Opinion | Why India, Israel And UAE Are Building A Security 'Trilateral' Of Their Own |
Opinion | Why India, Israel And UAE Are Building A Security 'Trilateral' Of Their Own
Updated: May 12, 2026 20:36 pm IST Published On May 12, 2026 18:54 pm IST Last Updated On May 12, 2026 20:36 pm IST
Published On May 12, 2026 18:54 pm IST
Last Updated On May 12, 2026 20:36 pm IST
Three countries, separated by geography but converging in threat perception, are quietly constructing one of the most consequential strategic partnerships of this decade. India, Israel and the United Arab Emirates do not share a formal alliance treaty, a mutual defence pact, or a joint command structure. What they share is something more operationally durable: a common adversary network, a common set of conclusions drawn from repeated experience, and an expanding web of institutional agreements that are steadily translating shared threat assessment into coordinated strategic action.
That convergence is no longer theoretical. It is documented, incremental and accelerating.
A Common Threat, Not a Common Patron
Most strategic alliances in modern history have been assembled around a common patron - typically a great power offering security guarantees in exchange for alignment. The India-Israel-UAE alignment is not that. It has no single convening power, no Washington or Moscow at its centre. It has emerged from the ground up, driven by the consistent operational experience of three countries that have each absorbed attacks from radical Islamist networks over decades and reached strikingly similar conclusions about the nature, direction and financing of that threat.
The network these three countries are responding to does not observe national borders in any meaningful sense. Hamas leaders have shared public platforms with Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed commanders in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. In August 2025, Pakistan's ambassador to Qatar met a senior Hamas official in Doha, with both sides explicitly framing Kashmir and Palestine as dimensions of the same ideological struggle. The financing channels sustaining these organisations move through intermediaries operating simultaneously across South Asia and the Gulf. The targeting doctrine, when examined across recorded attacks from the Kashmir valley to the Negev to the energy infrastructure of the Arabian Gulf, is remarkably consistent: identify civilians or critical infrastructure, strike with maximum visibility, and generate enough political pressure on the targeted government to demand public restraint.
That consistency of method and genealogy is the........