‘More opportunism than strategy’? UAE as a case study

Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, the Gulf states have become far more assertive actors in Middle Eastern politics. States that were once often seen as wealthy but secondary players have intervened diplomatically, financially and militarily across conflicts in Libya, Yemen, Syria, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, while also taking a more visible role in regional rivalries, mediation efforts and new security alignments. This transformation has raised an important question: why have the Gulf states become so much more active? One common answer is that their behaviour has been driven more by opportunism than by strategy. On this view, Gulf rulers simply took advantage of collapsing Arab centres, weak regional institutions, American retrenchment and shifting alliances to expand their own influence wherever openings appeared. There is some truth in that argument. The post-2011 Middle East did create unusual opportunities for smaller but richer states to project power into theatres where older regional actors had weakened or where outside powers seemed unwilling to impose order.

Yet the UAE shows why that explanation is ultimately too narrow. Emirati activism has certainly been flexible, bold and at times improvised, but it has not been random. Across very different cases, including Egypt, Libya, Yemen, the Qatar crisis and normalisation with Israel, Abu Dhabi has pursued a relatively consistent set of objectives: protecting regime security, countering political Islam, limiting Iranian influence, building strategic depth, securing trade and maritime routes, and increasing its own regional weight. What often looked opportunistic was usually the method rather than the purpose. The UAE adapted quickly to changing circumstances, used informal alliances and local proxies, and recalibrated policy when necessary, but the broader direction of its regional activism remained strikingly stable. In that sense, the phrase “more opportunism than strategy” captures only part of the picture.

This essay argues that the UAE’s post-2011 activism is best understood as strategic activism pursued through opportunistic methods. The most useful way to explain this is through Legrenzi’s argument that Gulf politics cannot be understood through balance-of-power logic alone, because rulers are concerned not only with military threats but also with regime security, domestic legitimacy and transnational political identities (Legrenzi, 2021). That framework is especially valuable for the UAE, whose regional activism was shaped less by traditional territorial defence than by fear of ideological contagion, state collapse and hostile regional realignment. Used together with wider arguments about hedging and “liquid alliances”, it becomes clear that tactical inconsistency does not necessarily mean the absence of strategy. In the Emirati case, it often reflected the way strategy had to be carried out in a fragmented and unstable regional order. The essay will therefore show that opportunism mattered, but mainly in execution; the deeper logic of Emirati activism after 2011 was strategic.

A brief analytical framework helps clarify why this distinction between opportunism and strategy is not as straightforward as it first appears. In The International Politics of the Gulf, Legrenzi argues that Gulf politics cannot be adequately explained through classical balance-of-power logic alone. While military capabilities, territorial insecurity and interstate rivalry remain important, they are insufficient to account for the way Gulf rulers perceive threat and formulate foreign policy. Domestic legitimacy, transnational political identities and the vulnerability of ruling elites are equally central to understanding regional behaviour. In the Gulf, threats are therefore not simply military in nature; they are also deeply political, because rulers are concerned not only with external aggression but with ideologies, movements and regional transformations that may erode domestic authority, unsettle existing regimes or encourage alternative political loyalties. Regime security thus matters as much as, and at times more than, conventional state security (Legrenzi, 2021). This approach is especially useful in explaining the post-2011 regional order. The Arab uprisings did not merely alter the distribution of power across the Middle East; they also intensified fears of political contagion, state fragmentation and ideological diffusion. Civil war, sectarian mobilisation, collapsing republics and the rise of armed non-state actors created an environment in which Gulf rulers increasingly viewed regional instability through the lens of domestic vulnerability. Applied to the UAE, Legrenzi’s framework suggests that Emirati activism after 2011 should be understood not as impulsive adventurism, but as a strategic response to a transformed threat environment in which domestic order, regime survival and regional stability had become inseparable.

