Transcript: Webinar – Saudi-UAE Tensions Over Yemen: Squabble or Breaking Point?

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PANELISTS

Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

John Hannah, JINSA Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow

Amb. Michael Ratney, Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia

The discussion was moderated by JINSA Vice President for Policy Blaise Miztal.

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TRANSCRIPT

Transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Blaise Misztal:

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today’s discussion. I’m Blaise Misztal, JINSA’s Vice President for Policy, and I’m delighted to be joined by an all-star cast of panelists this afternoon to go over this multifaceted question.

We have Dr. Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near East Studies at Princeton University and the author of Saudi Arabia in Transition, Ambassador Michael Ratney, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia as well as former U.S. Special Envoy to Syria and I believe the former chargé d’affaires in Jerusalem as well, so he knows the region very well. And of course, JINSA’s very own Randi and Charles Wax Senior Fellow, John Hannah.

Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. The proximate cause of our discussion is the rapid series of events in Yemen, beginning in late December that saw both shifting territorial control between the different groups that claim to be the government of Yemen, but more importantly, the friction that it caused between their various backers, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

I, at least, was somewhat caught by surprise by this friction, by this tension between two Gulf states that I assumed were partners, and, if we think back to 2017 and the blockade of Qatar, they seemed to be aligned in their foreign policies. Now they seem to be at odds over Yemen and perhaps elsewhere around the globe, as well.

So, I’m really glad to have all three of these experts here to help unpack what is going on and what it means. John, maybe I could start with you to go over what exactly transpired in Yemen over the past couple of weeks and how it led to this friction.

John Hannah:

Thank you, Blaise. It’s great to be here with Bernie and Ambassador Ratney. I thought it might be useful for people who really haven’t thought much about Yemen, the geography of Yemen, or the geopolitical significance of it, much less the breakdown in different lines of control and groups inside of Yemen, to just spend a couple of minutes getting people oriented here. There’s a slide that you should all be able to see.

That pink blotch in the middle there, that is the country of Yemen. You can see it has a long border with Saudi Arabia over there and to the east it has a border with Oman. To the south, there, is the Gulf of Aden, leading westward into the Bab al-Mandab straits between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and then leading up into the Red Sea, up to the Sinai Peninsula and the Mediterranean, you’ll see why Yemen is so significant.

It not only has this major border with Saudi Arabia, but if you go down south to the Horn of Africa, moving from east to west and north, you’ll see Somalia, and of course, you’ll see Somaliland, which has been in the news quite a bit. I will probably discuss it as part of this complex series of events surrounding Yemen. Then up through Djibouti, Eritrea on the Red Sea coast, up through Sudan and then in Egypt, which you can’t see on the map, there are a lot of players involved here.

There’s a mini version of the great game going on in the whole Red Sea and Horn of Africa region involving a lot of players, not only now obviously the Saudis and the Emiratis, but the United States is in the region as well, Turkey is very much in the region, and Somalia and Sudan, and the Chinese have got now their first overseas blue sea base, out in Djibouti, and obviously the Israelis are now moving down into Somaliland.

So, it’s all very, very complex, with a lot of players competing for position and primacy and geopolitical advantage down there.

So, this is just the breakdown in Yemen. It’s crude. It’s very, as we said, very fluid. There are a lot of players involved, and it’s complex. So, just to give you a general idea of what the lines of control looked like in Yemen back in the very beginning of December, before all of this broke loose, you’ll see there in the kind of reddish pinkish areas in the north and west of Yemen, along the Red Sea, areas largely controlled by the Houthis, which we’ve all heard a lot about during the two year war in Gaza.

The Houthis firing missiles north toward Israel, that’s remained pretty static. But you had this entire area east of the Houthi line of control along the Saudi border and the Omani border there, particularly if you look at these two key provinces of Hadhramaut and Al Mahrah along the Omani border, and Hadhramaut, obviously, along the Saudi border, in the green, controlled by the internationally recognized and largely Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

Then along the south, there in the purple, is the area largely controlled by this group that’s come to prominence recently, the Southern Transitional Council, which is essentially a southern group in Yemen, who were nominally part of the internationally recognized government of Yemen. They sat on its presidential leadership council and participated in the government, but they have always been slightly separate.

The Southern Transitional Council had their own agenda, which was essentially, long-term at least, going to be a successionist agenda to try and re-establish the two separate North and South Yemens that existed from about the late 1960s up to about 1990 when the country was reunified.

But the Southern Transitional Council has had secessionist aspirations to reestablish an independent country of South Yemen. So that’s the way the situation looked for the previous several years, more or less, before the beginning of December.

