The Emirates' Shadow Wars
The Most Consequential Foreign Policy Nobody Debates
If you asked a foreign policy professional in Washington, London, or Brussels to name the single most consequential external actor across the world’s active conflicts — not the most powerful, but the one whose decisions most directly shape outcomes on the ground — a surprising number would, after a pause, name the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE arms Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces through a covert pipeline that a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation documented with flight logs, geolocated videos, and satellite imagery[1]. It hosts the financial infrastructure through which Iranian sanctions evasion operates. It anchors the Abraham Accords that reshaped Israel’s strategic posture and contributed to the regional architecture that made Operation Epic Fury possible. Its sovereign wealth funds are among the largest holders of Western equities, giving it economic leverage that far exceeds its population of 10 million. And it has cultivated relationships across the American political spectrum — from defense contractors to think tanks to lobbying firms — that insulate it from the kind of scrutiny applied to less diplomatically adept states.
Yet the UAE’s role in multiple simultaneous conflicts draws a fraction of the attention directed at Russia, Iran, or China. This is not accidental. It is the product of a deliberate strategy, executed over two decades, to project power through proxies, logistics, and finance rather than direct military confrontation — and to keep relationships with every major power running in parallel, so that no single patron holds the leverage, or feels the inclination, to impose constraints.
This essay traces the UAE’s involvement across the Iran war and the Sudan civil war, examines the strategic logic that links them, and asks whether the Emirates’ shadow wars are a durable model of power projection or a structure the current regional conflagration has finally begun to bring down.
Sudan: The Arms Pipeline
The evidence of Emirati involvement in Sudan’s war is not circumstantial. It is documented, sourced, and has been confirmed by the UAE’s own reactive behavior.
The New York Times’ investigation, led by Declan Walsh and a team of visual investigators[1], established that the UAE transformed a military airbase into a logistics hub for weapons transfers to the RSF. Flight tracking data showed cargo aircraft flying regular routes between the UAE and airstrips in RSF-controlled territory in Chad and Darfur. Geolocated videos posted by RSF fighters showed Chinese-manufactured Wing Loong II drones — sold to the UAE by their manufacturer — operating over Sudanese battlefields. Satellite imagery captured the expansion of airfield facilities consistent with drone operations and heavy cargo handling.
When the investigation was published, the UAE quietly withdrew drone equipment from the identified facilities — in effect, the most expensive confirmation of a news story on record, an admission delivered by logistics rather than statement. But the pipeline did not close. It adapted. Subsequent reporting by the UN Panel of Experts[2] documented weapons flowing through alternative routes, including overland transfers through Libya and maritime shipments through Eritrea.
The UAE’s motivations in Sudan are layered. At the simplest level, Hemedti is an old ally. The RSF supplied thousands of Sudanese mercenaries to the UAE’s campaign in Yemen, where they fought as ground forces in a war the Emirates was unwilling to staff with its own citizens. That relationship created mutual obligations and personal connections between Emirati security officials and RSF leadership that predate the current war.
At a strategic level, the UAE views Sudan through the lens of its regional competition with Turkey and Qatar. Ankara backs the SAF with Akinci combat drones and military advisors. Doha has historically supported Islamist-leaning political factions in Sudan that the UAE considers threats. For Abu Dhabi, the RSF represents a counterweight — a secular, commercially oriented military force that, if it consolidates control over western Sudan, would owe its existence to Emirati patronage.
And then there is gold. The UAE’s gold souks have long been the primary destination for Sudanese artisanal gold, much of it extracted from mines in RSF-controlled territory. Suliman Baldo’s research at the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker[3] has traced the flows: gold moves from Darfur’s mines through intermediaries in N’Djamena and Kampala to Dubai, where it enters the legitimate global supply chain. The trade generates billions annually and is, for both the RSF and its Emirati facilitators, a powerful incentive to maintain the status quo.
The SAF has filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice[4] accusing the UAE of genocide complicity — the legal argument being that Emirati weapons enabled the RSF’s systematic atrocities in Darfur. The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on RSF figures linked to the pipeline. Neither mechanism has materially altered the UAE’s behavior, because neither imposes costs that exceed the strategic and economic benefits of the relationship.
Iran: The Other Side of the Ledger
The same UAE that arms the RSF in Sudan found itself under Iranian missile and drone attack in March 2026 — and the contradiction at the heart of Abu Dhabi’s multi-vector foreign policy stopped being theoretical.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports sustained direct hits from Iranian ballistic missiles during the retaliatory strikes that followed Operation Epic Fury. The Burj Al Arab caught fire from secondary explosions. AWS data centers in the UAE were struck with precision, triggering a regional cloud computing outage. 260,000 passengers per day were stranded as Emirates airline suspended all operations.
