Recent developments across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa tell a story that few have bothered to connect. A multibillion-dollar Pakistani arms deal with Libya. Separatist advances into Yemen’s most resource-rich territories. Israel’s recognition of a breakaway state in northern Somalia. On the surface, these appear unrelated, but they all lead to Abu Dhabi, where Mohammed bin Zayed has been constructing a new architecture of regional power that operates through proxies, economic leverage, and fragmented sovereignties rather than traditional military force. The question is no longer whether the UAE has transformed into a major interventionist actor, but whether the international system has any mechanisms left to respond to powers that operate this way.

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.

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.

© Middle East Monitor