The Saudi leader has pulled away from his former mentor as they compete to dominate the Persian Gulf, where U.S. power has waned
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gathered local journalists in Riyadh for a rare off-the-record briefing in December and delivered a stunning message. The country’s ally of decades, the United Arab Emirates, had “stabbed us in the back,” he said.“They will see what I can do,” he told the group, according to people at the meeting.
A rift has opened up between the 37-year-old Mohammed and his onetime mentor, U.A.E. President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that reflects a competition for geopolitical and economic power in the Middle East and global oil markets. The two royals, who spent almost a decade climbing to the top of the Arab world, are now feuding over who calls the shots in a Middle East where the U.S. plays a diminished role.
“These are two highly ambitious people who want to be key players in the region and the go-to players,” a senior Biden administration official said. “On some level they still collaborate. Now, neither seems comfortable with the other being on the same pedestal. On balance, it’s not helpful to us for them to be at each other’s throats.”
Once close, the two men—the Saudi is known as MBS and the 62-year-old U.A.E. president as MBZ—haven’t spoken in more than six months, people close to them said, and their private disputes have spilled into the open.
The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia have divergent interests in Yemen that have undermined efforts to end that country’s conflict, and Emirati frustrations over Saudi pressure to raise the global price of oil are creating new fissures in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The two countries are also increasingly economic competitors. As part of MBS’s plans to end Saudi Arabia’s economic reliance on oil, he is pushing companies to move their regional headquarters to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, from U.A.E.’s Dubai, a more cosmopolitan city favored by Westerners. He’s also launching plans to set up tech centers, draw more tourists and develop logistical hubs that would rival the U.A.E.’s position as the Middle East’s center of commerce. In March, he announced a second national airline that would compete with Dubai’s highly ranked Emirates.
In December, after intensifying divisions over Yemen policy and OPEC limits, MBS called the meeting with the journalists. The Saudi leader said he had sent the U.A.E. a list of demands, the people there said. If the smaller Persian Gulf nation didn’t fall in line, MBS warned, Saudi Arabia was prepared to take punitive steps, much like it did against Qatar in 2017, when Riyadh severed diplomatic relations for more than three years and engineered an economic boycott, with help from Abu Dhabi.
“It will be worse than what I did with Qatar,” he told the journalists, according to people there.
MBZ skipped an Arab summit MBS called for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Riyadh, and didn’t show for the Arab League’s vote in May to allow Syria back into the group. MBS himself was absent when MBZ met with Arab leaders at a hastily arranged regional summit in the U.A.E. in January.
“Tensions are rising between them, in part because MBS wants to step out from under MBZ’s shadow,” said Dina Esfandiary, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program. “Things are going to get worse, because both countries are getting more confident and assertive in their foreign policy.”
The Saudis and Emiratis have called themselves the closest of allies, but they have had a sometimes tense relationship since even before the U.A.E. gained independence from Britain in 1971.
The U.A.E.’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan, bristled at Saudi domination of the Arabian peninsula, and then-Saudi King Faisal refused to recognize his Persian Gulf neighbor for years, seeking leverage in various territorial disputes. In 2009, the U.A.E. scuttled plans for a common Persian Gulf central bank over its proposed location in Riyadh. To this day, there are territorial disputes over oil-rich land between the two countries.
Today, MBS feels that the Emirati president led him into disastrous conflicts that served the interests of the U.A.E. and not Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf officials said.
MBS “does not like him and he wants to show him up,” said Douglas London, a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer who now works as a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank. He said that as threats from Iran and terrorist groups recede, tensions between them are likely to escalate. Still, London said the Saudi leader had developed a more practical approach to leading his country that makes it unlikely that he would take rash actions against the U.A.E.
Divisions between the two leaders are threatening to undermine ongoing efforts to end the war in Yemen, which pits the Saudis, Emiratis and a host of Yemeni factions against Iran-backed Houthi rebels who took over large parts of the country in 2014, including the capital, San’a.
The U.A.E. continues to back a Yemeni separatist movement seeking to restore a Yemeni state in the south. This could undermine efforts to keep the country united. Saudi- and Emirati-backed fighters working together to defeat Houthi forces have at times turned their weapons on each other over the years.
Analysts at the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, an independent think tank in London, have warned that the rival Yemeni forces are preparing for new clashes that threaten ongoing peace talks. “The two Persian Gulf monarchies are projecting more power and behaving more aggressively toward each other in the region overall,” the analysts said in a series of Twitter posts. “Yemen is just the first and most active front line.”
If the Saudis withdrew from Yemen now, the Houthi-controlled north would align with Iran and the south would align with the U.A.E., leaving Riyadh with little to show for the war, said Yemeni officials, reflecting Saudi concerns.
MBS told Tahnoun that the U.A.E. shouldn’t disrupt cease-fire talks in Yemen that the Saudis are leading and promised concessions to the U.A.E., the people said. But later he told his advisers that they shouldn’t change any policies toward the U.A.E. “I don’t trust them anymore,” he told advisers, the people said.
The Best of Frenemies: Saudi Crown Prince Clashes With U.A.E. President
The Saudi leader has pulled away from his former mentor as they compete to dominate the Gulf, where U.S. power has waned.
www.wsj.com