This was not supposed to happen. The UAE had spent the better part of a decade carefully managing its relationship with Iran, pulling back from the confrontational posture of the early Trump and Obama years. Abu Dhabi restored full diplomatic relations with Tehran in 2023[1]. Bilateral trade flourished. Iranian businessmen operated freely in Dubai’s free trade zones. The UAE positioned itself as a neutral commercial hub that could do business with everyone — the United States and Iran, Israel and the Arab world, China and the West.
The Abraham Accords were the centerpiece of this strategy. By normalizing relations with Israel in 2020[2], the UAE gained access to Israeli technology, intelligence cooperation, and — crucially — a privileged position in the American political landscape that bipartisan support for the Accords guaranteed. When the Iran war erupted, the UAE found itself hosting American military assets at Al Dhafra Air Base while Iranian missiles targeted the airfield next door.
The contradiction is structural, not accidental. The UAE’s foreign policy is built on the premise that it can maintain profitable relationships with all sides simultaneously — that strategic ambiguity, backed by sovereign wealth and diplomatic skill, can substitute for the hard choices that less wealthy states must make. The Iran war tested this premise to destruction. Abu Dhabi discovered that hosting American military infrastructure makes you an Iranian target regardless of your bilateral trade volume, and that the economic diversification strategy — the entire Vision 2031 project of transforming the UAE into a post-oil knowledge economy — is worthless if your airports, data centers, and financial districts can be cratered in an afternoon.
The $1.4 trillion investment package that the UAE negotiated with the Trump administration — including the Stargate AI data center project, Nvidia chip imports, and Oracle cloud partnerships — now sits in a fundamentally different risk calculus. Every foreign investor doing business in the UAE must now price in the possibility that the next regional war will put their physical infrastructure in the blast radius. The Emirates’ value proposition — stability, connectivity, rule of law, world-class infrastructure — depends on the absence of the very conflicts that its own foreign policy entanglements help perpetuate.
The Diplomatic Teflon
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the UAE’s shadow wars is how little political cost they impose domestically or internationally.
In Washington, the UAE enjoys a level of bipartisan goodwill that few countries can match. The Abraham Accords made it a darling of both parties. Its massive arms purchases — $23 billion in pending sales as of 2025[2] — ensure that every major defense contractor has a financial interest in the relationship. The UAE’s network of lobbying firms, think tank sponsorships, and former-official advisory boards creates an ecosystem in which criticism of Emirati policy is professional career risk.
Cameron Hudson, among the most persistent analysts of the UAE’s role in Sudan, has made the essential point repeatedly: the international response has substituted naming and shaming for leverage it has been unwilling to acquire[1]. Congress held hearings on Emirati arms transfers to the RSF. The Biden administration raised the issue in bilateral meetings. Secretary Rubio’s Quad diplomacy framework has attempted to engage the UAE constructively. None of it has changed behavior, because the UAE has correctly calculated that the United States values the broader relationship — Abraham Accords, basing rights, AI partnerships, oil market cooperation — more than it values accountability on Sudan.
This calculation extends to international institutions. The UAE sits on the UN Human Rights Council. It hosts COP climate summits. It positions itself as a mediator and humanitarian donor. Abu Dhabi’s aid budget is, per capita, among the world’s largest. These credentials create a reputational shield that makes it politically awkward for diplomats to level the kind of accusations that the evidence warrants.
The result is a state that operates in the gap between what everyone knows and what anyone is willing to say officially. Western diplomats will tell you off the record that the UAE is fueling Sudan’s war. They will acknowledge that Emirati weapons have been used in atrocities documented by the ICC, the UN Panel of Experts, and the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. But the same diplomats will attend the next Abu Dhabi defense exhibition, sign the next arms deal, and issue the next joint statement celebrating the ‘strategic partnership.’
This is not hypocrisy in the conventional sense. It is a rational response to a structural reality: the UAE has made itself too useful to too many powerful actors to be held accountable by any of them. The arms pipeline to Sudan continues because the cost of stopping it — antagonizing a wealthy, well-connected ally — exceeds the cost of allowing it — additional suffering in a country that generates no strategic pressure on Western governments.
The Model: Power Without Visibility
What the UAE has pioneered is a model of power projection that is, in some ways, more sophisticated than anything attempted by larger states.