By the way, the Southern Transitional Council is very much backed by the United Arab Emirates. They’ve worked together for several years when the Emiratis had a major presence in Yemen during the civil war there, when they were allied with the Saudis as Blaise said, and even afterwards they had a close relationship after most of the UAE troops withdrew from Yemen in 2019. They did maintain a prominent Special Forces presence inside of Yemen, largely working with the Southern Transitional Council, fighting certainly at one time the Houthis but also al-Qaeda and other extremist group movements down in southern Yemen.

If you look now at this map that’s been put up, you’ll see a dramatic change in the lines of control. The Houthis still control what the Houthis have, but in early December, the Southern Transitional Council, the belief is largely with Emirati backing, made a major power play to largely take both of these two critical provinces bordering the neighboring Gulf states, Hadhramaut and Al Mahrah. This move basically evicted allies of the Saudis from control of those territories and established Southern Transitional Council, or STC, control of those areas for at least several weeks, until things changed at the end of December.

This move was obviously a major flash point and seen by the Saudis as a significant challenge right in their own strategic backyard, that the STC took control of those areas.

In this next map, this is what the situation has looked like, triggered off by the Saudis. I think to the surprise of some, the Saudis came out very strong militarily at the end of December, shortly after, actually, the Israelis became the first country to recognize Somaliland as an independent state. A few days later, the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government of Yemen launched its own counter-offensive against the Southern Transitional Council. The initial blow was a Saudi airstrike down in a port city in the southern city of Mukalla, where the Saudis believed that the Emiratis had been getting in weapons to the Southern Transitional Council.

They claimed to have bombed a convoy down in that port city, and they publicly blamed the Emiratis for backing this power play by the Southern Transitional Council and altogether demanded that the Emiratis now withdraw entirely their presence from Yemen within a day or so. The Emiratis, and again, maybe to the surprise of some, did withdraw, apparently all their forces from Yemen.

Then, very quickly within a couple of days, the government in Yemen, with Saudi backing, particularly with air cover airstrikes, launched their counter-offensive, and as of today, again, it’s a rough and crude map, but essentially, they have not only taken back those two crucial provinces of Hadhramaut and Al Mahrah but also additional lands from the STC. These include, we now believe as of the last day or two, probably the capital of the internationally recognized government in Yemen, down in Aden, which had really been under STC control.

And there’s still some, no doubt, contested areas that you can see in those lines down there in the southwest. One other important place to mention is this island of Socotra. If you look out into the Gulf of Aden there, it’s actually closer to Somalia than it is to Yemen, but it is Yemeni territory, an island tourist spot. It is apparently very, very nice.

But the Emiratis, along with the STC, also over the last several years, have had control down in Socotra, very strategically located in the Gulf of Aden and the approaches to the Red Sea. And as of the last few days, the Emiratis apparently have also dismantled their presence there. Flags of the national government of Yemen have begun to appear. STC flags are disappearing.

So, I think the assumption is, while it’s shown as contested on this map, and the situation is still obviously very fluid, the belief is that the Government of Yemen, with Saudi-backing, will soon have control of Socotra as well. Apparently, the only way to get to Socotra, the best way to get there, had been flights from the Emirates. Those flights have now been canceled, and the way they’re trying to get people out of Socotra who need to travel out is now through Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. So that’s probably a sign of the times.

Hopefully this is giving people some sense of how fluid and dynamic things have been, within not just weeks but in a matter of days. There’s been major, what appear to be geopolitical developments with obvious consequences for both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, their relations, the future of the unity of the GCC, and obviously the geostrategic situation more broadly in the Middle East, Horn of Africa, Red Sea. These are all big developments that are very dynamic and fast moving.

Blaise Misztal:

Thanks, John, for that tour of the horizon and giving us the lay of the land, which I think is really helpful to understand what happened. Ambassador Ratney, let me turn to you, next.

You left Riyadh just a little under a year ago at this point, I believe, and I’d be curious to know if the tensions that we’ve seen flare up in the last couple of weeks between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia were visible already then, or are they sort of brand new, and have erupted all of a sudden in just the past couple of weeks.

Amb. Michael Ratney:

Thanks, Blaise. It’s one of those things that, now in retrospect, people will say, oh, I saw this coming all along, right? I think what people saw all along was certainly competition that had grown more heated, both a certain amount of commercial competition, a certain element of ideological competition, some diverging perspectives on how to manage kind of the general crises in the region and how to de-escalate them.

But I think the degree to which this broke out so intensely, and now, if you look on social media, so vitriolically, I think the nature of the developments surprised a lot of people again. Again, now in retrospect, people say, this was always under the surface, this was going to happen sooner or later, but I would say I didn’t think this would explode in quite the way it has to the point where now, I don’t know if this is the case or not, but you have people commenting that this is some sort of an unfixable rupture between them at this point, and things will never be the same.

