The United Arab Emirates‘s aggressive stance against Iran was the culmination of a 15-year process that saw the transformation of the Gulf state from a minor Middle East player into a major military and geopolitical force.
In the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, the UAE unexpectedly found itself bearing the brunt of retaliatory assaults, being targeted by more Iranian drones and missiles than any other belligerent, including Israel.
The UAE quickly turned to being the most hostile Gulf country to Iran, calling for the government’s overthrow, reportedly begging the United States to invade Iran, and reviving irredentist demands.
The sudden aggressiveness from the tiny Gulf state came as a surprise to many analysts, leading many to believe that the war had triggered a sea change in Emirati foreign policy. In reality, the Gulf state’s stance was the natural conclusion of a carefully engineered stance dating back to 2011.
A break from the past
Beginning in 2011, the UAE began an overhaul of its foreign policy. Abu Dhabi began heavily investing in its hard and soft power capabilities abroad, fearing its vulnerable position in an increasingly uncertain new world order. The change would have major implications for the entire Middle East and North Africa.
By 2026, the UAE had broken with its traditional stance of deferring foreign policy matters to Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. It unilaterally and decisively intervened in the political and military affairs of Yemen, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. In Yemen and Sudan, it acted in direct opposition to Saudi Arabia, positioning the erstwhile allies as emerging rivals.
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The UAE, once a backwater with very little say in regional matters, much less global affairs, is now widely treated as an integral power player in the region and world.
Author Dina Esfandiary argued in her book New Order in the Gulf: The Rise of the UAE that three major events cascaded to trigger this change in Emirati policy: the Arab Spring, former President Barack Obama’s announcement of a “Pivot to Asia,” and the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
Emirati confidence in the U.S., its primary security guarantor, was shattered in 2011 when the Obama administration refused to back its despotic ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, against democratic protesters.
To the Emiratis, this was nothing short of “their worst nightmare,” Esfandiary argued, believing the abandonment of Mubarak showed that the U.S. would no longer support the autocratic status quo in the Middle East.
Obama’s announced “Pivot to Asia,” though many analysts believe the pivot didn’t actually happen, was another major psychological blow to the Emiratis, furthering their paranoia that the U.S. was preparing to abandon the region. The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran served as the final straw, with the UAE believing it amounted to the U.S. handing over the Middle East to Tehran.
Beginning in 2011 and intensifying with each subsequent moment, this new sense of insecurity pushed Emirati leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed to overhaul the UAE’s position in the world, in tandem with the country’s explosive economic growth.
The center of its ideological foreign policy interests was the suppression of political Islamism, viewed as particularly important over the negative Western perception of the UAE due to two Emiratis being among the 19 9/11 hijackers.
Given its small size and population, the UAE first relied on its economic dominance to push its influence abroad. Economic and financial aid was increasingly made conditional, usually attached to demands to crack down on the influence of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, most notably in the case of Egypt. Billions of dollars in financial aid to Egypt were conditional on ousting the Muslim Brotherhood from the government. The UAE was widely viewed as having sponsored the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, argued that the growing aggressiveness of the UAE is a natural outgrowth of its status as a small, desert, and maritime country.
“Historically, they’ve been merchants, and they established communities in the Horn of Africa and other places. They were maritime nations, and this is how they live. Otherwise, the desert has limited resources for them, so the UAE just revived the … tradition of their nation,” he said.
“And this meant that they had to have investments across the world, whether in Africa, Libya, Sudan, you name it. And when you have investments, you need a foreign policy to protect them,” Hussain added, drawing parallels with the rise of the U.S. Navy and Marines to protect its commercial interests.
While the UAE’s massive soft power led the way in its expanding influence, what truly changed its position was its growing military buildup.
Little Sparta
The Arab world is infamous for its poor military capabilities. However, in Armies of Sand, author Kenneth Pollack identified the UAE as one of the only exceptions to this rule of Arab military incompetence. The tiny Arab country has surprised observers by consistently overperforming in military conflicts, earning it the nickname “Little Sparta.” This perception has pushed the UAE to increasingly exert its hard power abroad.
This capability comes from a combination of close cooperation and training with the U.S. and NATO, investment in the latest military technology, and real combat experience.
The UAE reflects Meiji-era Japan in its willingness to eschew its own military traditions and rely on Western and foreign advisers. Its small population bars it from enlisting a large army, pushing it to instead focus on quality by investing heavily in its special forces capabilities. These special forces closely train and drill with NATO special forces, making it one of the most capable pound-for-pound military forces among Arab countries.
Its diversification of security partners also helped it build up its military. When the U.S. or a Western power wouldn’t trade certain technologies due to security concerns, it quickly turned to Russia, China, or other non-Western powers that had no qualms in selling new technologies to them.
The effectiveness of this new instrument of influence likewise pushed the Emirati government to be more willing to use it, a dynamic further boosted by the country’s military successes.
While the 2015 intervention in Yemen against the Houthis was a fiasco for most participants, the UAE was the most effective of the Arab coalition. Its ability to identify and work closely with effective partners on the ground helped it to rout the Houthis and take territory in its zone of responsibility.
Its other big deployment was in Libya, where it was similarly effective. Emirati troops helped Gen. Khalifa Haftar gain control of half the country and were only prevented from consolidating control over the whole country when Turkey intervened.
The growing assertiveness of the UAE reached new and more controversial heights in 2023 when civil war broke out in Sudan. Eager for a stake in the gold-rich country and seemingly locked out by the Sudanese Armed Forces, the UAE allegedly began throwing its weight behind the rival Rapid Support Forces. It increased support in 2025, sending advisers, ammunition, and equipment that helped the paramilitary group turn the tide.
The end of 2025 saw one of the UAE’s most aggressive foreign policy moves, when it pushed its allied forces in Yemen, the Southern Transitional Council, to launch an offensive against the internationally recognized Saudi-backed government. Riyadh responded with airstrikes against the group, delivered an ultimatum for Emirati troops to leave Yemen completely, and backed an offensive to take out the STC. The UAE abided by the ultimatum and lost its presence in Yemen, the first major setback in its aggressive new foreign policy.
A month later, it faced its greatest threat yet when Iran began directly bombarding it in response to Operation Epic Fury.
Future with Iran
The beginning of the war with Iran came more than a decade into the UAE’s transition to a hawkish foreign policy stance, fully willing to use any means to advance its interests abroad. Abu Dhabi quickly became the standard-bearer of the Gulf hawks, arguing for the complete destruction of Iran’s ability to wage war and exert influence.
Even though the UAE had long viewed Iran as its primary security threat, the two still retained some connections. Iran’s highly disproportionate targeting of it took Abu Dhabi by surprise, especially after its public signals before the war that it wouldn’t allow the U.S. to use its airspace.
“It really made the Emiratis think that Iran had it out for them, and they were not aware that their neighbor hated them so much,” Hussain said. “And I think this was instrumental in the fundamental change in the position on Iran.”
As of this writing, the two-week ceasefire is still holding, and the UAE hasn’t yet joined the U.S. and Israel in attacking Iran. That could change if the war resumes — Hussain noted that arms shipments to the UAE since the war began largely consisted of offensive weapons, showing a readiness for the UAE to take the fight to Iran.
If the ceasefire holds and a peace deal is reached that keeps the regime in power in Tehran, the UAE will likely reach new heights in its foreign assertiveness.
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“If the Iranian regime survives, then expect the UAE to be leading the regional isolation of the Iranian regime,” Hussain said.
“It depends what happens next, but if the regime survives, I can tell you with certainty that the Gulf states will be really isolating the regime in an aggressive way,” he added, positioning the UAE at the center of this coalition.