As the wave of Arab Spring protest movements challenged governments across the Middle East and North Africa, the Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar emerged as key sponsors of proxy warfare across the region. These states’ efforts to shape the politics of other countries reveal profound shifts in the character of proxy warfare in the Greater Middle East since 2011.

The Gulf monarchies’ interventions have reshaped conflicts from Libya to Yemen and the Horn of Africa to Syria, competing not only against their regional rival Iran but also amongst themselves for political influence and economic access. In doing so, they illustrate the complexity and dynamic nature of the multipolar proxy war environment, where conflicts between the United States and Russia, and the United States and Iran, are layered over multiple axes of regional and sub-state competition.

However, since 2011, all three Gulf monarchies have shifted their approach to proxy warfare. Their initial aims of reshaping the regional balance of power in their favor—by supporting revisionist proxy actors in arenas like Libya and Syria while working to shore up allies like Bahrain— ran into the challenges that sponsors of proxies often face. As a result of this, as well as their perceptions of the United States’ policy orientation in the region, the Gulf monarchies adopted more conservative goals in their use of proxy warfare, aiming to protect their interests and manage threats to the status quo across the region rather than reshape it.

In addition to this shift, diplomatic divisions among the three monarchies have intensified due to differences in their proxy war strategies and their perceptions of the Arab Spring. These divisions hold the potential to spark further conflict in areas where proxy sponsors’ interests collide. The shift to status quo maintenance-driven strategies has not ended Gulf state sponsorship of proxy forces. Instead, it has led to ongoing warfare in the name of crisis management, and in many cases, the virtual absence of efforts to end wars through negotiations, political settlements, and the provision of reconstruction aid and other forms of assistance.

• In the early years of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar sought to use proxy warfare to re-order the Middle East in their favor. The rise of these Gulf states as sponsors of proxy warfare increased the complexity of U.S. efforts to stabilize the region.
• The proxy strategies of these three Gulf monarchies have shifted since the 2011 Arab Spring from seeking revisionist and opportunistic aims to efforts at crisis management:
  • Revisionist/opportunistic: From 2011 through about 2014, the Arab Gulf monarchies saw the instability wrought by the Arab Spring as an opportunity to revise the existing regional balance of power in their favor by replacing opponents with friendly regimes, as in Libya and Syria (with the notable exception of Bahrain, where a regional coalition intervened to shore up the regime).
  • Crisis management/status quo maintenance: By about 2014, the Arab Gulf regimes no longer believed that they could win a decisive victory in the region’s conflicts. At the same time, the proximate costs of regional instability resulting from these unresolved conflicts became too high a cost to bear. These three Arab Gulf states’ proxy strategies therefore largely shifted to a crisis containment mode. While they continued to engage in proxy conflicts, notably launching an intervention in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies were increasingly oriented towards upholding the status quo rather than overturning existing regimes.
• By 2014, the Gulf monarchies changed their proxy warfare strategy as it became increasingly clear that their proxies could not achieve decisive victory but more often fragmented and extended civil wars that gave their opponents an opportunity to gain regional influence.
• Growing divisions among these three Gulf states exacerbated competition among the proxies they supported, thereby prolonging conflict. Different approaches to regional policy, including their choices of proxy affiliates, sharpened long-standing diplomatic divisions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand and Qatar on the other.
• The monarchies’ shift towards status quo maintenance has not meant an end to proxy war. In the absence of U.S. pressure on regional actors to resolve regional disputes and investment in demobilization and the creation of alternative livelihood opportunities, proxy wars will continue where the leadership of the Arab Gulf monarchies perceive a conflict party as a threat to their regional interests or when crises spark new conflicts.
• Despite the shift towards status quo maintenance, splits among the three monarchies over their threat perceptions and willingness to support different kinds of proxy forces persist and could fuel further conflict. Qatar, in particular, has supported Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated and other Islamist proxies, while Saudi Arabia and the UAE see these groups as dangerous to their own regional interests, and have supported Salafists, more “moderate” groups, autocratic regimes, and others who oppose Muslim Brotherhood affiliates. This split continues to shape conflicts in which the three monarchies are involved.
• When the Obama administration began to signal that it was looking to disengage from the Middle East and would not support Gulf state revisionist strategies with direct military force, Gulf states adopted more conservative, status quo maintenance aims.
• Gulf proxy strategies have also been shaped by intra-Gulf competition, local conflict dynamics, and regional politics more broadly.
• The most important step that U.S. policymakers can take to increase stability in the Middle East—a core U.S. strategic goal—is to end civil wars and other forms of sub-state conflict, and therefore close off opportunities for regional proxy intervention. Sustained diplomatic attention and investment in development will be necessary, if not sufficient, to end these deeply complex and intractable conflicts.

In 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar viewed this new source of instability as an opportunity to revise elements of the existing regional balance of power through proxy warfare. Over time, however, this assessment soured, as proxy warfare no longer appeared to be a policy tool with the potential to achieve a new favorable regional order while insulating their homelands from threat. As a result, they increasingly shifted to proxy strategies aimed at managing specific crises with an eye toward maintaining the regional status quo.

To varying degrees, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar were insulated from the Arab Spring’s destabilizing effects. Due to their monopoly on domestic security services and vast hydrocarbon wealth, they were able to use combinations of violent repression, welfare spending, and sectarian appeals to stave off more widespread protest movements.¹ The Gulf monarchies’ relative stability amid the Arab Spring in turn enabled them to develop proxy relationships with armed groups in states that were experiencing the greatest upheaval during the Arab Spring.