Blaise Misztal:

So Professor Haykel, I would be curious for you to at least give us a little bit of the Saudi perspective on whether this is, in fact, just about the most recent moves in Yemen that precipitated this or whether there were sort of other long standing grievances that led to this, or is behind, at least, the Saudi part of this friction.

Dr. Bernard Haykel:

All right, thank you for inviting me. I think that there are serious structural differences between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and particularly when we talk about the UAE, we’re really talking primarily about Abu Dhabi, and the differences between them have to do with the commercial competition that Ambassador Ratney just mentioned, but also many, many other things.

For instance, there’s competition over the production of oil and how much each country can and should produce, because the Emiratis have built up significant spare capacity, and they want to bring that onto the market. And the Saudis, through the OPEC+ framework, have been limiting the UAE from doing that, and limiting themselves, by the way as well, in order to maintain a certain price band on oil.

They also compete and have very different views on Sudan and on Syria. For instance, the UAE has an absolute allergy to dealing with anyone who is Islamist, and they want to stop any Islamists from coming to power anywhere. This is a personal kind of view of the leader of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed.

And again, these are countries that are ruled by individuals, so it’s highly personalistic. So, he’s animus to Islamists, and it determines how he kind of deals with certain countries. So, for instance, in Sudan, where the army has a strong Islamist component, the UAE has supported this other force called the Rapid Support Forces, that are against the army. And this is a group that is formally from the Janjaweed, and they’ve been accused of committing genocidal acts in Sudan

So, the differences are significant, and I think that they’re structural, and I think that the competition is just not going to go away because the Saudis want also what the UAE has become, which is to be a major hub for business, for technology, for a number of other sectors and industries.

And lastly, I would say, and I could go on quite a bit about this as you can imagine being a professor, but there’s also a difference in scale, right? So Saudi is 24 times, in terms of population, the size of the UAE and it’s a much, much bigger country. It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the region and thinks of itself that way.

And I think the UAE thinks it’s an equal. It doesn’t think that it’s a kind of junior partner, and as such, the UAE has pursued its own kind of independent policy. One could describe it as a kind of regional sphere of influence seeking hegemony in certain countries like Somaliland, Yemen and Sudan. And this has rubbed the Saudis the wrong way because they feel that the UAE should kind of know their place, and I don’t think that structural difference is going to go away anytime soon.

The Saudis feel the same way about the Qataris, but they’ve kind of patched things up with the Qataris, and one could see that as the Saudis got closer to the Qataris, that they were basically giving the finger to the UAE. So, you know, these countries, you can kind of watch the status of their relationship by how they cozy up to one or the other party.

The UAE has tried to cozy up to Kuwait by the way, and the Kuwaitis have said no, thank you, as a way of kind of upsetting the Saudis. So, it’s a complicated place, very, very personalistic in its politics, and therefore can change very rapidly, as we’ve seen, and it can change again. So, nothing is permanent in this part of the world.

Blaise Misztal:

John, let me ask you, if you’re able to give us a little bit of the Emirati perspective, particularly with the backing for this lightning blitz of the STC to take Hadhramaut and other parts of Yemen along the Saudi border.

Do you think they underestimated how that would be seen in Riyadh? Do you think they had some sort of understanding with Riyadh that fell apart? What was the motivation behind it? What do you think they were trying to accomplish, and how do you think they thought it would play out?

John Hannah:

Yeah, it’s a good question, Blaise. I obviously don’t know. I haven’t really spoken to the Emiratis about their role in that STC decision to take this territory right in Saudi Arabia’s strategic backyard.

Obviously, it’s very sensitive. People who know something about the STCs, you know, claim that they couldn’t have made this move without an Emirati green light, and it sounds plausible to me. Why the Emiratis would have done it, I don’t know. As Bernie says, they’ve for many years now, I think, have had an emerging view of the region, obviously driven by this very intense anti-Islamist, anti-Muslim Brotherhood fixation.

But they also have believed that they have a particular role to play in the region, particularly in dominating certain maritime channels or contested areas where weak states are involved rather than bucking up those centralized states, which you know, is the sort of status quo as the Saudis seem prone to do in places like Yemen, Syria, or Sudan.

I think the Emiratis have looked and said, this is a screwed-up region with Islamists running around in parts of central governments that are completely dysfunctional. Their sentiment has been “We need to protect our interests, which are maritime interests, and we see that there are potential partners, non-state actors,” so they’ve decided to pursue a policy in which non-state actors play a very, very prominent role.

But when you think about countries in the Arab League, and particularly in the Gulf, and we think of them as quite conservative and status quo-oriented powers, the Emiratis have launched a much different kind of policy focused on the STC in Yemen. As the most likely allied actor, to work with the UAE this relationship gives them strategic positions down along both the Gulf of Aden, there, and the Red Sea approaches at Bab al-Mandab.

