Nine months ago, Saudi aircraft were striking Emirati cargo in Mukalla. Now Riyadh is asking the Emirates to return to the war, while at the same table in Abu Dhabi, the Israeli prime minister is sitting alongside representatives of states that do not officially recognize Israel.
On Tuesday, September 29, UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed was personally received at Riyadh airport by the kingdom’s defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman. A matter of protocol, perhaps, but a telling one. At the end of December last year, Saudi aircraft struck the port of Mukalla, where, according to Riyadh, Emirati weapons intended for southern Yemeni separatists were being unloaded, while Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, gave Emirati forces 24 hours to leave the country. Now the UAE president’s brother has arrived in the Saudi capital with a delegation whose composition speaks louder than any communique: Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali bin Hammad al-Shamsi, national emergency and crisis management chief Ali Saeed Matar al-Neyadi, and Tawazun Council Secretary-General Nasser Humaid al-Nuaimi.
You do not bring an entourage like that to discuss brotherly ties. A delegation like this comes to negotiate a war.
The official wording, naturally, was impeccably empty: the two sides discussed bilateral relations and regional developments. After the meeting, Prince Khalid wrote that he was pleased to continue “brotherly consultations” with his guest and called Saudi Arabia his “second home.” For a man whose country, according to the Saudi account, secretly spirited an accused separatist leader charged with treason out of Yemen in January, such a reception means one thing. Riyadh is in enough trouble that it is prepared to forget old grievances. And to forget them publicly.
The Forty-Eight Hours That Redrew the Gulf
Mansour bin Zayed’s visit capped the most intense week of Middle Eastern diplomacy this year. The chronology matters, so it is worth reconstructing.
On Sunday, September 27, Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Abu Dhabi aboard a private jet and spent the entire day there. According to Israeli press reports, he was accompanied by the director of Mossad. Official Emirati media did not confirm his meeting with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed until the following day, while the Israeli prime minister’s office confined itself to a statement about strengthening relations and addressing “regional challenges.” The public optics were pointedly bilateral.
Behind the scenes, the picture looked very different. According to Israeli sources, Abu Dhabi hosted a meeting involving representatives of roughly ten countries. In addition to Israel and the UAE, delegations reportedly came from Saudi Arabia, the United States, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain, Libya, Oman, and Egypt. There is no complete confirmation of that list. Two Gulf diplomats, however, confirmed to Israeli journalists that representatives of at least two Arab states with no diplomatic relations with Israel participated in the meeting. Iran and scenarios for the coming months were reportedly at the center of the discussions, with defense against the Houthis addressed separately. Judging by the details that leaked out, the future Emirati role in Yemen was also discussed, with Saudi representatives sitting at the table.
On Monday, September 28, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan arrived in Abu Dhabi directly from the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. At the same time, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan landed in Washington for talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. On Tuesday, Mansour bin Zayed was in Riyadh.
There is also an Israeli domestic dimension without which the analysis would be incomplete. Netanyahu’s trip came amid a fierce controversy after the Israeli press published reports claiming that Mohammed bin Zayed had warned the Israeli prime minister as early as late September 2023 that Hamas was preparing an attack. Netanyahu denies this. With less than a month remaining before the October 27 Knesset election, some Israeli commentators have argued explicitly that Netanyahu flew to Abu Dhabi partly in search of a public denial. If so, he failed to secure one: no Emirati statement to that effect followed. None of this, however, makes the regional agenda any less important. Quite the opposite. Netanyahu needs the image of “Israel at the center of an Arab coalition” precisely when voters are asking him about the intelligence failures of three years ago.
Thirty-Eight Days That Turned Allies Into Enemies
To understand the scale of the current reversal, one has to remember just how deeply Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had fallen out only months earlier.
The coalition that entered the Yemeni war on March 26, 2015, with Operation Decisive Storm was from the outset an alliance of two engines following different road maps. Saudi Arabia fought for a unified Yemen under a government loyal to Riyadh. The Emirates built a network of ports and footholds along the coast and relied on southern forces, many of which dreamed of restoring the independent state that had existed in southern Yemen from 1967 to 1990. In 2019, the UAE withdrew most of its troops, leaving behind trained and armed allies, foremost among them the Southern Transitional Council, established in April 2017.
