by Dr Asad Ullah
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), under the direction of Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has evolved from a wealthy but peripheral Gulf monarchy into something far more ambitious: a network state that operates through proxies, weaponises commercial relationships, and treats sovereignty as a tradable commodity. December’s developments in Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia reveal not isolated incidents but a coherent regional strategy, one that bypasses international norms, exploits institutional weakness, and privileges control over legitimacy.
This is not traditional imperialism. It is something more insidious: a franchised model of intervention that outsources violence, privatises geopolitical influence, and operates beneath the threshold of direct accountability. And it is succeeding precisely because it understands the contemporary global order’s greatest vulnerability: its inability to respond to threats that don’t look like 20th century aggression.
The Pakistan-Libya-Sudan Axis: Outsourcing genocide
Consider the chain of transactions reportedly initiated by Abu Dhabi this month. Following a recent meeting between Mohammed bin Zayed and Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, reports have emerged that Abu Dhabi instructed Islamabad to supply weaponry to Khalifa Haftar’s forces in eastern Libya. These arms, including JF-17 fighter aircraft and Al-Khalid main battle tanks, valued at $4.5 billion, are not destined to remain in Libya. Instead, they are to be funneled onward to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, whose Rapid Support Forces are currently waging what international observers have characterised as genocidal violence in Sudan.
The logic is coldly transactional. Pakistan, desperate for Gulf financial support and facing its own economic fragility, becomes the arsenal. Libya’s fragmented sovereignty provides the laundromat. Sudan becomes the battlefield. And the UAE achieves what it has long sought: the elimination of any Sudanese government that might emerge from popular will or electoral processes.
Why? Because Mohammed bin Zayed does not trust democracy, not in Sudan, not anywhere in the region. The 2019 Sudanese revolution, which toppled Omar al-Bashir through mass protests, represented precisely the kind of popular mobilisation that threatens autocratic Gulf monarchies. The subsequent emergence of a civilian-military transitional government was, for Abu Dhabi, an intolerable risk. Better a client warlord, however brutal, than a government that might one day answer to its own people.
This is not speculation. The UAE has form. It backed the 2013 coup in Egypt that overthrew Mohamed Morsi. It funded Haftar’s assault on Tripoli in 2019. It has systematically opposed every transition toward accountable governance across the Arab world since 2011. The weaponisation of Pakistan’s defence industry to fuel mass atrocities in Sudan is simply the latest iteration of a tested playbook.
Yemen: The proxy war within the proxy war
Simultaneously, the UAE is escalating its interventions in Yemen, a country already devastated by nearly a decade of war. But Abu Dhabi’s current manoeuvres are not primarily directed against the Houthi movement, which continues to control northern Yemen and has recently demonstrated its capacity to disrupt Red Sea shipping. Instead, the Emirates is backing southern separatists, particularly in resource-rich Hadramawt, in a direct challenge to Saudi Arabia’s interests and the internationally recognised Yemeni government.
This is remarkable for what it reveals about the fracturing of the Saudi-Emirati alliance that launched the Yemen intervention in 2015. What began as a joint campaign to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and roll back Houthi advances has devolved into competing imperial projects. The UAE wants a pliant, fragmented Yemen that secures its access to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the broader Indian Ocean corridor. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has grown war-weary and increasingly concerned about Emirati encroachment on what Riyadh considers its natural sphere of influence.
Bin Salman finds himself in an impossible position. He cannot decisively confront the Houthis, who have proven resilient and militarily adaptive. He cannot trust the Islah party, Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, which represents a political constituency his kingdom has spent billions trying to suppress regionally. He cannot fully back the internationally recognised government, which is weak, divided, and increasingly irrelevant. And he cannot openly challenge Emirati separatism without acknowledging the fundamental failure of the Saudi-led intervention.
The result is paralysis, which the UAE exploits with surgical precision. Abu Dhabi is not seeking to win the Yemen war; it is seeking to ensure that Yemen never again exists as a unified state capable of exercising independent agency. A southern Yemeni micro-state, dependent on Emirati patronage, would serve Abu Dhabi’s interests far better than any outcome that Riyadh might prefer.
And there is another player in this equation: Israel. According to multiple reports, the UAE’s vision for southern Yemen includes provisions for Israeli strategic access, particularly regarding the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb. This is where the Abraham Accords reveal their true purpose, not as peace agreements, but as architecture for joint Israeli-Emirati dominance over maritime chokepoints that could be used to strangle economies and enforce geopolitical compliance.
Somalia, Somaliland, and the normalisation of fragmentation
Perhaps nowhere is the UAE’s strategy clearer than in the Horn of Africa. Israel’s recent recognition of Somaliland, a self-declared independent region in northern Somalia, represents a watershed moment, but not for the reasons commonly discussed. This is not about self-determination or rewarding stable governance. It is about establishing a forward operating base.
The UAE has reportedly brokered arrangements whereby Somaliland provides Ethiopia with maritime access, solving Addis Ababa’s landlocked predicament, while simultaneously offering Israel naval and air facilities near Bab al-Mandeb. These bases would serve multiple purposes: projection of Israeli power into the Red Sea theatre, capacity to strike Houthi positions from the south, potential staging grounds for operations against Iran, and critically, control over shipping lanes through which pressure might otherwise be applied regarding Israeli conduct in Palestine.
