined solely by armies crossing borders. It now involves drones launched from Yemen, cyberattacks on energy infrastructure from Russia, maritime chokepoints, proxy militias and economic coercion operating simultaneously across multiple theaters. The fantasy of absolute security has been realised: either you are a nuclear power, or you form an alliance with one. And the Middle East is beginning to choose, starting with the UAE. This is precisely why Abu Dhabi’s exit from OPEC carries significance beyond oil markets.

OPEC once symbolized a rare institutional framework capable of subordinating national ambitions to collective Gulf interests. Abu Dhabi’s departure signals that even the energy domain, historically the foundation of Gulf coordination, is now giving way to competitive nationalism and nuclear safety. Reuters reported that the UAE sought greater freedom to expand production and challenge quota constraints amid escalating regional tensions and market volatility. The move also exposed widening distrust between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, as Gulf politics is now not a ‘unified Sunni front’ but an overlapping rivalry masked by temporary tactical cooperation. The implications for regional stability are profound.

In the short term, fragmentation raises the risk of miscalculation. Without cohesive Gulf diplomacy, crises involving Iran, Israel, or maritime security become harder to contain. Competing blocs may pursue overlapping proxy networks, military partnerships and economic corridors that intensify regional competition rather than reduce it, but the longer-term picture is more ambiguous.

Some analysts argue that the collapse of Gulf consensus may actually produce a more realistic regional order. Instead of pretending unity exists where it does not, Middle Eastern states are openly reorganizing around genuine strategic interests. The result could resemble a multipolar balance-of-power system, similar to that of 19th-century Europe: unstable, competitive, yet not necessarily permanently catastrophic. The greater danger lies elsewhere: in the erosion of institutions capable of crisis management.

The Gulf’s old order survived not because trust existed, but because mechanisms for coordination remained intact. Today, those mechanisms are deteriorating faster than new ones are emerging. OPEC’s weakening, GCC fragmentation, and the rise of competing security architectures suggest that the region is entering an era in which ad hoc coalitions replace durable frameworks. Meaningful Gulf cooperation, in its traditional form, may not be entirely dead, but it is no longer the organizing principle of Middle Eastern politics.

What is emerging instead is a harsher reality: a Middle East defined less by shared Arab identity than by logistics corridors, transactional alliances and overlapping cold wars — a region no longer united by oil, religion or a people, but divided by the struggle to control the future that follows.

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