All three of these Gulf monarchies saw the early years of the Arab Spring as an opportunity to assert their regional ambitions, an approach this report terms “revisionist.” For Saudi Arabia, this meant reasserting what it saw as its rightful role in leading the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the association of Arab Gulf countries created under Saudi leadership in Riyadh in 1981, and replacing a potentially threatening regime in Syria.² However, of the three, Saudi Arabia took the most cautious approach due to concerns that revolution could spread within the Arabian Peninsula, potentially challenging the absolute monarchy of the Al Saud royal family.³

For the UAE and Qatar, both founded in 1971, the Arab Spring provided an opportunity to assert their own ambitions to regional leadership. Prior to the Arab Spring, both states had pursued hedging strategies, offsetting the risks of associating solely with one powerful state (first Britain and later the United States), by balancing among multiple regional powers.⁴ Both invested heavily in military cooperation with the United States from the 1990’s, purchasing U.S.-manufactured weapons systems, hosting U.S. military bases, and sometimes even engaging in coalition interventions alongside the United States and NATO. The UAE earned the nickname “little Sparta” from U.S. generals who admired the capabilities of UAE pilots in Afghanistan.⁵ While the UAE tended to hew more closely to Saudi Arabia’s policies and Qatar tended to strike out further on its own, the Arab Spring offered both small states the opportunity to assert regional leadership.

One of the first opportunities for the Gulf states to alter the regional balance of power came in the early months of 2011, when the Obama administration made clear its willingness to intervene in Libya. Muammar al-Gaddafi had previously clashed with the leadership of the Gulf monarchies, in particular Saudi Arabia, over their relationship with the United States among other issues. Gaddafi’s intelligence chiefs reportedly ordered a covert plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2003,⁶ and at a 2009 Arab League summit, Gaddafi announced to King Abdullah in front of the rest of the Arab leaders, “I have been waiting for six years to tell you that you are the liar. You were made by Britain and protected by the United States.”⁷ The 2011 Libyan uprising and the signal that the United States would back intervention offered the opportunity to replace a long-time erratic opponent with a potential ally.

Meanwhile, through the summer and fall of 2011 and into 2012, the Assad regime’s violent repression led Syria’s peaceful protest movement to disintegrate into civil war. The Syrian civil war represented another opportunity for Saudi Arabia and the UAE—and to a lesser extent Qatar—to replace the Assad regime, an important strategic partner of their regional rival Iran, with a more friendly government. Overthrowing the Assad regime also held out the further promise of eliminating the “land bridge” that served as a supply route from Iran to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The notable exception to the Gulf states’ revisionist approach—in which the Gulf monarchies saw the Arab Spring-wrought instability as an opportunity to gain regional influence by replacing oppositional regimes with friendlier proxies—was in Bahrain, where the GCC, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, deployed troops to stabilize the regime and suppress Bahrain’s nascent protest movement. The intervention demonstrated Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies’ fears that revolution elsewhere in the Greater Middle East could come home to roost in the GCC. The Saudi leadership in particular hoped to not just suppress opposition in Bahrain but also to send a message to their own restive Shia population in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.⁸

However, while it is difficult to pinpoint a precise turning point, the combined influence of four factors by about 2014 led these three Gulf monarchies to change their calculations and adopt proxy warfare strategies aimed more consistently at managing crises that threatened their spheres of interest and maintaining the political status quo for the region rather than revising the regional balance of power.

First, by 2014, it had become increasingly clear that proxy warfare strategies were riskier than the Gulf monarchies had imagined in early 2011. Rather than achieving quick victories in Libya and Syria as they had hoped, the monarchies found themselves in complex quagmires with dwindling hope for an outright military victory.

Second, the Obama administration signaled that it would not support further military revisionism in the wake of the Libya intervention. The administration’s decision to not use direct force against the Assad regime in Syria in August 2013 made this stance clear. Formal negotiations leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran deal as it is known colloquially, began in November 2013, with formal signing of the agreement taking place in July 2015. The negotiations and eventual agreement further stoked Gulf state fears that the United States was retreating from the region altogether, leaving a security vacuum in its wake that called for a more conservative approach to regional instability.

Third, the divergent goals of the Gulf monarchies in many of the same arenas increasingly came into conflict. This strategic divergence was at the root of the diplomatic dispute between Qatar and the other GCC states, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that first burst into the open in March 2014 and flared up again beginning in 2017. As a result, the Arab Gulf monarchies increasingly saw themselves in competition not only with their traditional regional opponent Iran, but also with one another, creating a far more complex web of competitive relationships that increased their perceptions of risk.

Finally, Iran and ISIS both benefited from the post-Arab Spring instability, increasing the threat they posed to the Gulf monarchies. Iran doubled down on its support for the Assad regime in Syria and deployed its own proxy Shia militias there to support the regime’s forces, while in the spring and summer of 2014, ISIS was able to win a significant swath of territory extending from Mosul to Raqqa. Both Iran’s increased presence in the Levant—where Syria formed an essential part of Iran’s desired “land bridge” linking it to Hezbollah⁹—and ISIS’s territorial victories posed a significant threat from the perspective of the Arab Gulf monarchies.