They’ve gone across the sea to Somaliland and the same, I imagine, with the RSF in Sudan, all kind of non-state actors. There’s also discussion that they’ve been quietly supportive of Israeli policies to support minorities, and particularly the Druze inside of Syria, seeing a real threat from the Sharaa government. They’re not particularly comfortable with seeing the Sharaa consolidate their control there. So, they’ve been playing a much different game that has economic aspects to it, in terms of their entry on ports, on agriculture, on industries in these different countries, and having a kind of dominant influence. But they very much use a proxy strategy that has, I think, traditionally, been relatively foreign to the major powers in the Gulf.

Blaise Misztal:

So, Professor Haykel, I am curious on your thoughts on whether this was just a squabble, whether it is an unfixable rupture, as Ambassador Ratney said and some are saying, whether this is sort of a frozen conflict now, or whether things will continue to escalate. Where do Riyadh and Abu Dhabi go from here?

Dr. Bernard Haykel:

So, to answer your first question, which is what provoked this, right? I suspect it had to do with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s visit to the United States, and that during that visit, he spoke with President Trump about the civil war in Sudan. Sudan is extremely important to Saudi Arabia because there are millions of Sudanese refugees and residents in Saudi Arabia. And the Crown Prince is worried that, you know, as the war continues, that there may be more refugees coming across the Red Sea.

So, you know, from the Saudi perspective, there are countries that are a national security risk, and they’re very important. Yemen, of course, is by far the most important country, because it’s the underbelly of Saudi Arabia. Having some kind of stability there, especially with the Houthis, armed by the Iranians, who have launched many missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia, the Saudis really are very keen to have that country stable. This is a very difficult thing to pull off, by the way.

So, what prompted it was this meeting with Trump, asking Trump to intervene in Sudan, which meant putting pressure on the UAE. I think then the UAE said, you know, we’ll show you that we have other cards that we can play if you’re going to the patron, America, to come after us, we’ll make life difficult for you in Yemen. And so the STC was allowed to take over Hadramaut and Al Mahrah, and those are two provinces where there are separatist feelings, but not STC separatist feelings. They are kind of Hadrami separatist and Mahra separatist feelings.

So, the Saudis felt that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and they’d had enough of the UAE’s shenanigans, and they put their foot down. I was surprised by how vehement the Saudi reaction was, and essentially, the UAE seems to have said, okay, you want to own Yemen, you can own Yemen, and you’ll pay for it, because it will be very costly for the Saudis to keep Yemen together.

And they have withdrawn, although I doubt that they will give up their decade long support for different factions in Yemen, especially the STC, and where the STC has very strong support in the provinces of Lahij, Abyan, and Shabwah. So, the UAE for now is pretending to have backed off completely. I think they haven’t. They will maintain a presence.

And as I said in my earlier response, I think that the relationship with Saudi Arabia will be tense going forward, between the UAE and Saudi Arabia. But it won’t take this kind of intense form, you know, again, I don’t think, I think the UAE probably won’t want to provoke the Saudis in this way, but I don’t see their relationship, you know, sort of not remaining tense. It’s tense because they compete in so many different ways with each other and it is, in a way, a zero-sum competition on a number of these files.

Blaise Misztal:

So, Ambassador Ratney, I would welcome your analysis of where things go from here, but I also wanted to get your sense of what this means for the US and US interests.

On the one hand, sort of the various places that the UAE and Saudi Arabia seem to be squabbling over, Yemen and Sudan, don’t really seem to be of much interest to US policymakers, at least at the moment. And on the other hand, both the Emirates and the Saudis are obviously very good US partners, and yet we seem to be able to work with competing GCC states at the same time without that necessarily affecting our relations. So, does this matter for the US? Is this attention that Washington should or can intervene in, or should the US just let it play out?

Amb. Michael Ratney:

The short answer to that part of the question is, it matters a lot to us. You know, if you’re US Central Command, you want a collection of countries, partners in the region that are going to be partners with each other as well, not just partners with the United States. We want them to work together, whether it’s on regional air defense or intelligence or military operations, and the degree to which there’s divisiveness, even this intense divisiveness, just makes it harder, especially when it comes to a moment when things really get serious, particularly with respect to Iran.

To kind of further what Bernie was saying, there is intense competition between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and it is to some degree, zero sum. They share a lot in common, though, when you think about it, they’re in the region, they’re both oil producers, they’re both trying to wean themselves off of oil, they both have an aversion to Islamist movements generally, although clearly the Emirates to a greater degree, they both regard Iran as their ultimate adversary, and they both would like to kind of get away from a historic region of conflict and volatility, and focus on business and commerce and artificial intelligence and defense instead of these conflicts.