The explosion came on December 2, 2025. The Southern Transitional Council launched an offensive in the south, and from the Saudi perspective, the timing was deliberately provocative: the operation began just as the annual Gulf Cooperation Council summit was getting underway. Within a week, the separatists had seized Hadramawt and al-Mahrah. According to available estimates, by December 9 they controlled between 90 and 95 percent of the populated areas of the former South Yemen and at least 80 percent of the country’s known oil reserves. Shortly before that, Yemen’s geological authority had announced the discovery of platinum-group metal deposits in Hadramawt. Money in this war is never lying out in plain sight, but it is always somewhere nearby.
Riyadh responded with unusual speed. On December 26, the Saudi Air Force struck Southern Transitional Council positions in Wadi Nahb. On December 30 came a strike on the port of Mukalla and vessels carrying cargo that the Saudi side described as Emirati weapons. Abu Dhabi denied that weapons were involved and conspicuously reaffirmed its commitment to the kingdom’s security. That same day, after consultations in Riyadh, al-Alimi demanded that all Emirati forces leave Yemen within 24 hours.
The finale was almost cinematic. Southern Transitional Council leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi was supposed to fly to Riyadh for negotiations but never boarded the plane. The coalition command later claimed that on January 7 he escaped by sea to Berbera in Somaliland, flew from there through Mogadishu, and landed at Al Reef military airfield in Abu Dhabi. According to the coalition, the aircraft switched off its transponder over the Gulf of Oman and turned it back on only ten minutes before landing. On January 9, the dissolution of the Southern Transitional Council was announced in Riyadh. A spokesman for the movement based in Abu Dhabi refused to recognize the decision.
The history of the past decade offers a useful guide to how such Gulf quarrels usually end. In June 2017, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi jointly imposed a blockade on Qatar, presented it with thirteen demands, and failed to secure compliance with a single one. On January 5, 2021, everyone embraced in Al-Ula, and nobody apologized to anybody. Gulf monarchies know how to reconcile without admitting fault. That is precisely why the current rapprochement should not be interpreted as one side’s capitulation. It is a bargain in which everyone pretends to have conceded nothing.
Yemen, however, was only the loudest dispute. In Sudan, Riyadh backs General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s army, while the Emirates have for years faced accusations of supporting the Rapid Support Forces. Abu Dhabi rejects those allegations. A third fault line tightened on December 26, the very day Saudi aircraft were striking Wadi Nahb, when Israel became the first United Nations member state to recognize Somaliland’s independence. The Saudi Foreign Ministry responded with a strongly worded statement reaffirming full support for Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and describing Israel’s move as a violation of international law. Abu Dhabi has been tied to Somaliland since 2016, when the Emirati company DP World received a $442 million concession for the port of Berbera. A year later, Somaliland’s parliament approved the establishment of an Emirati base there. Somalia subsequently terminated a number of major contracts with the UAE.
By early 2026, two camps had taken shape on the Red Sea map. Israel and the UAE, with Berbera, were in one. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and Somalia were in the other.
Mokha Fell in a Day: How the Houthis Put the Kingdom in a Chokehold
Everything that followed is impossible to understand without the larger war. In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a military campaign against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes in normal times, was effectively blocked. On March 13, Saudi Arabia cut production by 20 percent. The kingdom redirected the bulk of its exports to the roughly 750-mile East-West Pipeline leading to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Its capacity is estimated at between five and seven million barrels per day, and the question of which figure is closer to reality now interests traders more than any official statement.
The Red Sea became Riyadh’s only pair of lungs. The Houthis understood that before anyone else.
The American-Iranian ceasefire collapsed over the summer. On July 20, the Houthis announced a blockade of Saudi ports and vessels. On July 23, they claimed attacks on two Saudi tankers. On July 30, movement leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi threatened the kingdom with “full escalation,” and within hours Riyadh announced the creation of a Multinational Maritime Defense Coalition. Fourteen countries signed the founding declaration, including Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Djibouti. The headquarters and command structure were established in Saudi Arabia.
The Houthis answered in their own fashion. On September 4, they launched an offensive along the western coast. Within days, they seized six districts in Taiz and Hodeidah provinces, the port cities of Mokha and Dhubab, and then strategic islands, including Perim at the entrance to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. On September 11, the Hanish archipelago fell. The Houthi military command declared that shipping would remain safe for every company except Saudi ones. The formula was designed to keep the rest of the world on the sidelines, and it worked: Washington, which bombed the Houthis under both Biden and Trump, stayed out of the war this time.