This reading is strengthened by Del Sarto and Soler i Lecha’s concept of “liquid alliances”. They argue that the post-2011 Middle East was shaped by heightened regime insecurity and shifting threat perceptions, which weakened formal regional institutions such as the Arab League and the GCC and encouraged ad hoc, unstable patterns of cooperation instead (Del Sarto and Soler i Lecha, 2024). Their key insight is that tactical volatility does not prove the absence of strategy. In a region where allies can cooperate in one arena and compete in another, flexibility may itself be strategic. Guzansky’s notion of strategic hedging points in the same direction. Gulf states often mix deterrence, diplomacy and engagement rather than choosing one pure strategy, reducing short-term risk while preserving longer-term room for manoeuvre (Guzansky, 2015). These debates matter because they show why the UAE should not be judged against the standards of a stable regional system. In a fragmented post-2011 Middle East, adaptive behaviour may be one of the main forms strategy takes.

The Arab uprisings were the decisive turning point because they transformed how Abu Dhabi understood both danger and opportunity. Before 2011, the UAE was already economically ambitious and diplomatically active, but it was comparatively cautious in projecting hard power. Almezaini shows that after 2011 it moved beyond the conventional behaviour associated with small states and adopted a more hawkish posture, combining soft and hard power in response to regional insecurity (Almezaini, 2018). The reason was not simply that opportunities appeared. Emirati leaders concluded that passivity had become more dangerous than intervention. Salisbury argues that officials in Abu Dhabi came to believe the federation could no longer preserve itself as a stable and prosperous enclave while the wider neighbourhood was fragmenting. A defensive foreign policy no longer seemed sufficient in a region marked by weakened republics, civil war and what Gulf leaders increasingly saw as an unreliable American security commitment (Salisbury, 2020). Barnes-Dacey similarly describes a post-2011 “assertive Gulf”, in which Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE deployed unprecedented political, economic and military resources because they believed the regional order was collapsing and older Arab powers were no longer capable of stabilising it (Barnes-Dacey, 2015).

This shift was rooted in a particular understanding of order. Salisbury describes the “UAE model” as one that combines economic openness, strong governance, service delivery and a relatively moderate social environment with a closed political system and an entrenched security state. Crucially, that model also depends on rejecting any political or religious ideology that might challenge the supremacy of the state and its rulers (Salisbury, 2020). From Abu Dhabi’s perspective, this domestic order could not be protected by internal policing alone. It also required managing the surrounding region. Disorder after 2011 was therefore seen in two ways at once: as a direct threat to Emirati stability, and as an opening to shape the regional environment in a more favourable direction. That is why Emirati activism should not be dismissed as simple opportunism. It was tied to a broader effort to defend and project a preferred model of political order.

The clearest and most consistent pillar of Emirati activism after 2011 was hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam more broadly. Almezaini shows that domestic concerns about stability merged with the regional upheaval of the Arab Spring, pushing the UAE to redefine its security policy. After the March 2011 petition calling for the Federal National Council to be given greater legislative powers, Emirati officials became increasingly concerned about al-Islah, the local Brotherhood affiliate, especially as Brotherhood-linked actors gained strength in Egypt and Tunisia (Almezaini, 2018). Almezaini also notes that the UAE issued a 2014 list of roughly 80 terrorist organisations and signed additional security agreements with states including Egypt, Algeria, India, Afghanistan, Morocco and the United Kingdom. Whether the Brotherhood was in reality capable of overthrowing the Emirati system matters less than the fact that the leadership perceived it as a serious political threat. That is exactly the sort of regime-security logic highlighted by Legrenzi. Salisbury supports this reading directly. He argues that Emirati threat perceptions were often summarised by officials and analysts as centred on “Iran and the Ikhwan”, meaning Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. For MbZ and his inner circle, the Brotherhood was not just another political movement. It was treated as a transnational ideological force, backed by Qatar and Turkey, that could weaken Gulf monarchies and other status quo states (Salisbury, 2020). This helps explain why developments in Egypt, Libya and Qatar were interpreted not as isolated disputes but as connected fronts in a wider struggle over political order. Emirati support for the post-2013 Egyptian order, its hostility to Qatar and its backing of anti-Islamist actors in Libya all reflected a consistent objective: to roll back political Islam and preserve centralised state authority. Opportunism shaped how Abu Dhabi intervened in each case, but the underlying goal remained stable.

