A week before Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s plane landed in the United Arab Emirates, a historic visit occurred in Iran: Tahnoun bin Zayed, the UAE’s national security adviser, came to Tehran following a five-year rift between the two countries. “We’re on the brink of turning over a new leaf in our relations with the UAE,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said about a week before the Emirati official’s visit.
But this wasn’t really a new leaf; it was one more page in a notebook that began filling up two years ago, when the UAE and Iran signed a security cooperation agreement to ensure the safety of shipping in the Persian Gulf. That agreement also included stopping attacks on Emirati ships and other targets by Yemen’s Houthis and making it significantly easier for Iranians to get visas for the UAE, which is home to some 600,000 Iranians, according to unofficial estimates.
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In November, the UAE, Iran and Turkey signed a trade agreement allowing goods from Abu Dhabi to be sent overland to Turkey via Iran. This will shorten shipment times to just a week, compared to the 20 days needed to go by sea through the Suez Canal.
According to official Iranian statistics, the UAE is Iran’s second largest trading partner after China, with about $10 billion in annual trade. It’s hard to trust these statistics, because in a list of its leading trade partners that Iran published just two weeks ago, the UAE was only fourth, following China, Iraq and Turkey. Yet even the lower ranking attests to extensive bilateral trade ties.
On top of that, between 3,000 and 5,000 Iranian companies operate in the UAE. Moreover, 15 percent of Iran’s non-oil exports and 10 percent of its imports pass through the UAE. And both countries are talking about trying to increase bilateral trade to between $15 billion and $20 billion a year.
The strategic and economic interests that link Abu Dhabi and Tehran show that the so-called “Arab coalition against Iran” launched by Saudi Arabia in 2016 no longer exists. Saudi Arabia itself even held three rounds of direct talks with Iran this year with the goal of resuming diplomatic relations.
Bennett said the goals of his visit to Abu Dhabi were to bolster economic ties and thereby give additional content to the Abraham Accords, and also to discuss Iran. But he’s unlikely to find a partner for Israel’s war cries against Iran in UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, who is slated to visit Tehran himself later this year.
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The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, opposes military action against its neighbor, because that could set the entire Gulf aflame, thereby undermining its economic ventures. Abu Dhabi would also have trouble supporting new sanctions on Iran, because that would directly harm the UAE at the very moment when it’s trying to forge agreements with Tehran to ensure it gets preferential status once sanctions are lifted.
According to Arab sources, Prince Mohammed told Bennett that the UAE’s relations with Iran aren’t coming at the expense of its relations with Israel, which Abu Dhabi seeks to expand. Rather, these are separate and completely unrelated diplomatic channels.
Similarly, while Tehran denounced the UAE’s peace and normalization agreement with Israel, it never demanded that Abu Dhabi cancel the agreement or sever relations as the price of economic cooperation with Iran. It also never demanded that Ankara sever relations with Jerusalem as the price of Turkish-Iranian economic cooperation.
Thus, the most the UAE can do is urge Iran to return to the nuclear deal. But that’s cold comfort for Israel, which views that agreement as a threat to it.
One person who is very cognizant of the UAE’s ability to influence Iran is U.S. President Joe Biden. He has asked both Prince Mohammed and Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to persuade Iran to move forward on negotiating a return to the deal – not through threats, but by presenting economic scenarios that would help Iran extricate itself from its economic crisis.
At the same time, a high-level American delegation is slated to visit Abu Dhabi this week to warn against continued evasion of the sanctions on Iran by Emirati banks. This would seem to send the message that Washington intends to impose new sanctions on Iran if the nuclear talks don’t make suitable progress. Yet despite this implied threat, America’s Plan B should the talks fail remains vague.
Had Washington wanted to send an aggressive message to Iran, it would have released the F-35 fighter jets that the previous U.S. administration let Abu Dhabi buy as a reward for making peace with Israel. The UAE made it clear that its patience with Washington’s delay in releasing the planes is waning when, in a well-publicized move, it signed a deal to buy 80 Rafael fighters from France for $19 billion. This deal had been in the pipeline for two decades, and its sudden finalization was no accident.
Admittedly, Tehran denounced the deal. But that hasn’t stopped it from continuing to develop its ties with the UAE.
The Iranian issue shows that Israel has no ability to influence either Washington or Abu Dhabi. The latter is following its own agenda, which also includes renewing relations with Turkey as part of the strategic envelope it is building in anticipation of America’s withdrawal from the Middle East.
Israel is just one element of this agenda. And it’s one whose public statements are currently threatening stability and calm in the Persian Gulf while also contradicting the vision laid out by the Gulf States.
Prince Mohammed undoubtedly explained this web of interests to Bennett. And just like Bennett presumably sought to persuade his host to join the military threat against Iran, Prince Mohammed presumably sought to calm the flood of aggressive verbiage coming from Jerusalem.