Russia projects power through direct military intervention — visible, costly, and reputationally devastating. Iran projects power through proxy networks — effective but ultimately vulnerable to the kind of systematic dismantlement Israel executed in 2024–2025. China projects power through economic infrastructure — Belt and Road investments that create dependency but also create targets and resentment.
The UAE’s model is different. It projects power through logistics, finance, and relationships. It doesn’t send its own troops (it sends Sudanese mercenaries). It doesn’t build its own proxy militias (it arms existing ones). It doesn’t occupy territory (it buys influence through investment, arms sales, and diplomatic access). The result is power without fingerprints — or, more precisely, power where the fingerprints are visible to specialists but invisible to the public.
This model has obvious advantages. It is cheap relative to direct intervention. It is deniable in the formal diplomatic sense, even when the evidence is overwhelming. It preserves the UAE’s brand as a cosmopolitan, business-friendly, moderate Arab state — a brand worth hundreds of billions in foreign investment and tourism revenue. And it allows Abu Dhabi to pursue contradictory objectives simultaneously: arming the RSF while maintaining relations with the SAF’s backers, hosting American bases while trading with Iran, supporting Israel while cultivating Arab world legitimacy.
But the model has a vulnerability that the Iran war has exposed: it depends on the absence of large-scale interstate conflict. The UAE’s shadow wars work in environments where the consequences are contained — where Sudan’s suffering doesn’t spill over into the Gulf, where Yemen’s chaos stays in Yemen, where the proxy relationships don’t generate direct retaliation against the Emirates themselves.
The Iranian missile strikes on Dubai and Abu Dhabi shattered that assumption. For the first time, the UAE’s foreign policy entanglements produced consequences that were visible to its own citizens — burning buildings, closed airports, stranded tourists, a shattered sense of invulnerability. The shadow wars came home.
Whether this changes Abu Dhabi’s strategic calculus is the open question, and the UAE’s leadership has historically been adaptable enough not to be counted out. But the Iran war introduced a variable no amount of diplomatic skill can neutralize: a regional adversary has now demonstrated both the will and the reach to strike the UAE’s most valuable assets — its cities, its infrastructure, its brand — in direct retaliation for its strategic alignments. The shadow wars worked in an era of contained regional conflicts. In an era of multi-front conflagration, they are a liability that neither wealth nor diplomacy can fully offset.
What Accountability Would Look Like
If the international community were serious about addressing the UAE’s role in Sudan’s war — and, more broadly, about establishing norms against the kind of covert arms transfers that fuel conflicts worldwide — what would it actually take?
The answer is uncomfortable because it involves costs that no major government has shown willingness to bear.
First, arms conditionality. The United States sells the UAE billions of dollars in advanced weapons annually. Conditioning those sales on verifiable cessation of arms transfers to the RSF would be the single most effective lever available. The precedent exists: the Leahy Law[1] prohibits U.S. arms sales to foreign military units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations. Applying it to the UAE’s relationship with the RSF would be legally defensible and practically impactful. It has not happened because the defense industry lobby opposes it, the Abraham Accords constituency opposes it, and no administration has been willing to pick that fight.
Second, financial sanctions on the gold pipeline. The RSF’s gold revenues flow through identifiable intermediaries, refineries, and trading houses in the UAE. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)[2] has the tools to target these networks — the same tools used against Russian oligarch assets and Iranian sanctions evasion. Applying them to the Sudan gold trade would hit both the RSF’s revenue and the UAE’s complicity. It has not happened because the UAE’s financial sector is deeply integrated with Western banking, and sanctioning Emirati entities would create collateral damage that Treasury officials consider disproportionate.
Third, diplomatic consequences. The UAE’s membership on international bodies — the UN Human Rights Council, the board of the International Renewable Energy Agency (which it hosts) — could be challenged. Its candidacies for future positions could be opposed. Its invitations to multilateral forums could be conditioned on verifiable compliance with arms embargoes. None of this has happened because the UAE’s diplomatic network ensures it always has enough votes to block such measures.
The honest assessment is that accountability for the UAE’s shadow wars will not come from external pressure. It will come, if it comes at all, from internal recalculation — the moment Abu Dhabi’s leadership concludes that the costs of these entanglements have outrun their benefits. The Iran war may be the catalyst for that recalculation. When your airports are burning and your data centers are offline and your tourists are stranded and your $1.4 trillion investment pipeline is suddenly repriced for war risk, the strategic value of a proxy relationship with a Sudanese militia looks rather different than it did when the consequences were confined to Darfur.
But counting on the UAE to reform itself is not a strategy. It is a hope. And hope, as every analyst of these conflicts knows, is not a plan.