By tradition, the communiqué at the end of every Gulf Cooperation Council summit meeting is a bromide about friendship among the member states — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. The joint declaration is usually long on promise but short on any real purpose beyond concealing discord.
Even by that low standard, the document released at the end of the latest gathering of Gulf leaders in Riyadh on Dec. 14 was the wispiest of fig leaves. The usual invocation of unity did little to hide the growing rivalry between the group’s two most important members, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
For me, the widening divergence of economic, security and foreign-policy interests between the kingdom and the confederation of emirates was one of the most important stories of 2021. How the contest plays out will have a large bearing not only on the affairs of the Arabian Peninsula but on the geopolitics of the wider Middle East. In particular, it poses a challenge for the U.S., which has long relied on the friendship between the two states as a bulwark against Iran.More from
Some of the differences between Saudi Arabia and the UAE stem from economic choices made by their leaders, others from contrasting security calculations and still others from ideological considerations. These haven’t yet added up to open antagonism between them, certainly nothing in the nature of the naked hostility they jointly directed at Qatar during a three-year economic embargo that ended at the start of 2021.
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