Arshad Mahmood Awan
There is a particular kind of power that does not announce itself. It does not march through capital cities or deliver speeches from palace balconies. It works through port contracts, paramilitary trainers, cargo flights landing in desert airstrips, and sovereign wealth funds writing cheques that desperate governments cannot refuse. This is the power the United Arab Emirates has spent two decades quietly assembling, and its decision to withdraw from OPEC and OPEC+ this week has thrown that extraordinary foreign policy machinery into sharp relief.
The UAE’s exit from the oil producers’ grouping is not merely a technical economic decision. It is the most visible symbol yet of a country that has decided it no longer needs the traditional frameworks that once governed Gulf politics. Abu Dhabi is building something different: a sphere of influence that stretches from the Mediterranean coastline of Egypt to the horn of Africa, bound together not by ideology or religion, but by a single, driving obsession: the destruction of political Islam wherever it takes root.
That obsession shapes everything. Senior Emirati officials frame their regional strategy in the language of stability, describing their interventions as efforts to strengthen nation-states against the threat of extremism. The argument has a surface logic to it. However, United Nations experts and Western governments have repeatedly pushed back, arguing that Emirati interventions have just as often poured fuel onto fires already burning. Critics go further, pointing out that the states Abu Dhabi strengthens tend to be authoritarian ones, and that the line between countering extremism and crushing democratic opposition is one the UAE crosses with notable frequency. Abu Dhabi rejects these characterisations entirely.
The cornerstone of this anti-Islamist project is the UAE’s deep hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated movements. That hostility has defined Emirati foreign policy in country after country, driving alliances and interventions that would otherwise seem disconnected. It explains the tensions with Qatar, whose regional posture has been far more accommodating of Brotherhood-linked movements. It explains the friction with Turkey, whose ruling party Abu Dhabi regards as ideologically aligned with the Brothers. And it increasingly explains the quiet but significant disagreements with Saudi Arabia, once the undisputed anchor of Gulf strategic consensus, which has diverged from Emirati positions in Yemen and elsewhere.
Into this strategic picture came the Abraham Accords of 2020, which normalised relations between the UAE and Israel. What might have appeared to outside observers as a diplomatic surprise was, in Emirati strategic logic, almost inevitable. Israel offered two things Abu Dhabi valued enormously: military and intelligence cooperation of the highest order, and a direct, privileged channel of influence into Washington. After the UAE came under fire during the Iran conflict, those ties deepened still further, pulling Abu Dhabi closer to its Israeli and American partners while creating new distances from its Gulf neighbours.
Nowhere is Emirati strategy more visible, or more contested, than in Yemen. The UAE formally withdrew its troops in 2019, but withdrawal from a battlefield is not the same as withdrawal from a war. Abu Dhabi maintained its influence through the Southern Transitional Council, a separatist movement it had trained, funded, and equipped, which it views as both a buffer against Islah, a Yemen political faction it considers a Brotherhood offshoot, and a guarantor of maritime access in strategically vital southern waters. That continued investment in the STC brought the UAE into rare direct military confrontation with Saudi forces in the south in late 2024 and early 2025, a rupture that underscored how far apart the two Gulf partners have drifted.
Egypt tells a different but equally revealing story. When General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, Abu Dhabi became Cairo’s most important financial patron almost overnight. A secular Egypt, in Emirati thinking, is not merely a regional partner but a civilisational firewall against an Islamist resurgence across the Arab world. That commitment has been backed with serious money. In 2024, Emirati sovereign wealth fund ADQ signed a $35 billion agreement to develop a prime stretch of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, delivering the hard currency injection Cairo desperately needed while cementing Abu Dhabi’s position as the indispensable guarantor of Egyptian stability.
In Sudan, the picture darkens considerably. United Nations sanctions monitors have described credible allegations that the UAE provided military support to the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, in the brutal civil war against the Sudanese army. The UAE’s distrust of the army’s leadership reportedly stems from the continued presence of Islamists within its ranks, a legacy of Omar al-Bashir’s long rule. Hemedti, who had worked alongside Emirati forces in Yemen, was viewed as a more reliable counterweight. The RSF has been accused by the United States and human rights organisations of committing crimes against humanity and ethnically motivated mass killings in Darfur. The UAE has firmly denied arming the RSF, insisting its role is purely humanitarian.
Adjacent to Sudan, the UAE has also cultivated Chad, signing a military cooperation agreement with President Mahamat Idriss Deby in 2023 and supplying armoured vehicles to a country it regards as a buffer against Islamist insurgencies spreading from the Sahel. The remote Amdjarass airport, near the Sudanese border, has attracted particular scrutiny after Reuters reported a surge in cargo flights. Abu Dhabi says it operates a field hospital there. UN monitors and Western officials allege it functions as a logistics hub for weapons heading to the RSF. The UAE denies this entirely.
In Libya, the UAE was the primary international backer of Khalifa Haftar’s 2019 offensive against the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, which included Brotherhood-affiliated factions. In Somalia, DP World’s $442 million investment in the Port of Berbera in Somaliland represents a strategic beachhead on the Gulf of Aden, while Abu Dhabi trains Somaliland’s security forces and quietly facilitated Israel’s decision last December to become the first nation to formally recognise Somaliland’s independence.
Taken together, this is not foreign policy in the conventional sense. It is the architecture of a new kind of regional empire, built not on military occupation but on financial leverage, proxy relationships, strategic infrastructure, and the patient cultivation of client states. The UAE leaving OPEC is, in this context, less a departure than a declaration: Abu Dhabi no longer sees itself as merely a member of regional institutions. It sees itself as a power that shapes them, or discards them, on its own terms.