As a result of these four factors, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies became increasingly status quo-oriented. Rather than seeing ongoing conflicts in the region as a strategic opportunity, the monarchies began to see some of the actors involved in these conflicts as potential threats. Their proxy strategies, in turn, became oriented towards crisis management, or maintaining rather than revising the regional balance of power. This led the Gulf monarchies to participate in the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition intervention, to intervene against an insurgent group they saw as an Iranian proxy in Yemen, and to deepen their competition in Libya. However, this transition did not eliminate Gulf opportunistic aims entirely, whether in Libya or as reflected in the competition in the Horn of Africa.

As the ten-year anniversary of the initial Arab Spring protests approaches, this shift in the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies will play a central role in defining the security landscape in the Middle East. The Gulf monarchies are unlikely to pursue further regional revisionism on the scale of their early Arab Spring interventions, at least in the near-term. Instead, we should expect them to wage proxy wars more often where rivals—whether Iran, Islamist groups, or other Gulf monarchies—encroach in places they perceive to be in their immediate sphere of interest.

Regional intervention in proxy wars often transforms relatively localized conflicts into destabilizing regional wars that spill across borders. Proxy wars across the Greater Middle East have spilled across borders, threatening the stability of neighboring states and providing potent breeding grounds for organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda, with security implications not only for their hosts but also for the world. They have also generated humanitarian crises, contributing to massive levels of human displacement that has significant impacts on the domestic politics of countries where refugees arrive as well as international security implications.

U.S. policy in the region should focus on using America’s considerable leverage over these three Gulf countries—all U.S. security partners—to end their interventions in conflicts in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. The United States should also use its diplomatic tools to promote political settlements in these conflicts and among the Gulf states, particularly in the ongoing diplomatic dispute between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Qatar on the other. As long as these wars continue, they provide avenues for adversarial actors to intervene and gain a foothold—not to mention the staggering humanitarian costs of these conflicts.

The rest of this report is divided into four sections. The first section examines each of these three Gulf monarchies’ strategic interests in the early post-Arab Spring period from 2011 through 2014 and goes on to look at how these interests shaped their proxy interventions in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. The second section examines the four factors that led the Gulf states to change their strategic assessments, and the third section examines the interventions that followed that turning point. Finally, the conclusion discusses what the Gulf states’ shifting approach means for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar’s proxy strategies since 2011 can be viewed through two broad strategic lenses. In the earliest years of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, the Gulf states adopted opportunistic and revisionist strategies aimed at revising the regional order. Later on, the Gulf states took a more conservative approach to crises, downgrading their proxy ambitions from shifting the regional balance of power to maintaining the status quo.

From 2011 through approximately mid-2014, all three Gulf monarchies largely took an opportunistic approach to the instability wrought by the Arab Spring. They saw weakness and conflict in Libya, and later Syria, as an opportunity to revise the regional balance of power by replacing opponents with allies or friendly regimes.

Notably however, of the three Gulf states, Qatar was by far the most optimistic, while both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi took a more conservative approach to the Arab Spring revolutions, especially with regards to instability on the Arabian Peninsula itself. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE deployed forces to quash a grassroots protest movement and prop up a neighboring Sunni monarchy.

The rest of this section examines the Gulf states’ strategic assessments of the Arab Spring. It then analyzes the interventions in Libya, Syria, and Bahrain through this lens.

All three Arab Gulf monarchies were largely insulated from the destabilizing effects of the Arab Spring. Due to their monopoly on domestic security services, as well as their prodigious oil and gas wealth, these countries were able to use different combinations of violent repression, increased welfare spending, and the deployment of sectarian narratives to stave off more widespread protest movements.

Thanks to their relative insulation, the monarchies perceived the Arab Spring as an opportunity to take advantage of instability in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa to use proxy warfare to reshape the Greater Middle East to favor their interests. Of the three states, Saudi Arabia perceived the Arab Spring as most threatening due to its revolutionary nature, while Qatar viewed the Arab Spring as more of an opportunity, with the UAE sitting between the two in its perceptions.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia initially saw the transnational Arab Spring movement as cause for concern, and saw potential instability on the peninsula itself as particularly threatening.¹⁰ This concern about instability, and the Saudi regime’s anti-revolutionary posture, meant that Saudi strategy was the closest to status quo maintenance of the three Gulf monarchies during the early post-Arab Spring period.

Riyadh also saw itself as both coordinator and leader of the GCC since its founding in 1981. Riyadh therefore felt responsible for taking the lead in countering the effects of the Arab Spring on the Arabian Peninsula, particularly where protests could threaten the GCC regimes themselves.

Saudi Arabia itself saw some domestic opposition organizing and protest in response to the initial wave of the Arab Spring. In February 2011, a number of leading Saudi intellectuals with different ideological backgrounds, including a human rights lawyer and Islamist leadership, signed a petition titled “Towards a State of Rights and Institutions” calling for freedom of speech, independent association, and an elected national assembly, among other rights; another petition articulating the political and economic demands of Saudi youth drew over 10,000 signatures.¹¹ Calls surfaced on Facebook for a Day of Rage on March 11 that paralleled organizing in other parts of the region.¹²

But Saudi Arabia quickly shut such efforts down through a combination of violent repression, increased welfare spending, and sectarian narratives designed to paint reformers as Shia “terrorists” who were secretly supported by Iran. The monarchy announced major new spending packages in response to the protests, including a $93 billion aid package, an increase in state subsidies, and the introduction of employment benefits.¹³ The National Guard was deployed across the country to prevent protests, protests in Qatif were violently quelled, and the monarchy painted its opponents in a sectarian light, claiming that the opposition was part of Iran’s conspiracy to destabilize Saudi Arabia from within.¹⁴

Despite the revolutionary threat Saudi Arabia perceived from the Arab Spring movements, the effective suppression of protest at home, allowed Saudi Arabia to also look towards the opportunities the protests opened up elsewhere.