On September 8, the kingdom itself came under attack. Missiles and drones struck targets in Abha, Jizan, Najran, and Khamis Mushait. Seventy-three people were wounded. Saudi Aramco facilities caught fire, including installations around Jizan, home to one of the country’s largest refineries, with a capacity of 400,000 barrels per day. Brent crude rose above $100 a barrel for the first time since July. Almost simultaneously, the East-West Pipeline was attacked in a strike attributed to pro-Iranian groups in Iraq, forcing pumping operations to be temporarily suspended.
The closest precedent is obvious. On September 14, 2019, the attack on Abqaiq and Khurais knocked out roughly 5.7 million barrels per day overnight, about half of Saudi production. Riyadh restored capacity within weeks, and the world quickly forgot the incident. The difference is that in 2019 the kingdom still had Hormuz. In 2026, it does not.
Mokha deserves separate attention. The city was recaptured from the Houthis in February 2017 by forces operating with Emirati support, and the western coast had since been held by formations built up by Abu Dhabi, particularly Tariq Saleh’s forces. In January 2026, the Emirates left Yemen. The Houthi offensive in September took Mokha in a single day. No one officially acknowledges a direct causal relationship, but the military logic is difficult to miss: Riyadh pushed out of Yemen the patron on whom the coastal defense depended, and eight months later lost that coast.
That, in my view, is the principal reason for the current reconciliation. Saudi Arabia discovered that it had won a war against an ally while losing a war against an enemy.
Pakistan’s Shield Turned Out to Be Made of Paper
Riyadh was hardly sitting idle. On September 17, 2025, the kingdom signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Pakistan. On August 7, 2026, a broader document followed: the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement among Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. The first meeting of its implementation committee took place in Istanbul on August 31.
On paper, the arrangement looked like something any strategist might envy: nuclear-armed Pakistan with one of the world’s largest militaries, plus Turkey with NATO’s second-largest army and drones battle-tested from Libya to Karabakh. Reality proved more complicated. On September 24 in New York, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, and Hakan Fidan agreed to convene an emergency meeting of their chiefs of staff. On September 25, Field Marshal Asim Munir and General Selcuk Bayraktaroglu arrived in Riyadh. They discussed intelligence sharing, coordination, and integration of capabilities. Formally, however, the collective-defense mechanism was never activated.
Pakistan’s caution has a long history. In April 2015, two weeks after the launch of Operation Decisive Storm, Pakistan’s parliament unanimously voted to remain neutral in the Yemeni war despite a direct Saudi request for troops. The explanation was obvious: Pakistan has a long border with Iran and a Shiite population numbering in the millions. Eleven years later, neither the border nor the demographics have changed. Ankara, meanwhile, officially insists on Yemen’s unity and maintains dialogue with Tehran, which remains an important trading partner.
It is telling that the kingdom also turned to its Western partners for help. France announced that it was deploying military personnel to protect the oil terminal at Yanbu. The United States, according to available information, rejected the crown prince’s request for direct strikes against the Houthis, agreeing only to provide intelligence support and assistance with targeting. The kingdom’s grand mufti issued a rare public appeal to soldiers at the front, urging them to remain steadfast. When a state with one of the world’s largest military budgets calls on the clergy for help, that says a great deal about the mood inside its command centers.
Against that backdrop, the Emirates look entirely different. They possess something neither Islamabad nor Ankara has: a decade of experience fighting on this exact coastline, intelligence networks across southern Yemen, relationships with tribal commanders, and infrastructure on both sides of the strait. The runway on Perim Island, whose construction in 2021 was linked to the UAE, is now controlled by the Houthis. Berbera remains part of the Emirati system. Riyadh does not need a distant ally with a nuclear bomb. It needs a neighbor that knows every pier from Aden to Hodeidah.
A Table for Ten: Netanyahu Beside Those Who Do Not Recognize Him
Back to Abu Dhabi. If the list of participants published by Israeli sources is even half correct, we are looking at an unprecedented configuration.
Formally, of the eight Arab states named on that list, four have diplomatic relations with Israel: Egypt since 1979; the UAE and Bahrain since the signing of the Abraham Accords on September 15, 2020; and Morocco since December of that year. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Libya do not officially recognize Israel. Kuwait has for decades been regarded as the Gulf’s most consistent opponent of normalization. Oman has hosted Netanyahu once before, in October 2018, and that visit was a sensation. This time, apparently, a comparable encounter passed almost unnoticed amid sirens and burning terminals.
