On Gulf Arab issues, Western media fails to grasp 'deep interests' that UAE, Saudi Arabia share

Oil markets took a quick two-dollar tumble on March 3 because a top US newspaper reported that the United Arab Emirates was thinking about leaving the Opec grouping.

Growing strategic competition between the UAE and big brother Saudi Arabia, on matters ranging from oil production quotas to dominance of regional commerce and the outcome of the civil war in Yemen, were cited as reasons for an "internal debate" in Abu Dhabi about leaving the Arab-led oil cartel with 13 members.

The excitement was caused by the potential repercussions of such a shock UAE departure.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Kristan Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, listed them in a tweet that day.

A UAE withdrawal from the cartel would represent "a huge victory for US policy by splitting Opec+ with its ties to Russia" - even if it happened for the UAE's own reasons, she said.

The implications for Saudi Arabia would be "dire" because it would render Riyadh more isolated with Russia.

And it would weaken their control of the oil market and revenues at a key moment in Saudi Arabia's economic transition away from its dependency on oil revenues.

"Given the sensitive geopolitics, I expect some sort of denial from UAE, or softening to walk back this trial shot across the bow. But this will happen," Diwan said.

The market's excitement was thus predictably short-lived and Brent prices recovered within hours after Emirati officials flatly denied that an Opec exit was under consideration.

Several other respected Western experts on Gulf Arab politics have since agreed with Diwan's conclusion that it could merely be a matter of time before the UAE jumps ship.

But Saudi and Emirati commentators see things very differently.

Nobody in the Gulf is denying that tensions exist between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

But Emirati analyst Hamad al-Ahbabi said Western media reporting on the Gulf was usually nothing more than "weakly-sourced stories", and that it "suffers from the inability to comprehend the deep interests of the two countries and constant partnership".

He has a point.

Looking back at some news reports on the Gulf since 2018, it is evident that the Western media has failed to learn the lessons imparted by their own perpetuation of the "weapons of mass destruction" fiction dreamed up by neo-conservatives to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

My personal favourite is the US$400 billion value commonly associated with China's strategic investment pact with Iran.

This fantastically enormous number has been widely embraced without basic journalistic inquiry about its economic and political viability or lack thereof.

I asked influential UAE academic Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a senior fellow of the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, to critique the March 3 newspaper report.

There was "nothing really new in the latest story", he responded.

"It repeats the same old issues such as Yemen, Opec et cetera - old stuff in a new bottle," Abdulla said. "There are a few policy differences between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, but 80 per cent of the story is not true."

Speaking to reporters in London on Tuesday, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan echoed those sentiments.

"We have a very, very strong, robust partnership between the UAE and the kingdom. Do we agree on everything all the time? Probably not. But reports of divergence - that are often overdramatised, usually based on unnamed sources - don't understand how deep the relationship is," he said.

Diwan's comment about the UAE's prospective departure from Opec is instructive in this regard.

The whole idea is centred on the Biden administration's efforts since the outbreak of the Ukraine war to break the Arab-Russia stranglehold on international markets.

Voices in Washington have talked up the prospect of the West regaining control of energy markets lost when Saudi-led Opec instituted the 1973 oil embargo against Western powers, which supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war.

In stark contrast, the Saudis and Emiratis have repeatedly pointed out that control of energy markets is not the reason that oil and gas prices have been so volatile.

One reason they have given is underinvestment in hydrocarbon production to meet demand, with energy companies more interested in pleasing shareholders and fending off political pressure to reduce their emissions.

The other, of course, is that energy politics between Russia and its European adversaries has massively disrupted markets.

Like China and Western allies India and Turkey, the Gulf Arabs see no reason to mix other people's politics with their own economic policy objectives, and they are doing more business than ever with the Russians and whoever else has a viable proposition.

Beyond that, it is essential to consider what Saudi Arabia and the UAE represent in Middle East politics.

They are absolute hereditary monarchies who are primarily invested, politically and financially, in ensuring the maintenance of the status quo in the Arab world, particularly in regards to the monarchies of Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco, and military-dominated Egypt and Sudan.

A breaking of ranks by the UAE would have seismic repercussions for the Middle East and North Africa, much to the benefit of Iran and the Islamist political movements the monarchies have worked with the West to suppress.

Nor would a UAE departure from Opec substantially change the dynamics of international oil markets, unless the cartel disintegrated altogether.

Were the UAE to do the Biden administration's bidding by exporting at full capacity, it could well panic markets because of enhanced concerns about the lack of spare global production capacity.

So while the Saudi-Emirati relationship is undoubtedly becoming increasingly competitive, there has been nothing to suggest that their common core interests and existential threat perceptions have at all changed.

Tom Hussain is a journalist based in Islamabad who has covered South Asia and the Middle East for the past three decades.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.