The foreign policy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has faced numerous challenges in recent years. From the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, after Abu Dhabi had invested immense political capital to normalize relations with his regime, to the recent military setbacks suffered by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which the UAE has been supporting despite credible accusations of genocide, Abu Dhabi’s recent gambles in the region have not borne fruit. 

On the contrary, they have worsened the UAE’s global image, put it at odds with its Gulf allies, and placed it on a collision course with US foreign policy goals.

Before Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) blitzkrieg offensive against the Assad regime, which led to its ousting, normalization between Syria and Gulf countries was moving at pace, with Abu Dhabi leading the charge. In 2018, the UAE became the first Gulf country to reopen its embassy in Syria, seven years after it had closed it following the outbreak of the civil war.

Speaking at a ceremony commemorating the UAE’s National Day held in Damascus, Abu Dhabi’s chargé d’affaires to Syria, Abdul-Hakim Naimi, left no ambiguity regarding whose side the UAE was taking in the conflict, “I hope that safety, security, and stability in the Syrian Arab Republic will prevail under the shadow of the wise leadership of Dr. Bashar al-Assad.” 

In a further sign of warming ties, in 2021, the UAE’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, met with Assad in Damascus to discuss boosting economic ties between the two countries.

The meeting attracted condemnation from the Biden administration. 

“We are concerned by reports of this meeting and the signal it sends,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price noted in a press briefing. “As we’ve said before, this administration will not express any support for efforts to normalize or to rehabilitate Bashar al-Assad, who is a brutal dictator.”

Assad would later visit the UAE in 2022, his first diplomatic trip to an Arab country since the outbreak of the civil war. The visit was a direct rebuke to the Biden administration, whose attempts to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin, a key ally of Assad, have failed to garner sufficient support from Gulf countries.

In January 2024, Abu Dhabi completed the process of restoring ties with Damascus by designating Hassan Ahmad al-Shihi as ambassador to Syria, marking the first time the UAE had appointed an ambassador to the embattled country in nearly thirteen years.

Eleven months after the UAE fully normalized relations with Syria, HTS launched its offensive against the Assad regime. As city after city fell into rebel hands, and recognizing that the cavalry wasn’t coming, with Iran’s proxies devastated and Russia bogged down in its war in Ukraine, Assad fled the country. The fall of his regime squandered years of political capital the UAE had invested in rehabilitating a brutal dictator and complicated relations with the new Islamist government, which now looks at Abu Dhabi with suspicion.

Notwithstanding the surprising nature of HTS’s offensive, which caught many regional actors by surprise, the political capital invested by the UAE to normalize relations with Assad was not paying dividends even before the downfall of his regime. Abu Dhabi’s

© The National Interest