Israel’s interest is transparent. The Houthis have waged their own war against Israeli shipping since November 2023, and by the summer of 2025, the port of Eilat, deprived of cargo traffic, was effectively bankrupt. Houthi control over Mokha, Perim, and the Hanish Islands transforms the threat from episodic to systemic. Israeli-Emirati defense cooperation since 2020 reportedly includes air-defense systems and intelligence sharing, and Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Zayed reportedly discussed, among other things, aviation security.
The limits of that interest are equally clear. Voices within Israel’s military and expert community have indicated that the country has no intention of entering a Saudi-Houthi war absent a direct attack on Israel. Three punishing years, the unresolved confrontation with Iran, and an election one month away hardly invite another front. Israel can provide intelligence, air-defense technology, and expertise in intercepting ballistic missiles. It will not provide soldiers.
For Saudi Arabia, participating in a meeting with Israel at a moment like this carries domestic risks, and Riyadh understands that perfectly well. Since 2024, the kingdom has publicly tied normalization to the establishment of a Palestinian state and has not abandoned that position. The solution is a Gulf classic: presence without photographs, participation without a communique, coordination without an alliance. For the first time, Israel finds itself inside an Arab military-political configuration that cannot be named aloud.
The Price of Forgiveness: What Riyadh Will Give Abu Dhabi
Reconciliation with the Emirates will not come free, and nobody knows that better than Riyadh. This time, the kingdom is the supplicant. Mohammed bin Zayed sent his brother rather than coming himself, and that choice of envoy is part of the message.
The first and most obvious price concerns Yemen. Abu Dhabi is unlikely to return to the war under the old terms, with Riyadh setting the strategy while Emirati allies die on the front lines. More likely, the negotiations will concern rehabilitating some of the southern structures crushed in January and providing guarantees to commanders whom Riyadh was calling rebels only recently. The fate of al-Zubaidi, accused of treason by the Yemeni government and living in Abu Dhabi, will be the litmus test. If the charges quietly disappear from the agenda, it will mean the deal was struck on Emirati terms.
The second price concerns the south’s resources. Hadramawt, with its oil and newly announced platinum-group metals, was the principal prize of the December offensive. The Emirates will want a share of influence there, even if not through direct control.
The third concerns Sudan and Somaliland, where Riyadh will at least have to lower the temperature. The kingdom will not recognize Somaliland; doing so would contradict its own December statement and damage relations with Egypt. But silence regarding Berbera, the Emirati base, and Israeli plans for the port becomes a currency Riyadh can now use to pay its bill. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has already announced plans to visit Berbera, while Somalia’s defense minister has threatened military action if an Israeli presence emerges there.
There is also a fourth, intangible price that is rarely discussed. In December, Mohammed bin Salman demonstrated that he was prepared to use force against a Gulf partner that crossed his red lines. Now he is demonstrating the opposite: force did not work, and he needs that partner again. Reversals like this are neither forgiven nor forgotten in Gulf politics. Abu Dhabi will remember that the kingdom came back on its own.
Why Ankara Was Not Invited to the Table
The most conspicuous absence from the Abu Dhabi meeting was Turkey. Hakan Fidan arrived there one day after Netanyahu, held talks with Mohammed bin Zayed, Mansour bin Zayed, and National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, called the visit “extremely productive,” and departed. The Turkish agenda included preparations for the second meeting of the High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council. According to Turkish diplomatic sources, Fidan intended to discuss the principle of regional responsibility for security and Yemen’s unity as a prerequisite for Middle Eastern security.
Each of those formulations has a specific audience. In Turkish diplomatic language, regional responsibility means reluctance to allow outside players, above all Israel, to become the architects of regional security. A unified Yemen sounds like a direct rebuke to Emirati support for southern forces. In December, Ankara described Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as an illegal and destabilizing act, while Turkey has operated its largest overseas military base in Mogadishu since 2017.
The reason for Turkey’s exclusion is obvious. As long as Netanyahu is sitting at the table, Erdogan will not be. Relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, after Gaza and Syria, are at their lowest point since the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010. The hosts made their choice, and it was not Turkey.
From Baku, this divide looks particularly stark. Azerbaijan has built strategic relations with both Ankara and Jerusalem, and in April 2025 it was in Baku that Turkish-Israeli technical consultations were held on preventing clashes in Syria. The harder the dividing line between the Turkish and Israeli camps becomes in the Middle East, the greater the demand for the rare venues where both sides are still willing to talk. Almost none remain in the region.
