SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have a long history as close allies in the Middle East. Cracks in that relationship started to show during the civil war in Sudan, when the two countries backed opposing factions. This December, the confrontation turned into a direct military offense by the Saudi army and its allies against the Emiratis and their allies in Yemen. In response to the sweeping military action by the Saudis, the UAE announced a complete withdrawal of its forces from Yemen. To better understand these developments, we have Marc Lynch, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. Welcome.
MARC LYNCH: Hi. Thanks for having me.
MCCAMMON: The Saudis have called Yemen a red line for Saudi national security. They launched a major offensive back in 2015 to restore their allies' control in Yemen, an offensive that the UAE was part of. Just to start, could you help us understand what's at stake for the Saudis in Yemen?
LYNCH: Well, if you just look geographically, you can see that, you know, Yemen is deeply and intimately related to Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula. There's a long land border. There's tribal connections across that border. And there's just a very long history of Saudi Arabia seeking to have a commanding position inside of Yemen, and the UAE was part of that coalition. But they had different approaches to it. The Saudis had a long and intimate history with Yemen, and that included a lot of the inland areas and a lot of the vast geographic scope of the country, whereas the Emiratis were more interested in the ports down in Aden and along kind of the maritime route into the Red Sea, and so they ended up kind of dividing power within the alliance and more or less going their own ways within a generally aligned anti-Houthi coalition.
MCCAMMON: I want to talk more about the Red Sea. The UAE, as you noted, has been trying to increase its influence there and wound up backing a separatist faction in Yemen and holding control of some Yemeni islands, including Socotra Island, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. What was the larger goal? What was the objective of the UAE in Yemen and the Red Sea?
LYNCH: So the UAE has been very patiently building what I would call a maritime empire based on control of ports across the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and Aden is a critical part of that, as is the island of Socotra. But it also goes down into Somaliland and Djibouti and all along the Horn of Africa. This is really intended to give them a dominant position in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea area.
MCCAMMON: Now, they must have known that they would be going against Saudi interests in the region. What was the calculation there?
LYNCH: So the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been closely aligned for many years, but they've started drifting apart, most dramatically with the UAE's decision to join the Abraham Accords and align itself very closely with Israel. Saudi Arabia didn't necessarily have a problem with that. They've also been discussing having a normalization agreement with Israel with both the Biden administration and the Trump administration. But they were not as big of a fan of the UAE's very close alignment with Israel and its attempting to use that as a way of asserting its own bid for leadership in the Arab world.
What made the Abraham Accords different from all previous approaches to peacemaking in the Middle East was that it essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue completely. And in the past, the basic Arab position is one that was associated with the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, which was that a normalization with Israel would be dependent upon a Palestinian state. The Emiratis basically said, no, we're not going to hold ourselves hostage to the Palestinians anymore, and we're just going to pursue our self interests by making this agreement with Israel. And so that was a real challenge to what had been a consensus position backed by the Saudis for many years.
MCCAMMON: Lots of complex dynamics in play, as always. What are you watching for? Where do you see this going in the months and years ahead?
LYNCH: Well, in the short term, I think what everyone is, you know, kind of looking at is to see whether the rhetoric gets toned down and the Gulf Cooperation Council just kind of puts all these issues aside and goes back to the way things were. This has been a long pattern in Gulf relations, where you'll have these intense conflicts and then, when the time is right, everybody kisses and makes up and they kind of go back to business as usual. You saw that with the four-year blockade of Qatar. It ended in 2021, and now, you know, it's as if it didn't happen.
The other thing that I think people really have to be paying attention to is the extent to which this new Saudi-led coalition represents something which is meant to challenge Israel. Does Israel really seek to establish a region-wide hegemony by force, and what would that mean for us? So it's possible that this Saudi coalition that I described could be intended to, in a sense, balance against this expanding Israeli power of which the UAE is seen as a leading edge.
MCCAMMON: That's Professor Marc Lynch of George Washington University. Thank you for your time.
LYNCH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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