Saudi Arabia asserted its authority to lead the region’s response to the Arab Spring. In part, this meant preventing the spread of protest movements close to home on the Arabian Peninsula and against allies like Egypt, objectives that align with status quo maintenance.¹⁵ However, it would also open space for Saudi Arabia to pursue opportunist policies with regards to its major regional rival, Iran, and other states that challenged its vision of regional order, like Libya.

The UAE

Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE initially took a cautious approach to the unrest generated by the Arab Spring. The de facto leader of the UAE, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ), viewed the rise of Muslim Brotherhood parties in Tunisia and Egypt as threatening to the security of the Emirati regime, initiating a domestic crackdown that targeted the small Muslim Brotherhood movement within the UAE.¹⁶ The Emirati Brotherhood affiliate, Islah, “voice[d] concerns about political freedoms more broadly, thereby leading to restrictions from the regime,” according to Courtney Freer, an expert on the domestic politics of the Gulf states.¹⁷

The Emirates’ leadership was concerned by the potential for Islah to draw on themes of economic disparity and lack of economic opportunities in parts of the Emirates that had resonated in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, particularly by highlighting economic disparities between the wealthiest emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which accounted for about 90 percent of the UAE’s GDP, and the more rural, less wealthy emirates, which had significantly lower GDP per capita and higher unemployment.¹⁸ According to a U.S. embassy diplomatic cable, Emirati political scientist Ebtisam Al Ketbi warned in the mid-2000s that “backward economic conditions and extremism in certain parts of the UAE could present a potent threat.”¹⁹ In 2011, the Gulf States Newsletter referred to the five poorer emirates as a “ticking time bomb,” since these emirates “have the least to lose by rocking the boat.”²⁰

The Emirati leadership had other reasons to resent the Brotherhood’s domestic influence that were rooted in the state’s values and regime stability, as well as its international image. The movement’s advocacy “for the implementation of conservative social policies [is] a source of embarrassment for rulers, who hope to project an image of a modern and largely secular society,” according to Freer.²¹ Islah had the potential to contest the regime’s claims to legitimacy.²² Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed has long seen the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, which he tends to conflate with each other, as critical threats to the Emirati regime: he reportedly told a U.S. delegation in 2004 that “we are having a culture war with the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.”²³ The instability that followed the Arab Spring appeared to empower Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups across the region, from the Emirati perspective. In 2012, the UAE’s Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed called the Muslim Brotherhood “an organization which encroaches upon the sovereignty and integrity of nations” while calling for a coordinated crackdown on the Brotherhood across the Gulf.²⁴

Nevertheless, while Abu Dhabi’s leadership saw the spread of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the region as a threat to the stability of the Emirati regime, they did not experience significant domestic mobilization at home.²⁵ Where the UAE perceived even the potential for mobilization, it cracked down, arresting 94 people in 2012, known as “the UAE 94,” with suspected ties to the Brotherhood.²⁶ The leadership of Abu Dhabi also announced $2 billion in housing loans for Emiratis.²⁷

The lack of a clear and direct domestic threat, despite UAE perceptions of Arab Spring movements as indirectly threatening regime stability, opened the space for an Emirati strategy of opportunistic intervention abroad.

Qatar

Compared to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Qatar viewed the Arab Spring as posing fewer threats and more opportunities—a perception that would promote its adoption of revisionist aims.

Qatar had long sought for itself a more significant role in the region, and the Arab Spring provided an opportunity to garner greater influence. Starting in the late 1990s, Qatar’s leadership began to invest resources in expanding Doha’s regional profile. It led mediation efforts in Lebanon, Darfur, and Yemen, and promoted an alternative vision of Islamic and Arab identity different from that of the other Gulf monarchies, a touchstone of many Middle Eastern states’ efforts to achieve regional power status. Doha also invested in soft power initiatives, including hosting campuses of American universities in Education City and submitting the winning bid to host international sports events like the 2022 FIFA World Cup.²⁸

These efforts to build a network of external relationships in the region were part of the regime’s strategy of linking Qatar’s economic well-being and security to more powerful states like the United States.²⁹

In comparison to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Qatar was the least concerned with the destabilizing potential of the Arab Spring. While Qatar has positioned itself firmly under the U.S. security umbrella, its leaders have also pursued a policy of balancing between the two largest regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, since the 1990s. This “strategic hedging” approach led Qatar to develop relationships with non-state Islamist organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood, and to maintain cautiously cordial relations with Iran.³⁰

Qatar has also never experienced Muslim Brotherhood affiliates as a direct threat to domestic stability, in part because its small population and unitary state system allowed its rulers to develop a strong welfare state with less internal inequality (at least among official citizens), and in part because the Qatari regime has invested over the past several decades in building relationships with Brotherhood-affiliates both domestically and abroad.³¹ Doha welcomed Muslim Brotherhood exiles like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and gave them a platform in exchange for the understanding that they would not weigh in on Qatar’s domestic politics.³² These relationships helped insulate Qatar from Arab Spring-related instability.