Iran was the second enduring pillar of Emirati threat perception, though here Abu Dhabi behaved more cautiously. Salisbury shows that MbZ’s anxieties about Iran were rooted in a longer history of vulnerability, including the 1971 seizure of Abu Musa and the Tunb islands, the Iran-Iraq War, the tanker war’s disruption of Gulf trade, the 1987 missile strike on an Abu Dhabi oil platform, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the overthrow of Saddam in 2003 (Salisbury, 2020). These episodes reinforced a sense that the federation was wealthy but exposed. Yet Emirati policy toward Iran was not identical to its policy toward Islamists. Salisbury argues that Abu Dhabi was often more aggressive in uprooting the Brotherhood than in directly confronting Tehran. Even while supporting pressure on Iran, the UAE avoided public escalation after the 2019 tanker attacks near Fujairah and instead expanded diplomacy with Tehran to reduce the risk of war. This fits Guzansky’s idea of hedging well: Iran remained a central threat, but the UAE mixed deterrence, alignment and diplomacy rather than relying on open confrontation alone.

The broader structure of Gulf politics helps explain why the UAE had both the motivation and the capacity to act. Legrenzi stresses that the Gulf’s politics are shaped by the intersection of oil wealth, outside power involvement, regional rivalry and domestic insecurity (Legrenzi, 2021). Beblawi’s classic concept of the rentier state helps clarify the domestic side of that picture. He defines rentier economies as those heavily dependent on substantial external rent, which allows the state to function without a strong productive domestic sector (Beblawi, 1987). In political terms, that gives ruling elites unusual autonomy from domestic society and exceptional access to resources. Hanieh develops this further by showing how Gulf capitalism became increasingly transnational, with Gulf capital shaping the wider Middle East through finance, infrastructure, logistics and ownership (Hanieh, 2011). These structural conditions matter because they explain why Emirati activism after 2011 was not only possible but sustainable. Abu Dhabi was not merely willing to intervene; it had the money, networks and state capacity to intervene across multiple theatres at once.

The military side of Emirati activism was strategic rather than symbolic. Dalton and Shah describe how sustained investment and operational experience turned the UAE armed forces into one of the most capable Arab militaries. They note a force of around 63,000 active personnel in a total population of 9.9 million, of whom only about 1.2 million were Emirati nationals, and present the UAE as one of Washington’s closest regional military partners (Dalton and Shah, 2021). Almezaini adds that by 2013 the UAE accounted for 8 per cent of total US arms exports and had developed one of the most advanced air forces in the region (Almezaini, 2018). This was not simply prestige spending. Dalton and Shah explicitly link force development to three broad priorities: countering Iranian threats, preserving the regional status quo and becoming a more self-reliant military force. In other words, military build-up was tied directly to a more activist regional role. Just as important, Emirati activism consistently combined hard and soft power. Almezaini argues that after 2011 the UAE no longer relied mainly on foreign aid and diplomacy, but widened its repertoire to include overt military diplomacy and intervention (Almezaini, 2018). Yet hard power did not replace soft power. It was added to it. Ardemagni shows that military training and education became a distinctive foreign policy tool, allowing Abu Dhabi to expand networks of state and local alliances while promoting an image of itself as capable and stabilisation-oriented (Ardemagni, 2020). Her later article on “flexible outposts” adds a spatial dimension to this strategy. Since the mid-2010s, the UAE has used or built facilities in eight countries, including Yemen, Eritrea, Somaliland, Somalia, Chad, Libya and Egypt. These were not classic permanent imperial bases, but flexible logistical nodes serving military, security and economic goals (Ardemagni, 2024). The existence of such a network strongly suggests strategic planning around maritime access, regional influence and projection of power beyond the federation’s small size.