I think all of those things that they have in common is the root of why there’s so much divisiveness between the two of them. Saudi Arabia looks at this region, and John kind of walked around the map very ably, and said, look at all these conflicts, look at all this volatility, whether it’s Yemen or Sudan or Somalia or even further afield, in Syria or in Gaza, the Saudis look at that and they see all downside, right? This is just conflict, many of which can’t be resolved. They just need to de-escalate them, to distance them from their shores so that they can focus on their priorities, which is the economic and social development of their country and ideally their region.

I think, to some degree, the Emiratis look at the same map, and they see a certain amount of opportunity, because the Emiratis are in this period where they want to project their own influence and their own power and their own identity, separate from simply a small country within the GCC. They want to show that they’re players regionally and even globally, and one of the ways that they’ve done that has been to partner with what we might call proxies or others in the region, whether they’re the STC in Yemen or the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan or the government of Somaliland, or others.

And the Saudis look at that and they say, this just stokes conflict. This just stokes more volatility at a moment where all we want to do is keep this volatility away from us. And I think the Emiratis look at it and they say, you Saudis need to understand that we’re not just your little brother. We have our own identity, we have our own foreign policy, and we have our own national interests, and among those national interests are kind of projecting economic strength and establishing a collection of partners in the region through which we can express that economic and military strength. And that was a growing tension.

A lot of that was hard to see on the surface, but it was definitely happening beneath the surface. And I think when the STC made its move in Yemen, it was, as Bernie says, the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is not just the Emiratis utilizing a proxy force in order to express their own influence. This is them doing it on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, in a place where Saudi Arabia has long standing interests and a long-standing presence, and they regard it fundamentally as a national security threat, not simply as the Emirates kind of establishing local partnerships.

Dr. Bernard Haykel:

As an American, it’s really tragic to have two allies not getting along, and they should all get along, because that serves our collective interest. I’m not sure President Trump will see it that way. He might want to see it as an opportunity to play these different countries off against one another and maybe get more investments from one or the other, etc, which is the wrong, wrong way to think about this situation.

We want them to get along just for the reasons Ambassador Ratney said. But one of the things that’s kind of peculiar about this situation is that Saudi Arabia is behaving like a small country, and the UAE is behaving like a big country. So, the Saudis don’t want to intervene anywhere. They just want these problems to go away. They want to deal government to government. They don’t want to deal with non-state actors. You know, they’re sovereigntists. They are kind of, you know, nationalists in their outlook. They want the territorial integrity of countries to be, you know, maintained.

And the UAE is behaving like this big country with kind of regional and geopolitical and hegemonic ambitions, in part, I think maybe because of the relationship with Israel, at least that’s the going theory now: the Israelis are sort of egging the UAE on. They didn’t need to be egged on very much. I mean, they were already doing this sort of stuff well before they got involved with Israel and before the Abraham Accords. But that’s the kind of strange thing about the UAE.

The other thing I should say, just as a kind of academic point, when you have countries that derive their revenue from oil, and it’s easy and it gushes, and not from taxation, you have this temptation to build militaries and to then project power. We saw it with Iraq, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, and then we saw it when he invaded Kuwait. There’s something about oil and the fact that you’re not accountable to your own people in terms of revenue, that allows you to do crazy stuff, and we’re seeing some of that on display, unfortunately.

Blaise Misztal:

Let me ask you, Professor Haykel, on a different narrative that has emerged in Washington, or at least I’ve heard in the last couple of days, explaining what’s going on. I guess it builds partially off what you said in one of your earlier comments, that the Emirates are staunchly anti-Islamist, which I guess the flip side of that could be that the Saudis are perhaps more tolerant of dealing with Islamist forces.

And in fact, the narrative that I’ve heard is that you have the Saudis at least playing footsie with or making overtures to this Sunni, Islamist axis, that’s emerging in the Middle East with Qatar and Turkey and maybe the Muslim Brotherhood, and then that ideological drift between the Emirates and the Saudis is part of what’s going on here, is that an accurate read?

Dr. Bernard Haykel:

Yeah, I’ve seen similar kinds of pieces about this. So, look, Islamism is a mortal danger to the Saudi royal family’s regime. Okay, so if you look at how they deal with Islamists domestically, none of what you just outlined is true. There’s zero tolerance for Islamism domestically.

Now, when it comes to overseas countries where you do have Islamists, and you don’t have sort of better alternatives, say, take Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria, then the Saudis will deal with him. But if you see the kind of conversations that are happening between the Saudis and the Syrians, they’re trying to tell the Syrians, I mean, Sharaa specifically, “we know you’re an Islamist, but we want you to behave like a nationalist. We want you to think like a nationalist, to behave like a nationalist, not to think that because you’re an Islamist, you can interfere in other Islamic causes around the world, including the question of Palestine. You deal with the Israelis, you don’t make trouble for the Israelis.” So that’s the kind of Saudi line with Syria.