In contrast to the Emirati Brotherhood, the Qatari Muslim Brotherhood movement “has favored the ideological and social elements of its platform over pursuing structural or institutionalized power,” according to Freer, thereby posing less of a direct threat to the monarchy’s political authority.³³

As part of Doha’s strategic hedging approach to the region, Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani also invested in creating a role for Qatar as a key diplomatic mediator in the region from the mid-1990s, a foreign policy reorientation facilitated by the Emir’s decision to invest in infrastructure to exploit the country’s natural gas reserves, leading to a rapid accumulation of wealth that could be invested in regional diplomatic initiatives.³⁴ Qatar maintained a cordial relationship with Iran in part because of the shared North Field/South Pars gas field.³⁵

Whereas Saudi Arabia and the UAE initially held concern regarding the risks of the Arab Spring, Qatar—with its different relationship with and orientation toward key Islamist groups and toward Iran—was the most willing to lean into the protests’ potential for revising the regional balance. In the early months of the Arab Spring, Qatar took advantage of its existing network of relationships and the good will they generated. Qatar’s state-aligned media company, Al Jazeera, provided extensive coverage of the Arab Spring protests in places like Egypt’s Tahrir Square, and therefore played an important role in broadening the Arab Spring’s reach. Notably, however, while Al Jazeera extensively covered protests in places where Doha supported the opposition, including Egypt, Libya, and Syria, it failed to give similar attention to protests in Bahrain, where Qatar tacitly supported the Saudi-led efforts to quash protests.³⁶

In the early years following the Arab Spring protests, the Gulf monarchies intervened in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. In two of these three interventions, the monarchies embraced an opportunist and revisionist strategy. However, the character of their strategies within these revisionist interventions differed depending on their threat perceptions.

In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—the two states that perceived the Arab Spring protests as more threatening—intervened directly to quash protests and maintain the status quo. Compared with subsequent interventions in Libya and Syria, the intervention in Bahrain was the most status quo-oriented of the GCC states’ interventions during the early years of the Arab Spring. Qatar, which of the three was least concerned about the strategic threat of revolution and therefore had the most opportunistic orientation, went along with the intervention in Bahrain without offering full-throated support.

Yet despite splits in their interpretation of the Arab Spring’s relative provision of opportunities, and their intervention in Bahrain, all three monarchies saw conflict in both Libya and Syria as an opportunity to revise the regional balance of power by partnering with proxies. As a result, the overall strategic character of Gulf monarchy proxy strategy in this period was opportunist and revisionist.

Bahrain (2011): Maintaining the Status Quo

While the Gulf monarchies’ approach to the early Arab Spring tended towards opportunism, the intervention in Bahrain stands out as an important exception where status quo maintenance dominated. The Gulf states’ approach to the intervention in Bahrain also foreshadowed the way differing threat perceptions would lead to more significant divisions later on.

For Saudi Arabia, the protest movement that erupted in Bahrain, led by Bahrain’s Shia-dominated opposition movement, cut too close to home by threatening the stability of an ally, neighbor, and fellow Sunni monarchy. The Saudi government’s relationship with its domestic Shia population, especially in its oil-rich Eastern Province, has been securitized since the Iranian revolution in 1979.³⁷ The Iranian government’s revolutionary-oriented foreign policy drove the Saudi government to perceive organizing by its Shia population as a potential threat to regime survival, linked to Iran as well as Shia movements elsewhere. Protests that spread from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province in mid-February 2011 heightened concerns that successes achieved by the protestors in Bahrain would encourage opposition movements within Saudi Arabia.³⁸

Saudi Arabia also shared the Bahraini monarchy’s view that the protests were somehow encouraged by Iran to help it gain a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. A Saudi official told a reporter at the time that “there is no doubt Iran is involved” in the Bahrain protest movement, without providing evidence for this claim.³⁹ Whatever the truth and extent of Iranian involvement, Saudi Arabia perceived the Bahrain intervention as an effort to defend the status quo from external and internal revisionist threats and not as an opportunity for its own revision.

On March 14, 2011, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sent 2,000 of their own security forces under the aegis of the GCC’s joint Peninsula Shield Force to Manama, alongside a Kuwaiti naval contingent, to quell the protests and shore up the government of Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.⁴⁰

Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE was concerned about the optics of the fall of a Sunni monarchy on the peninsula to opposition protests.⁴¹ Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, said in a statement about the Emirates’ contribution, “the security and stability in the region requires all of us to stand united in one rank so as to safeguard our national gains and prevent any strife for a better future.”⁴² The Bahrain intervention held such importance for the Emirati leadership that after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed public criticism of the intervention, the UAE reportedly threatened to withdraw from the NATO-led coalition in Libya unless Secretary Clinton issued a statement pulling back on criticism of the intervention. The statement was not only issued, but was also vetted by Emirati officials before it was put forth as an official communiqué.⁴³

While Qatar supported protest movements elsewhere in the region in early 2011, the prospect of the fall of a fellow monarchy close to home was concerning. Qatar supported the intervention with “a symbolic troop detachment,” according to scholar Toby Matthiesen.⁴⁴

The Saudi government had already violently put down street protests in Saudi Arabia itself, with police opening fire on protestors in Qatif, wounding at least three.⁴⁵ The Peninsula Shield Force was intended as an additional anti-revolutionary message to Saudi Arabia’s own Shia population in the Eastern Province that they would continue to experience violent repression by the regime in response to any public protest or opposition organizing.⁴⁶ It was also a message to the region that Saudi Arabia would be a counter-revolutionary force wherever its interests were threatened. A Saudi official noted at the outset of the intervention that “this is the initial phase. Bahrain will get whatever assistance it needs. It’s open-ended.”⁴⁷

Libya (2011 – 2014)

If the intervention in Bahrain exhibited the existence of status quo maintenance aims among the Gulf monarchies, the NATO intervention in Libya exhibited the Gulf monarchies’ opportunistic, revisionist aims in the wider region. Qatar and the UAE, in keeping with their lower perceptions of threat from the Arab Spring, played more active roles while Saudi Arabia took a more conservative approach.