This helps explain why Emirati behaviour in Yemen and the Red Sea is better interpreted as strategic than merely opportunistic. In Yemen, Abu Dhabi pursued several long-term objectives at once: countering Iranian influence through the Houthi challenge, limiting Islamist actors, shaping politics in the south and securing positions along maritime routes. Salisbury describes the UAE as the main external actor on the ground in southern Yemen, backing southern separatists and Salafi groups while drifting away from President Hadi (Salisbury, 2020). Vakil and Quilliam similarly link Emirati regional strategy to control of sea routes stretching from the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea (Vakil and Quilliam, 2023). Yemeni fragmentation clearly forced tactical improvisation, and the end-state remained unclear. But uncertainty over method does not erase coherence of purpose. The later reduction of the UAE’s overt military presence while retaining influence through local partners points to recalibration under pressure, not to the abandonment of strategy.

Libya reveals the same tension. Emirati activism there reflected a clear anti-Islamist agenda and a wider effort to shape the post-uprising regional order, particularly alongside Egypt. Yet Libya was also a fragmented theatre in which tactical improvisation was unavoidable. Hammond’s 2014 commentary captured the novelty of the UAE-Egypt intervention, presenting it as evidence of a major shift in Gulf politics. Hammond’s analysis supports the broader argument that Libya was not merely an isolated openings, but a theatre through which Abu Dhabi pursued wider regional objectives linked to islamism, state authority and geopolitical influence (Hammond, 2014)

Normalisation with Israel in 2020 also fits this wider strategic pattern. Vakil and Quilliam argue that the Abraham Accords formalised a relationship built over years on shared threat perceptions, declining confidence in US regional commitments and common ambitions for greater regional influence (Vakil and Quilliam, 2023). The accords did not emerge suddenly. They reflected a longer convergence between Israel and the UAE around Iran, regional instability, economic cooperation and the possibility of future security integration. Yossef similarly argues that the accords consolidated a status quo alignment against revisionist actors (Yossef, 2021). Seen this way, normalisation was not a random tactical move, but an extension of Abu Dhabi’s broader strategy of network-building, alliance diversification and regional positioning.

At the same time, opportunism undeniably mattered, and this is where the phrase in the question captures something real. Salisbury explicitly warns against imagining a neat masterplan. He argues that Emirati foreign policy was often shaped by a very small inner circle around MbZ, producing tactical boldness, sudden shifts and occasional overcorrection (Salisbury, 2020). The 2017 blockade of Qatar is a good example. The move was fully consistent with Emirati hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Doha’s regional networks, but it also fractured the GCC and pushed Qatar closer to Turkey and Iran. In that sense, tactical decisions sometimes damaged wider strategic interests. Yet even here it is more accurate to say that strategic aims were pursued through flawed tactics than to say there was no strategy at all. Later outreach to Turkey, Qatar and Iran should therefore be read as recalibration rather than reversal. Samaan makes precisely this point when he argues that the supposed Emirati “zero-problem” turn after 2021 was overstated; diplomatic openings did not replace Abu Dhabi’s core commitments, but coexisted with deepening security ties to the United States and Israel (Samaan, 2022).

Ultimately, the strongest conclusion is not that Gulf activism since 2011 has been driven by either strategy or opportunism in pure form. In the Emirati case, the relationship between the two is more complex. Strategy supplied the underlying objectives: regime security, anti-Islamism, strategic depth, managed competition with Iran and the expansion of Emirati influence through military, diplomatic and economic tools. Opportunism shaped execution: the rapid exploitation of openings, the use of ad hoc partners, the willingness to shift methods and the recalibration of policy when specific moves proved costly. If Legrenzi is right that Gulf politics is driven by the interaction of external rivalry and domestic insecurity, then tactical flexibility should not be mistaken for the absence of strategy. It may instead be one of the main forms strategy takes in the contemporary Gulf (Legrenzi, 2021). Using the UAE as a case study, the claim that Gulf states have become more active in Middle Eastern affairs since 2011 because of “more opportunism than strategy” is therefore too simplistic. The UAE did not merely exploit chaos for its own sake. It acted with a relatively clear strategic logic, even if it often pursued that logic through opportunistic and improvised methods in a volatile regional environment. The most convincing judgement, then, is that Emirati activism after 2011 is best understood as strategic activism executed through opportunistic methods.

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