And I think when it comes to Sudan, because they realize the army is the better option, better than the Rapid Support Forces, even though they are Islamists there, they’re willing to deal with them as well. In Yemen, you have the Islah [prominent Islamist political party] and you have some Salafis that they’re dealing with.

Again, it’s because I think there’s no better alternative, at least a more effective alternative, they would rather not deal with Islamists, is my feeling, not least because they’ve had this experience of blowback with Islamists, where they’ve come back to criticize the Saudis and try to topple the Saudi regime.

So, as I think, Ambassador Ratney said, they don’t like Islamists, but they’re willing to deal with them if there’s no better alternative that’s my sense. And I don’t think that them cozying up to Qatar has anything to do with Islamism; it’s more a finger to the UAE. And they’re cozying up to Turkey and Erdogan is again, more to do with coordinating on Syria, I think, rather than any love for Erdogan and his Islamism.

You have to remember Erdogan tried to topple MBS with the Khashoggi murder, and he used Islamism and Jamal was an Islamist himself, to topple MBS from power. So, there are long memories here in this part of the world. And I don’t think MBS is just going to become a pro-Islamist guy around the region. And you know, this is the only way for him to survive, but his choice is not to be with Islamists unless there’s no alternative, as I said.

Amb. Michael Ratney:

If I could just jump in, it’s fascinating and also somewhat disturbing to watch how this has played out in the media, particularly in Arabic social media. We see it a bit in the United States, the manifestation of some of these narratives with accusations, you know as Bernie was saying, that the Saudis have sort of thrown their cards in the Islamic movements and the Turks. I don’t think that’s true, and then you see kind of equal accusations against the Emirates.

But the social media is vastly more vitriolic. And they tend to focus on, you know, on the kind of anti-UAE side, they focus on the UAE’s relationship with Israel: “these guys are kind of conspiring with the Zionists,” this in the Arab world becomes the ultimate slur.

And then the anti-Saudi side, they don’t quite have that, but they find horrible ways to disparage MBS personally and all of his relationships. So, this was bad in 2017 during the rupture with Qatar. But I don’t think it was quite this bad. I don’t think it had gotten quite this personal or this intense.

And as I said, it is bleeding into the Western media as well, where you have articles saying MBS has kind of given up on his approach of regional moderation, and now he’s thrown his cards in Turkey and Qatar, right? And so, I don’t think that’s helpful. I gather that the Saudis and the Emirates have their own perspective, but when this bleeds into the public narrative, it makes it much, much harder for them to ultimately find a way to live together again

Blaise Misztal:

Ambassador, let me stay with you. And since you raised the question of Israel, what does this do for the prospect of either country’s relations with Israel, particularly the Evergreen hope, I suppose, of normalization between the Saudis and Israel, but also as Israel is looking to maybe do more on the Houthi threat, maybe work with regional partners, like with the Emirates or the Saudis. How does this affect those relations and those prospects?

Amb. Michael Ratney:

So look I think from the Emirati perspective, they made a decision, they made really a kind of fundamental strategic decision that we’re going to have a relationship with Israel, and we’re not going to let the kind of ups and downs of either Israeli politics or regional politics get in our way.

And I think they see it as not only to their strategic advantage, but it’s also a card that they play with Western and American audiences. They’re the Arab country that has a productive relationship with Israel, unlike those guys over there, right? So, they have played that card to some good effect.

The Saudis have a very different perspective on this. I think they’re going in a position regarding normalization with Israel, I think, remains the basic formula that had been discussed for the past couple of years. They’re willing to establish a relationship, a normal relationship, with Israel. They want something for it, and they want it from us in terms of a treaty relationship that gives them kind of the ultimate insurance policy against the threats that they face in the region, particularly from the Iranians, but it’s not something they’re willing to do at any cost. They don’t want it badly enough.

And the longer the Gaza war kind of dragged on, and the more that narrative, and especially the horrific images in the media, were on display for their own citizens, the harder it became, and the harder it became for the Israeli government to meet basically their kind of minimum entry price for getting back in the negotiations, which is kind of a definitive end to the war in Gaza, and kind of an articulation of support by the Israeli government for Palestinian statehood.

Those two basic conditions haven’t been met, so they never even got back to more detailed discussions about what nuts and bolts of an agreement would look like. Look, I think ultimately, and MBS made this point when he was in the Oval Office with President Trump, it’s not something that he’s ruled out. But he’s made it clear that it’s something that’s gotten much, much harder for them, and isn’t as critically as important for them as other things that he’s trying to accomplish right now, and probably the main thing that he’s trying to accomplish right now is to keep these conflicts at bay. Then he can get back, even in a time when oil prices are not as high as they would like he could get back to a focus, this kind of monomaniacal focus on his own country’s development.