On March 19, 2011, a NATO-led coalition that also included Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, and Sweden, implemented a no-fly zone in Libya in response to a violent crackdown on nation-wide protests by Libya’s long-time leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.⁴⁸ The Obama administration’s decision to intervene was based, in part, on the regime’s violent attacks on protestors and warnings from human rights organizations that the regime’s offensive on Benghazi could lead to an imminent massacre of civilians.⁴⁹

Both Qatar and the UAE saw intervention in Libya as an opportunity to replace Gaddafi, an erratic actor, with a more sympathetic government. The Libyan uprising also provided an opportunity to expand their influence generally.⁵⁰ According to Frederic Wehrey, an analyst of Libya’s civil war and Gulf politics, both states saw Gaddafi’s fall as an opportunity “to project influence beyond their borders, to refashion the shifting political landscape to their will.”⁵¹

Qatar’s foreign minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani played a key role in getting the Arab League to vote unanimously in favor of the NATO-led intervention.⁵² Qatar contributed six Mirage fighter jets that flew sorties as part of the no-fly zone mission,⁵³ while the UAE contributed six F-16 Fighting Falcons and six Mirages to the operation.⁵⁴ Their support also provided NATO with political cover.

During the NATO-led intervention, Qatar and the UAE also provided support and training to Libyan opposition militia groups on the ground, deploying their own Special Forces in Libya to aid these efforts. Qatar supplied fighting groups with Belgian FN rifles and French Milan anti-tank missiles, as well as small arms shipments that amounted to 20,000 tons of weapons. Qatari Special Forces also played an important role in the August Battle of Tripoli, when Libyan rebel forces captured Libya’s capital from the Gaddafi regime.⁵⁵ The sight of Qatar’s flag flying side-by-side with the free Libya flag over the ruins of Gaddafi’s compound in October 2011 quickly came to symbolize Qatar’s contributions to the Libyan rebels.⁵⁶ Likewise, the UAE transferred weapons to Libyan militias and its Special Forces participated in the rebel advance on Tripoli.⁵⁷ While Qatar reportedly tended to support militia commanders with Islamist ties like Ismail al-Salabi of the Rafallah al-Sahati Companies and Abdelhakim Belhadj, commander of the Tripoli Brigade, the UAE leaned towards regionally—and tribally—oriented militias.⁵⁸

While playing a more passive role in Libya than either Qatar or the UAE, Saudi Arabia supported the NATO-led no-fly zone in Libya. After hours of closed-door deliberations among the 21 foreign ministers, the Arab League called for a no-fly zone in March 2011 at the same time as it officially recognized the rebel movement as Libya’s official government.⁵⁹ Because NATO had announced that Arab support was a precondition for the execution of a no-fly zone, the support of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab League took on added significance.⁶⁰

The seemingly quick victory in Libya, which saw Qatar and the UAE working side-by-side with their proxy forces on the ground while rallying the international community, encouraged the flourishing sense of optimism among the Gulf countries that they could take advantage of the Arab Spring-generated instability to re-align the regional balance in their favor via proxy wars. Representing this view, in an early 2012 interview, then-Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim asserted that the change wrought by the Arab Spring “is positive in my opinion. And the medium and long-range will be possible…I’m not worried from [sic] the change. I think it will be healthy change for the people and for all of us.”⁶¹

This optimism was reflected on the ground: a reporter described a “hero’s welcome” for fighters returning to Benghazi in October 2011 from fighting the remnants of the regime in its last holdout in Sirte, that included crowds of flag-waving Benghazians dancing and ululating in the streets.⁶²

After this initial sense of optimism, however, Qatar and the UAE failed to translate their military victory into influence in the post-Gaddafi political landscape. The National Transitional Council (NTC), the alliance of rebel forces that overthrew Gaddafi’s regime, struggled to exert political authority in the post-Gaddafi state and got caught up in factional fighting as more than 300 militias continued to operate.⁶³

The international sponsors quickly got caught up in the cross-fire and recriminations: in November 2011, Ali Tarhouni, deputy chief of the NTC’s executive committee, publicly criticized Qatar’s ongoing role in Libya, saying “they have brought armaments, and they have given them to people that we don’t know—I think paid money to just about anybody. They intervened in committees that have control over security issues;” NTC chairman Mustapha Abdul-Jalil, whose faction had received support from the UAE, also criticized Qatar’s lack of consultation with the NTC.⁶⁴

As an anonymous UN official bluntly put it, in Libya, “the Emirates and Qatar were really awful…They didn’t give a damn about Libya, they were always worried that the other would come out on top.”⁶⁵

In July 2012, Qatar’s preferred political party Al-Watan, an Islamist party established by Abdelhakim Belhadj, the leader of an anti-Gaddafi rebel militia, only won one seat in constituent assembly elections.⁶⁶ The UAE also continued to play a behind-the-scenes role in the ongoing conflict in Libya, hosting some of the key figures of the NTC who relocated to the UAE as factional infighting wore on.⁶⁷

By that time, however, the optimism shared by the Gulf monarchies—and expressed perhaps most sharply by bin Jassim in his early 2012 interview—had already translated into opportunistic intervention in another country—Syria.

