Greece (Brussels Morning) What once appeared to be an unbreakable partnership now shows clear signs of strain. The alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, forged at the outset of the Yemen war, has been tested by diverging strategic priorities, particularly over the role of Yemeni separatist forces.
While Riyadh has doubled down on its support for Yemen’s internationally recognized government, Abu Dhabi has stepped back from its earlier backing of southern autonomy movements, exposing fractures that had long been obscured by the shared objective of confronting the Houthis.
The shift raises broader questions about the Emirates’ reliability as a long-term partner and the extent to which states or political actors can depend on its commitments. By contrast, Saudi Arabia is increasingly positioning itself as the region’s dominant power, leveraging political, economic and diplomatic pressure to shape outcomes in its favor.
Central to this strategy is the pursuit of influence over another critical theater, where control of key maritime chokepoints, alongside leverage in Somalia and potentially Somaliland, would allow Riyadh to project power over vital shipping lanes and exert a decisive influence on regional stability.
The rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over Yemen did not emerge overnight but crystallized around a concrete rupture that laid bare their diverging ambitions.
Tensions came into the open when Saudi forces struck a shipment at a key Yemeni port that Riyadh believed was intended for UAE-aligned southern factions, a move Saudi officials framed as an unacceptable breach of coalition discipline.
The episode underscored how the two partners, once bound by a shared campaign against the Houthis, had come to support rival political endgames inside Yemen.
For Abu Dhabi, backing southern power brokers offered a means of securing long-term influence over ports and maritime routes; for Riyadh, such moves threatened the authority of Yemen’s internationally recognized government and Saudi Arabia’s own primacy in shaping the country’s future. The fallout from that incident marked a turning point, transforming a quiet divergence into a strategic estrangement that continues to reshape Gulf power dynamics.
Two decades of regional (in)stability
The war in Yemen, now in its second decade, began as an internal rupture of fragile state authority that swiftly drew in regional heavyweights and turned a struggling Arab republic into a geopolitical battleground.
Rooted in long-standing political grievances and power struggles, the conflict sharpened in 2014 when the Iran-aligned Houthi movement seized the capital, Sanaa, forcing Yemen’s internationally recognized government into exile and prompting a Saudi-led coalition to intervene in 2015 in an effort to restore its authority and contain perceived Iranian influence on the Arabian Peninsula.
Over the years, the struggle widened beyond a simple north–south divide, devolving into a multi-layered civil war in which the Houthis entrenched control over much of northern Yemen while a loose alliance of pro-government forces, bolstered by Saudi and Emirati backing, fought to dislodge them.
More recently, the war’s dynamics have fractured further as the United Arab Emirates-supported Southern Transitional Council, a separatist force now holding significant territory in the south, has broken ranks with Riyadh’s preferred government, exposing deep fissures within the anti-Houthi camp and underscoring how Yemen’s conflict has become both a proxy for broader Saudi-Iran rivalry and a crucible of competing Gulf interests.
The toll has been catastrophic: one of the world’s darkest humanitarian crises, with hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and social infrastructure in ruins, even as diplomatic efforts yield only sporadic, fragile agreements.
A cold coexistence
The UAE, by contrast, is unlikely to abandon its long-term maritime strategy with Yemen in the picture. Even if it has reduced its military footprint, Abu Dhabi will continue to cultivate influence through proxies, ports, and local partners in southern Yemen and along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden corridor. Control over logistics hubs and sea lanes remains central to its vision of regional power projection, even if that vision now advances more quietly and through deniable means.
What follows, therefore, is a cold coexistence. Yemen will remain divided in practice, if not formally, with Saudi-backed institutions in the north and center and UAE-aligned actors consolidating the south.
The risk is not an intra-Gulf clash but a prolonged stalemate that freezes Yemen’s fragmentation while external actors recalibrate. In that sense, the Saudi-Emirati drift does not end the Yemen war; it reshapes it into a lower-intensity contest of influence, one fought less by airstrikes and more through political leverage, economic inducements, and control of strategic geography.
Both states have too much invested in regional stability, economic transformation and external perceptions to allow their Yemen disagreement to harden into a public break. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will continue to present a façade of alignment in Gulf and Western forums, while quietly pursuing divergent endgames on the ground.
Saudi Arabia’s priority is increasingly de-escalation: securing its southern border, extricating itself from a costly war, and positioning itself as a diplomatic broker capable of containing the Houthis through negotiations backed by pressure.
That trajectory requires a unified Yemeni state under nominally friendly leadership and limits tolerance for separatist projects that could fragment authority.
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