For Riyadh, Turkey’s absence creates a different problem. Ankara is part of both the Mecca Agreement and the maritime coalition, and the kingdom cannot afford to lose Turkey while gaining Israel. Hence the double-entry bookkeeping of Saudi diplomacy over the past few days: with the Turks and Pakistanis in New York, with the Israelis in Abu Dhabi, and with the Americans in Washington. The kingdom is not assembling one coalition. It is assembling several parallel coalitions, each with its own entrance and its own password.
The New Map: An Alliance Without a Name
So what exactly is taking shape before our eyes? This is not a conventional military bloc with a charter and headquarters. It is a network of overlapping arrangements centered on a common threat: Iran and its Yemeni ally astride the Bab el-Mandeb.
Within that network, everyone has a role. Saudi Arabia provides money, territory, and political legitimacy. The Emirates bring experience, ports, and networks of influence across southern Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Israel has intelligence and air-defense technology, without which defending Yanbu and Jizan from ballistic missiles becomes a game of chance. The United States plays the role of a guarantor that does not want to fight but supplies targeting data. Egypt, whose Suez Canal revenues collapsed along with Red Sea shipping, has an interest in any solution that brings vessels back through the strait.
This arrangement has no fewer weaknesses than strengths. Its participants remain divided over Palestine, Sudan, Somaliland, and Yemen’s future. Fear is the glue holding it together, and fear has historically proved a short-lived foundation for alliances. One need only remember how quickly the anti-Iranian “Arab NATO” promoted by the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019 under the name Middle East Strategic Alliance fell apart.
There is, however, one crucial difference from those years. Back then, Israel remained an outside partner with whom Arab capitals coordinated through Washington. Now, judging by the Abu Dhabi meeting, Israel is sitting directly at the table. Even if formal normalization with Riyadh remains distant, Israel’s functional integration into the Gulf security architecture is no longer hypothetical.
Who loses? Iran first and foremost. The isolation Tehran sought to break through the Saudi-Iranian normalization of 2023, brokered by Beijing, is returning in a harsher form. The Houthis also lose if this coalition truly comes together: Emirati intelligence networks in the south, Israeli interception technology, and Saudi money are more dangerous in combination than any of those assets individually. Turkey risks finding itself outside the principal military-political architecture of the Red Sea, where it has spent the past decade so carefully building a presence. The Palestinians lose yet another source of leverage: once again, Arab states are demonstrating that their own security takes precedence over the Palestinian agenda.
A Forecast With Dates
An analyst unwilling to put dates on the table is simply retelling the news. So I will make several testable assertions.
Before the Knesset election on October 27, 2026, there will be no official photograph of a senior Saudi figure standing alongside an Israeli counterpart. Coordination will continue, but Riyadh will not hand Netanyahu a campaign photograph, while Netanyahu will hint at “historic contacts” without providing details.
The Emirates will not return ground troops to Yemen before December 31, 2026. Their return will take the form of intelligence operations, maritime patrols, supplies, and financing for loyal southern formations. The clearest sign that a deal has been reached will be the appointment of figures close to the former Southern Transitional Council to key positions in Aden.
The Mecca Agreement will not be formally activated before the end of 2026. Pakistani and Turkish military involvement will remain limited to advisers, exercises, and intelligence sharing.
Israel will not strike Houthi positions on Yemen’s western coast before the end of the year unless the Houthis themselves attack Israeli territory. If they do, an Israeli strike will follow within 24 hours, marking the first time Israel is effectively fighting on the side of Saudi Arabia, a country that does not officially recognize it.
One question I will leave open. Can an arrangement held together by fear of Iran survive the moment that fear subsides, for example, under a new American-Iranian ceasefire?
The Plane That Landed in the Wrong Place
On Wednesday, September 30, three days after the Abu Dhabi meeting, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Israel made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia following an onboard incident that Israeli authorities treated as a possible terrorist attack. Passengers bound for Tel Aviv were received on Saudi soil and subsequently transported to Ben Gurion Airport. The Emirates opened an investigation, while Flydubai temporarily suspended flights to Tel Aviv.
No scandal followed. None of the parties tried to turn the incident into a political statement. The Saudi kingdom, which officially does not recognize Israel, simply accepted the aircraft and helped get the passengers home.
That is how new alliances are born in the Middle East: without signatures and without ceremonies, on an alternate runway, after the old flight plan has failed.