Syria (2011 – 2014)

In the earliest phases of the Syrian conflict, the Gulf Arab states—led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar—pursued a diplomatic approach, working through the League of Arab States to bring about a negotiated settlement and post-Assad transition process through the summer of 2011.⁶⁸ Such a strategy could be seen as status quo maintenance. However, by January 2012, it had become clear that this strategy would not suffice to resolve the Syrian crisis.⁶⁹ Despite shared incentives for the three monarchies to pursue leadership change in Syria, disagreements over who should lead a post-Assad government led to strategies of intervention that were at odds with each other.

In contrast with Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries in the region, the Assad regime did not fall in response to widespread protest. Meanwhile, Qatar, the then-chair of the Arab League, was still riding the optimism of the Libyan intervention, and leveraged its role to diplomatically isolate Assad’s regime and hosted conferences to provide support for the opposition.⁷⁰ Qatar was energized by a “sense of triumphalism” after Gaddafi’s fall and hoped to just as quickly replace the Assad regime with a friendlier, likely Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated government headed by rebel militias.⁷¹ The Emir of Qatar called for an armed intervention in Syria in early 2012.⁷²

The other Arab Gulf monarchies also believed they could quickly and easily achieve results similar to the Libya intervention in Syria. Replacing the Iran-aligned Assad regime with friendlier forces would extend the Gulf monarchies’ influence in the region while dealing a significant blow to Iran’s regional ambitions. Journalist Kim Ghattas writes that “the Saudis wanted Assad gone so they could contain Iran’s ambitions in Syria. In private, Saudi officials began to describe Assad as an occupier, a man with no legitimacy who was oppressing the majority with help from outside forces.”⁷³ The 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq had shifted the balance of power in the region, essentially creating a zone of uninterrupted Iranian influence from Iran to Lebanon by empowering Iraqi Shia militias and politicians with ties to Iran. Saudi Arabia in particular had tried to pull Syria away from Iran’s orbit in 2009 and 2010 with a diplomatic approach. For the Gulf monarchies, therefore, removing Assad via armed proxies gave them another bite at the apple, and would give them a greater foothold again in the sub-region: “when the uprising first began, Gulf leaders felt that the time was ripe to finally pull Syria into their orbit,” writes journalist Hassan Hassan.⁷⁴

The Assad regime was a key—indeed, the only—Arab state openly allied with Iran in the region, and a vital partner in Iran’s “axis of resistance.” Iran’s leadership committed “significant resources to shoring up Assad” as a result, according to Iran scholar Ariane Tabatabai.⁷⁵ An analysis by Iranian politician Amir Mohebbian published on the website of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in October 2011, illustrated Iran’s perspective on the dangers posed by the Syrian opposition in presenting an opportunity for others to intervene against Iranian interests: “Westerners considered the Syrian opposition as an opportunity to limit Hezbollah and cut relations between Iran and Syria, and they tried to…destroy Iran’s supportive bridge to Hezbollah through the toppling of Bashar Assad, thus putting Hezbollah under pressure.”⁷⁶ Hezbollah itself provides a critical “strategic asset that extends Iranian influence to the Mediterranean,” as Jeffrey Feltman, former State Department assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs put it.⁷⁷

Despite its intervention in Bahrain and greater fear of the Arab Spring movements, Saudi Arabia’s leadership was assertive when it came to Syria: Saudi King Abdullah was the first senior leader in the Arab world to openly condemn the Assad regime’s repression of protestors—and the first to publicly call for the arming of the Syrian opposition.⁷⁸ In a February 2012 speech described by the New York Times as unusually blunt, King Abdullah condemned Russia and China’s UN Security Council vetoes of a resolution on Syria.⁷⁹ The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, saw the violence in Syria as an opportunity to oust Assad, although the Emirates played a less prominent role in Syria than it did in Libya. The Emirates joined the rest of the GCC in closing its Syrian embassy in 2012 and declaring support for the Syrian people while denouncing the regime’s violence against protestors.⁸⁰ The UAE also joined various international coalitions opposing the Assad regime, including the Friends of Syria which first met in February 2012,⁸¹ and played host to anti-Assad Syrian businessmen expatriates living abroad, organizing a 2012 conference in Dubai with UAE-based Syrian businessmen to discuss post-Assad investment opportunities.⁸² In addition to this, the UAE also provided support to some Free Syrian Army (FSA) affiliated Syrian militias via alleged CIA programs, including to the Southern Front coalition, and supported the Syrian Elite Forces (SEF), established in 2016.⁸³

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait began providing funding to the political and military opposition.⁸⁴ Saudi Arabia and Qatar cultivated relationships with competing political factions within the Syrian National Council (SNC), the coordinating body for the Syrian opposition based in Istanbul, Turkey. Qatar also began shipping light weapons acquired in Libya to the Syrian opposition in mid-2012 via Turkey, where they were distributed by Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials.⁸⁵ While the largest factions received support from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, outside states facilitated support to a diverse array of factions within the opposition so that no one faction was able to solidify control. Instead, Syrian opposition groups competed with each other for external support, further driving factionalization rather than cohesion.⁸⁶

In Syria, as in Libya and elsewhere, two axes of competition gradually emerged amongst proxy sponsors: Qatar provided support to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliates and other Islamist groups.⁸⁷ In contrast, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, concerned with pushing back against the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing regional influence, given their greater perception of the movement’s domestic threat, supported proxies that opposed the Muslim Brotherhood affiliates. The Saudis wanted the Assad regime gone, but according to Hassan, backed insurgent groups that were either moderate and backed by Western actors, or “Salafi-leaning forces, not seen as politically radical because their teachings call for loyalty to Muslim rulers,” and therefore perceived by Saudi Arabia as less threatening than Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups.⁸⁸ This rift between the three Gulf Arab countries’ strategic priorities grew over the course of these proxy interventions.

