Geopolitics is most dangerous not when it erupts, but when it reorganises quietly — when the ground shifts beneath familiar alliances while elites continue to speak the language of yesterday. The Gulf today is in precisely such a moment. What once masqueraded as a coherent bloc has fractured into rival power models, incompatible strategic visions, and diverging relationships to empire, Israel, and popular legitimacy. And Pakistan, true to form, is responding not with strategic intelligence but with institutional reflex — confusing obedience with balance and habit with foresight.

The rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is no longer a matter of speculation or diplomatic gossip. It is an open contradiction — political, military, and infrastructural. Yemen has exposed it. Israel has radicalised it. The United States, particularly under Trumpism, has weaponised it. And Pakistan’s ruling elite —
military and civilian alike — has chosen to drift toward the most toxic pole of this fracture while reassuring itself that it is merely being “pragmatic.” It is not. It is being complicit. 

Two Gulf projects, one moral abyss 

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are still lazily grouped together by analysts who mistake shared authoritarianism for shared strategy. This is intellectual malpractice. The two monarchies are pursuing fundamentally different regional projects. 

Saudi Arabia’s current posture — hardly virtuous, often cynical, and deeply reactionary — nevertheless reflects a begrudging recognition of reality. After years of disastrous interventionism, Riyadh wants consolidation. It wants borders quieted, fires contained, and regional fragmentation slowed. Its outreach to Iran, cautious engagement with the
Houthis, and growing hostility to separatist militias are not gestures of enlightenment but acts of self-preservation. Endless chaos undermines Saudi ambitions at home.

The Emirati project is the opposite — and far more dangerous. Abu Dhabi does not seek order through states; it seeks domination through fragments. Ports, islands, militias, mercenaries, logistics corridors, surveillance hubs — these are its tools. Sovereignty is irrelevant. Fragmentation is not a failure; it is a business model.

If Saudi Arabia is a reactionary status-quo power, the UAE is a hyperactive destabiliser — an empire of nodes, happy to burn........

© Middle East Monitor