There is a darker dimension as well. Discussions have reportedly included the possibility of relocating Palestinian populations to the Horn of Africa, a twenty-first-century iteration of ethnic displacement dressed in the language of development and humanitarian assistance. If realized, this would represent the ultimate convergence of Israeli territorial ambitions and Emirati regional engineering.
The normalisation of Somaliland’s separation, facilitated by Israeli recognition and Emirati backing, sets a precedent that should alarm anyone concerned with the stability of existing state structures in Africa and the Middle East. If territorial integrity can be casually discarded when convenient for external powers, then the entire post-colonial international order, flawed as it is, loses what little coherence it retains.
The Emirati model: Autocracy as export
What unifies these seemingly disparate interventions is a coherent ideology: Mohammed bin Zayed’s conviction that stability requires the systematic suppression of popular politics and the cultivation of dependent autocrats. This is not mere realpolitik or pragmatic alliance-building. It is a conscious effort to remake regional order according to principles that privilege control, predictability, and commercial access over legitimacy, representation, or sovereignty.
The Emirati model operates through distinct mechanisms. First, it weaponises economic dependency, using sovereign wealth and commercial investment to purchase influence and compliance. Second, it employs proxies: militias, separatist groups, favored generals, to achieve plausible deniability while maintaining strategic direction. Third, it leverages partnerships with established powers, particularly Israel and the United States, to shield its activities from meaningful international response.
This is not traditional imperialism, which required direct territorial control and administrative burden. This is franchise imperialism: outsourced, privatised, and adapted to an era of formal sovereignty and international institutions. The UAE does not need to occupy Khartoum, Aden, or Berbera. It need only ensure that whoever controls those places understands their patron and acts accordingly.
The Pakistani dimension: A dangerous bargain
Pakistan’s reported involvement in this network is particularly troubling and revealing. General Asim Munir’s willingness to transform Pakistan’s defense industrial base into a supplier for UAE-directed operations suggests how deeply Islamabad has mortgaged its foreign policy autonomy for Gulf financial support. Pakistan’s economic crisis, characterized by currency instability, mounting debt, and energy deficits, has made it vulnerable to precisely this kind of instrumentalisation.
But the bargain carries profound risks. By facilitating arms flows that enable mass atrocities in Sudan, Pakistan implicates itself in potential war crimes. By aligning its defence exports with Emirati regional strategy, it undermines its own stated commitments to Palestinian rights and self-determination, given the UAE-Israel nexus. And by demonstrating such transactional flexibility, it signals to the world that Pakistan’s military establishment is available to the highest bidder, regardless of normative considerations.
The question of where Pakistan will stand if Saudi-Emirati tensions escalate into open confrontation in Yemen is no longer hypothetical; it is imminent. The recently announced Pakistan–Saudi security pact reinforces the depth of Islamabad’s historic military alignment with Riyadh, yet Pakistan today is financially tethered to Abu Dhabi in unprecedented ways. This is a strategic trap of Pakistan’s own making, but one with consequences far beyond Islamabad. A Pakistani tilt toward the UAE in a Saudi-Emirati crisis would fundamentally alter Gulf security equations and trigger secondary realignments, potentially drawing in actors from Turkey to Iran.
American and Israeli complicity
None of this occurs in a vacuum, and none of it would be possible without American and Israeli acquiescence, indeed, active participation. The United States has long viewed the UAE as a dependable partner in a volatile region, a perception rooted in shared counterterrorism priorities, weapons purchases, and nominal support for American regional interests. Washington has consistently overlooked Emirati support for authoritarian backlash, proxy warfare, and the systematic undermining of transitions toward accountable governance.
This is not oversight. It is policy. The United States has concluded that stability, defined as the absence of disruption to oil flows, security partnerships, and Israeli supremacy, matters more than the character of governments or the welfare of populations. The UAE has internalised this lesson and acts accordingly. As long as Abu Dhabi purchases American weapons, hosts American bases, and coordinates with American intelligence, its regional interventions will receive, at minimum, tacit approval.
Israel’s role is even more direct. The Abraham Accords formalised what had long been an informal alliance: shared opposition to Iran, shared hostility to popular Islamist movements, and shared interest in controlling strategic chokepoints. Israeli recognition of Somaliland, coordination on Red Sea access, and reported discussions about Palestinian displacement are not aberrations. They are the logical extension of a partnership rooted in the conviction that neither democracy nor self-determination serves Israeli or Emirati interests.
The question, ultimately, is not whether the UAE is intervening across the Middle East, the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa. That much is evident. The question is whether the international community, governments, institutions, civil society, possesses the will and capacity to respond?
Mohammed bin Zayed has constructed a shadow empire that operates through cutouts, proxies, and commercial fronts. It is an empire built for an age of formal sovereignty and international institutions, designed to exploit their weaknesses while avoiding their constraints. Recognising this model for what it is, and responding accordingly, is among the most pressing challenges facing those who still believe that international order should rest on something more than raw power and transactional loyalty.
The question is whether anyone in a position to act still shares that belief.
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