Blaise Misztal:

Thank you. Well, I’m eager to get to questions from the audience. So, if you are watching and you want to ask any of our panelists anything, please feel free to submit those questions using the Q&A feature in Zoom.

In the meantime, while you’re composing those, John, let me ask you both to weigh in on what Ambassador Ratney and Professor Haykel just said, but also to get your thoughts on this. We’ve just been having a webinar on the Middle East for the last 45 minutes, and by my count, the word Iran has been uttered only two or three times, which I think is a first.

We just had Prime Minister Netanyahu meeting with President Trump, talking about the resurgent threat of Iran rebuilding its ballistic missile program. How does this spat between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh affect the attention and ability to continue focusing on that Iranian threat and dealing with it, either by Israel or the United States or the region more broadly?

John Hannah:

I’m not sure it affects the Israeli and American calculations right now and what’s going on in Iran. I can only imagine that it makes the Iranians ecstatic to see the Saudis and Emiratis at loggerheads and knives drawn.

I do think it affects the Houthi battle to an extent. I see the Israeli recognition of Somaliland as obviously a play to settle their account with the Houthis. Somaliland is so much closer geographically to Yemen. If the Israelis are able to have an air base there, they can begin deepening the strategy that they were developing before the ceasefire to really go after the Houthis in a much more serious way than before the ceasefire.

The Somaliland play was really a play to go after the Houthis. And my guess is, without knowing for sure, it was done in some conjunction with the Emiratis. The Israelis had decided that it was the Emiratis and that Emirati-STC alliance that was going to be the ground force for the Israeli air assault on the Houthis, that they were going to combine and go after them.

Obviously to the extent that the Emirati position, at least momentarily, has collapsed, almost overnight, in a very humiliating way, maybe the Saudis will come to regret, as Bernie says, now they maybe own it, but just for the moment.

It’s a position that the Emiratis had invested tremendously in over the last several years, and it’s been eliminated almost overnight, which leaves the Houthis kind of also licking their chops and watching their two former adversaries really go after each other and debilitate each other, and it eliminates what I think was the big strategic play by Israel. They’ll still be able to do things from Somaliland, but I think that was the opening move in a much larger strategic play to go after the Houthis. And I think to some extent that’s been lost.

And I also think you know, it has implications to the extent al-Qaeda or ISIS on the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen is still a factor to be reckoned with that could come back. I think this kind of fighting between our two primary partners inside of Yemen could have implications for the fight against ISIS, and we could see some kind of resurgence of ISIS in Yemen and other extremists in the same way we’ve seen some of that happen in Syria.

So that’s all kind of second order to Iran, but it no doubt helps the Iranians. It’s a net positive for the Iranians to see this kind of clash going on between two of America’s, and potentially Israel’s, best partners in the region. They were all supposed to be part of a unified security architecture to confront the long-term Iranian challenge and threat.

Blaise Misztal:

We have a question from the audience almost directly to that point, asking, why are the STC and government forces more focused on fighting each other than fighting the Houthis? Why would Saudi Arabia and the UAE not press the STC and the Yemeni Government to focus on the Houthis? I don’t know if Professor Haykel has first thoughts on this, and then I’m happy to go to Ambassador Ratney and John.

Dr. Bernard Haykel:

Well, first, there’s a truth regarding the Houthis, between the Saudis and the Houthis and other Yemeni factions. So, if you decide to take on the Houthis, you know, that’s basically reopening up or rekindling the Yemeni Civil War full on.

And, you know, the experience with the Houthis is basically that the Houthis are very tough. They’re like the Taliban or like the Viet Cong; they’re not easy to defeat either on the ground or by air.

The US has tried defeating the Houthis twice, the Israelis have tried it, and the Saudis before them have tried it, and they all failed. 80% of Yemen’s population still lives under Houthi control in that red area that you have on the map. So, if you’re going to go after the Houthis, you know you really have to prepare long and hard, and the STC and the Saudi-backed forces are simply not up to the task. I guess that’s the main reason why they haven’t been asked to or made to go after the Houthis

Blaise Misztal:

Ambassador Ratney or John, any additional points on that?

Amb. Michael Ratney:

I mean, I’d only say that the question cuts to the heart of why this whole issue is so vexing for the Saudis and also for us, right? We regard the ultimate adversary down there as the Houthis. Why are they giving the Houthis the opportunity to strengthen when these kind of opposing factions are fighting with each other?

