The Best of Frenemies: Saudi Crown Prince Clashes With U.A.E. President

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. 

U.S. officials said they worry that the Gulf rivalry could make it harder to create a unified security alliance to counter Iran, end the eight-year-old war in Yemen and expand Israel’s diplomatic ties with Muslim nations.

“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 the realm of soft power, the Saudi purchase in 2021 of Newcastle, England’s soccer club and investment in global superstar players took place just as Manchester City—owned by a prominent member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family—won the English and European soccer titles.

The Emirati president, MBZ, has chafed at being eclipsed by a Saudi royal that U.A.E. officials believe has made some serious missteps, according to Gulf officials.

Deal with Iran

In separate statements responding to The Wall Street Journal, a U.A.E. official speaking for the government said claims of strained relations were “categorically false and lack foundation,” and a Saudi official called the idea “simply not accurate.”

“The U.A.E. is a close regional partner of Saudi Arabia, and our policies converge on a wide range of issues of mutual interest,” the Saudi official said. The two countries work together with other Gulf neighbors on political, security and economic coordination, the official said.

The U.A.E. official said their “strategic partnership is based on the same objectives and vision for regional prosperity, security, and stability.” 

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 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.

Since the December meeting, MBS has undertaken a series of diplomatic moves and ended his political isolation triggered by a Saudi hit team’s 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

He turned to China for help restoring Saudi Arabia’s relations with Iran and then orchestrated Syria’s return to the Arab League, a process that the U.A.E. had initiated several years earlier. The country had been expelled in 2011 after President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on Syrian civilians demonstrating for change.

MBS is in talks with the U.S. about formally recognizing Israel, which the U.A.E. did in 2020. MBS is leading diplomatic efforts to quash violence in Sudan, where the U.A.E. backs an opposing side. 

In an effort to smooth over tensions, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. have traded communiqués outlining their complaints and demands for change, according to officials from both nations.

In a pointed response to Saudi complaints, MBZ privately warned the Saudi ruler late last year that his actions were undermining ties between their two nations. He accused the Saudi crown prince of getting too close to Russia with its oil policies and pursuing risky moves, such as the diplomatic deal with Iran, without conferring with the U.A.E., Gulf officials said. 

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.”

Forged alliance

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 Gulf central bank over its proposed location in Riyadh. To this day, there are territorial disputes over oil-rich land between the two countries. 

The two countries became closer with the rise of MBZ and MBS. The Emirati royal became de facto ruler of his country at the age of 54 in 2014 when his half-brother, President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, had a debilitating stroke. When MBS began accruing power after his father King Salman’s accession in 2015, MBZ began grooming the young Saudi prince, then just 29 years old. 

The two men hardly knew each other before an overnight camping trip in the vast Saudi desert, the Journal has reported. Accompanied by trained falcons and a small entourage, the outing—roughly equivalent in Gulf tradition to a round of presidential golf—was a turning point in their friendship, according to people familiar with the excursion.

MBZ and other senior Emirati officials played a key role in lobbying the Trump administration in favor of MBS, who was then still deputy crown prince. MBZ helped orchestrate then-President Donald Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia in 2017, which bolstered MBS. The Saudi prince launched a palace coup the next month to become heir apparent and then began eliminating critics and potential rivals.

In formulating a plan to transform and open up his conservative kingdom, MBS looked to MBZ for guidance and tapped some of the same banks and consultants that the Emiratis used for a similar plan a decade earlier.

MBS and MBZ forged a foreign-policy alliance that intervened in Yemen, helped Abdel Fattah Al Sisi take power in a coup in Egypt, armed Libyan fighters in that divided country’s east and boycotted Qatar over ties to Iran and Islamists.

Both men have since tried to extricate their countries from those interventions. 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, 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.

OPEC dispute

The rift bubbled to the surface in October last year when OPEC, the 13-nation oil-production group that has allied with Russia, decided to slash output in a move that blindsided the Biden administration. The U.A.E. went along with the cut, but in private told U.S. officials and the media that Saudi Arabia had forced it to join the decision. 

The dynamic reflected a longer-running feud between the Saudis and Emiratis over policy in OPEC, a body that Riyadh has long dominated as the world’s top crude exporter. The Emiratis have raised their oil-production capacity to more than four million barrels a day and have plans to go above five million, but are allowed under OPEC policy to pump no more than about three million, costing it hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenues.

The Emirati increase in oil-production capacity also gives it the potential ability to move output up and down, and with it global oil prices. Until recently, only Saudi Arabia wielded that sort of market power. 

Emirati frustrations reached the point where they told U.S. officials they were ready to pull out of OPEC, according to Gulf and U.S. officials. U.S. officials said they took it as a sign of Emirati anger, not a real threat. At OPEC’s last meeting, in June, the Emiratis were allowed a modest increase in their production baseline, and their energy minister emerged holding hands with his Saudi counterpart. 

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. 

In December, the U.A.E. signed a security deal with the Saudi-backed Yemeni presidential leadership council that gives Abu Dhabi the right to intervene in Yemen and the waters off its coast. Saudi officials viewed it as a challenge to their Yemen strategy.

Saudi Arabia has plans to build a pipeline from the kingdom to the Arabian Sea via the Yemeni province of Hadramout, with a seaport in its regional capital, Mukalla. Emirati-backed forces in Hadramout threaten those plans.

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 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. 

Biden goal

The Saudi-Emirati rivalry has vexed the Biden administration, which wants friendly Gulf capitals like Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to help form a united front against Iran. Ending the war in Yemen, which triggered a humanitarian disaster, is also a key foreign policy goal of the administration, which wants stability in the region and in oil markets.

Neither MBS nor MBZ is perfectly aligned with Washington on important matters such as Ukraine and China. U.S. officials are increasingly worried about the outreach to Beijing and Moscow by MBZ, who like MBS has built stronger ties with them.

Biden came into office pledging to treat the kingdom as a pariah state over the Khashoggi killing, which MBS has said he didn’t order. Instead, Biden visited Saudi Arabia in July 2022, helping end his isolation. Now, U.S. companies that had been hesitant to engage with the kingdom are taking a second look. That interest will likely accelerate as a year-end deadline approaches for companies with contracts from the Saudi government to establish a base in Riyadh instead of flying in from Dubai. 

The Biden administration brokered a May 7 meeting between MBS and the Emirati president’s younger brother, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, once seen as a confidant of the Saudi crown prince, said people familiar with the matter. Tahnoun had been frozen out, making at least six trips to the kingdom without securing a meeting with MBS until he got help from the U.S., the people said. 

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.

Write to Summer Said at [email protected], Dion Nissenbaum at [email protected] and Stephen Kalin at [email protected]