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Pakistan’s Gulf policy drifts towards the UAE–Israel axis, exposing moral compromise, regional instability, and the illusion of strategic balance.
By JUNAID S. AHMAD
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 towards 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 quietened, 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 regions so long as trade flows and leverage compounds.
Yemen: where the lie finally died
Yemen is where the fiction of Gulf unity collapsed beyond repair. What began as a joint intervention has devolved into a struggle over whether Yemen will exist at all as a state. The House of Saud – bloodied, embarrassed, and exposed – now insists on a unified Yemeni authority capable of enforcing borders and agreements. The UAE has invested instead in carving out a southern enclave: separatist militias, port control, island bases, and economic chokeholds.
For Riyadh, this is existential. A fragmented Yemen exports instability directly into Saudi territory and sabotages any negotiated settlement with the Houthis. For Abu Dhabi, fragmentation is leverage – control of chokepoints matters more than Yemen’s survival as a polity.
That Saudi Arabia has now openly bombed weapons shipments linked to UAE-backed forces and issued public warnings is extraordinary. Gulf disputes are traditionally smothered in silence. When they go kinetic and public, it signals not a spat but a structural rupture.
Pakistan’s establishment sees this – and chooses denial.
Israel: the cancer at the core
To understand the Emirati recklessness, one must confront the real axis around which it revolves: apartheid, genocidal Israel.
The Abraham Accords were not peace agreements; they were an integration pact into Zionist regional supremacy. Israel does not merely occupy Palestine; it exports a model – militarised impunity, surveillance capitalism, permanent war dressed as security. The UAE did not normalise with Israel reluctantly. It embraced Israel as a force multiplier.
Israel provides Abu Dhabi with access to Washington’s coercive machinery, advanced surveillance, cyberwarfare, and a propaganda ecosystem that converts mass death into ‘stability’. In return, the UAE provides geography, ports, islands, mercenaries, and political insulation – doing Israel’s dirty work where Tel Aviv prefers not to appear.
Sudan. Somaliland. Socotra. Cyprus. The Red Sea. These are not isolated projects; they are components of a Zionist–Emirati expansion strategy designed to insulate Israel from economic pressure and accountability while strangling any resistance corridor before it matures.
Israel is the disease. The UAE is its most enthusiastic carrier.
Pakistan’s elite: Zionism in uniform and suits
Pakistan’s tragedy is not that it lacks options. It is that its ruling elite lacks dignity.
Rather than reassess its position amid this fracture, Pakistan’s military–civilian elite clings to the rhetoric of ‘balance’ while deepening structural entanglement with the Emirati–Israeli axis. Ports, airports, logistics terminals, military-linked corporations – these are not neutral investments. They are instruments of alignment.
Pakistan’s generals and their civilian accessories imagine they are playing geopolitics. In reality, they are being used as infrastructure – cheap, deniable, disposable.
Their behaviour is not naïveté. It is covert Zionism: collaboration without confession, obedience without ideological honesty. They mouth solidarity with Palestine while embedding Pakistan’s economy and security apparatus deeper into a regional order built to protect Israel from consequences.
This is not pragmatism. It is moral and strategic bankruptcy.
Venezuela: when empire drops the mask
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The illusion that empire prefers subtlety should have died long ago. Venezuela put the lie to it.
When sanctions failed and proxy pressure proved insufficient, the United States escalated – directly. US special forces were involved in a scandalous operation that culminated in the attempted kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. This was not deniable proxy warfare. It was naked imperial contempt for sovereignty.
And what happens when Washington’s decapitation move fails to achieve complete regime change in Caracas? Silence. Zero accountability. Empire simply moves on.
This is the future Pakistan’s elite is courting. When alignment fails to deliver stability, the costs will not be borne by Washington, Tel Aviv, or Abu Dhabi. They will be borne by Pakistan.
Empire does not protect collaborators. It discards them.
Saudi Arabia: a lesser evil, still an evil
Saudi Arabia deserves no absolution. The House of Saud remains a reactionary monarchy, structurally hostile to popular sovereignty and deeply entangled with empire. Its version of ‘stability’ is still oppression – merely quieter than the Emirati inferno.
Yet the difference matters. Saudi Arabia understands that Zionist expansionism generates perpetual instability. The UAE celebrates it. Riyadh conceals its servitude; Abu Dhabi flaunts it.
Pakistan’s elite has chosen to tilt slightly more towards the louder master.
Trumpism: empire without shame
Hovering over this landscape is Trumpism – the ideological nakedness of empire. Trump dispenses with liberal hypocrisy entirely. Loyalty is transactional. Morality is a joke. Strongmen are preferred to institutions. Israel is sacred. Everyone else is expendable.
The UAE fits this worldview perfectly: ruthless, efficient, unburdened by public opinion. Pakistan’s rulers mistake proximity to this axis for relevance. In truth, it entrenches their subordination.
When things go wrong – as they inevitably will – Trumpism will shrug. Pakistan will bleed.
The reckoning Pakistan is avoiding
The Gulf is not merely fracturing; it is sorting. States will be forced to choose – between sovereignty and fragmentation, between justice and normalisation, between dignity and managed submission.
Pakistan’s establishment has already chosen. It just lacks the courage to admit it.
History will not judge Pakistan for failing to be the Mafia don of West Asia. It will judge it for failing to recognise a moral and strategic crossroads when it stood directly upon it.
The UAE will continue to burn regions in service of Zionism. Israel will continue its genocidal project. The United States will continue to kidnap, sanction, and discard. Saudi Arabia will continue to pretend restraint equals virtue.
And Pakistan – unless it breaks from habit – will continue confusing servitude for strategy.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonisation (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), the Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE).