It really is vexing, and I think it does, to some degree, go back to what Bernie says. The Saudis and really the Emiratis, aside from prior to the reignition of the military conflict against the Houthis in late 2022 early 2023 as a reaction to the Houthis attacks on, particularly on Israel, the core goal has just been to de-escalate, to establish diplomatic dialogue, a political process with them, which kind of acknowledges that they’re not going to get rid of them anytime soon, but they just need to keep their most pernicious effects away from the Arabian Peninsula, away from Saudi Arabia in particular.

So, I think there was this sense that the Houthis aren’t going anywhere, and maybe the Emiratis at that point, or certainly the STC thought that maybe the time is right to take their crack at independence, because who knows when that opportunity is going to come again.

Blaise Misztal:

All right, well maybe for the last question, we can do a lightning round on what should the US be doing about this now? Is this something that Washington should just let play out? Is there something we can do to try to bring the Emirates and Saudi Arabia back onto better terms? What sort of sticks or carrots can we use to do that? John, let me start with you.

John Hannah:

I don’t have a prescription for you, but I think it’s just old-fashioned diplomacy, and probably at very high levels. Trump has prided himself on the eight or nine disputes and wars he has settled.

You would think, with two allies we’re the primary security partner for both, the partner of choice on a lot of economic things as well, and investments, that Trump would have substantial leverage to go in there and kind of behind the scenes, really crack heads and get these guys to say this is completely counterproductive to American interests in the region and to our joint interests.

It should all be about Iran, about economic development, about cooperation, collaboration, thinking about building a future new security architecture in the Middle East, keeping Iran down, and obviously the normalization agenda with Israel.

So, I think it’s diplomacy. I’m not sure there’s any real coercive things we could do, either militarily or economically, to force these guys, because we don’t want to get into a dispute with them. But I think as a good faith negotiator and mediator who has just a lot of standing and leverage with both of these guys, I still don’t think either one of them really wants to cross Trump.

I hope the US is being active behind the scenes. I don’t quite see it. I think they were caught off guard and obviously dealing with a lot of other things and having limited bandwidth. But I think this is one, given the importance of these two partners where, if you’ve got the horses in the stable, including if President Trump has some additional time, this is worth high-level diplomacy. I’m not aware he’s made any calls yet, but this is worth putting his shoulder into, I think.

Blaise Misztal:

Professor Haykel, thoughts?

Dr. Bernard Haykel:

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that the US has huge leverage over these countries. And you know, President Trump has to knock heads, and maybe, send a special envoy. I mean, Jared Kushner would be the obvious person to my mind, because he has dealings with all three countries here. I mean, not just Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but also Qatar, and to make them stop. Then also to concretely build on the interoperability and the coordination and this defense architecture that they need to work together on.

I would certainly also get involved in Sudan and try to stop that war. Basically, what the US should do is to try to manage and mitigate and lower the tensions across the entire region. Stop these wars, stop the conflict as much as possible, because that’s what serves America’s interests and it also serves the interests of these countries.

And to focus on the most important thing, which is the Iranian threat, and the Houthi threat here in Yemen, specifically, because of shipping and the bombing and the ballistic missiles and drones that they have that they can target both Saudi Arabia and all the countries of the GCC.

Blaise Misztal:

Thank you. Ambassador Ratney, close us out with some brilliant recommendations on how we move forward.

Amb. Michael Ratney:

My guess is that the Trump administration doesn’t get heavily involved. I could imagine some phone calls basically saying, “Hey, you guys really need to work this out.” I don’t think the US is going to pick a side. We have too many interests in both countries to get in the midst of that.

And I think if there’s a lesson from the 2017 rupture with Qatar, it’s that our diplomacy really didn’t have an impact, ultimately. We tried. We had some meetings. For us it’s obvious, right? We need these partners that are going to work together, can’t we just get these guys in a room together and work this out? It just didn’t work that way with Qatar.

I think eventually, as some people would say, they’re going to figure it out. And eventually they did figure it out. I think in that case, it was partly because it didn’t work. The Qataris just became more self-sufficient, rather than get weakened, and ultimately the Saudis and others just thought it was better just to turn the page.

I can imagine that there are people saying now, because the level of vitriol is so high that this is fundamentally different, that this will never be the same. And that might indeed be true, but it also might be true that in the fullness of time, after a few years, they figure out again how to work this thing out without us involved, without any outside parties involved, and they get back to a much healthier modus vivendi. I think that’s possible as well. In the meantime, I don’t know if our diplomacy is really going to have a great impact.

Blaise Misztal:

All right. Well, Ambassador Ratney, Professor Haykel, John, thank you very much for your analysis on unpacking this complicated situation for us this afternoon. To everyone who tuned in, thanks for joining us for this webinar, and I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Have a good day. Thank you.