These axes of competition repeatedly undermined efforts to unify and create cohesion amongst the Syrian political and military opposition. While the SNC was intended to coordinate with insurgent groups on the ground, it was in reality removed from them. As a result, in January 2013, western states pressed for the formation of the Supreme Military Command (SMC) under General Salim Idris to coordinate the military opposition. Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar publicly supported the formation of the SMC. However, in practice, both competed to appoint their preferred officials to leadership roles, even as they bypassed the SMC altogether to provide support to their preferred Syrian rebel factions. This competition undermined the SMC’s legitimacy and eroded any connections it had to the forces that were doing the actual fighting in Syria.⁸⁹

Despite the early factionalization, hope remained that the policy could be salvaged. The United States allegedly launched a classified weapons and training program by 2013, led by the CIA and supported by Gulf intelligence services, called Timber Sycamore. The effort was in large part motivated by a desire to minimize the risk of uncoordinated Gulf support for Syrian rebels, although it ultimately did not succeed in doing so, and successive coordination efforts also failed.⁹⁰

While Timber Sycamore initially provided non-lethal assistance, by the end of 2013, the White House had approved amending the operation to provide lethal assistance. This program worked through two operations rooms: one in Turkey called the “MOM,” an acronym of its Turkish name, the Müşterek Operasyon Merkezi, and one in Jordan called the “MOC,” short for its English name, the Military Operations Command. These command centers were staffed by representatives from the United States as well as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, Jordan, and France. According to journalist Rania Abouzeid’s account, “The CIA chose, vetted, and trained select Syrian armed groups, while the MOM/MOC provided them with money and weapons, including—for the first time—US-made TOW [Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided] antitank missiles from Saudi stockpiles.”⁹¹

However, the operations rooms suffered from the same sources of dysfunction, as patrons side-stepped the coordinating mechanisms to continue supporting their preferred factions.⁹² The proliferation of political and military coordinating bodies was itself symptomatic of the underlying problem—that the state sponsors of Syrian proxies had fundamentally different strategic objectives. While Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar all wanted to reshape conditions in Syria by toppling the Assad regime, they disagreed on what should come after Assad.

These strategic divisions led to “a highly competitive bidding war for arms by fighters…[that] accelerated their radicalization,” according to journalists Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan—or at least their willingness to behave as though they had been radicalized— in order to win external support.⁹³ As more extreme forces won increasing external support, they also became more effective on the ground, drawing individual fighters and units away from less extreme factions. While western policymakers sought to provide support for moderate rebels while eschewing extremist or terrorist-affiliated groups, in reality, according to Syria scholar Christopher Phillips, “many militias were fluid in their composition and professed ideology, made easier by their local and personalized nature. Whole katibas [battalions] might suddenly change identity.”⁹⁴

By 2012, the symbolism and rhetoric of Syrian rebel brigades had shifted away from secular nationalism and towards extremist Islamist rhetoric. Qatar began to establish tenuous associations with increasingly extreme groups: Ahrar al-Sham reportedly received support from Qatar and Turkey, and there were reports of increased contact with Jabhat al-Nusra, an AQ affiliate, over the course of 2013.⁹⁵ Qatar also looked to deal with Syrian military defectors, but chose interlocutors besides the FSA’s leadership.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE initially focused their support on non-Islamist elements of the FSA, a military organization established in July 2011 by officers who had defected from the Syrian military.⁹⁶ By 2012, however, Saudi Arabia had sidelined these defectors altogether and instead helped to form the Istanbul Room to distribute its support. However, when supplies did arrive via the Istanbul Room, they “were inconsistent and insufficient, prompting fighters to look elsewhere. Rebels found private sponsors, bought weapons from inside Syria, smuggled them from abroad, manufactured their own, or joined non-FSA Islamist groups that generally had stronger support.”⁹⁷ In an effort to push Qatar aside, Saudi Arabia reportedly took over the “military file” and became the main external sponsor of the FSA in May 2013.⁹⁸

As the FSA faltered due in part to internal divisions, “the Saudis shifted some of their backing to more overtly sectarian Salafi fighting groups, supporting the formation of the Islamic Front” or al-Jabhat al-Islamiya, an alliance of Islamist groups including Jaysh al-Islam, al-Tawhid Brigade, and Ahrar al-Sham, in 2013.⁹⁹ Riyadh also pushed the United States to intervene on behalf of more moderate rebel forces and provide them with arms and training.¹⁰⁰ These initial tensions between the Gulf states and the factionalization of the conflict would contribute to the emergence of a turning point in Gulf state approaches to proxy warfare. However, in the early stage, optimism regarding the potential for revision managed to live on—even if on life support—whether that took the form of reorganizations of Gulf state sponsorship or calls for greater U.S. direct involvement.

Four factors led to a fundamental change in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar’s strategic approach to proxy warfare and regional competition by mid-to-late 2014. By then, the failure to achieve victory and the quagmires in Libya and Syria had already cast serious doubt on the possibility of installing friendly governments in either country. The Obama administration’s unexpected decision to not conduct airstrikes against the Assad regime in August 2013 was a turning point in how many viewed U.S. engagement in the region’s proxy wars—a clear signal that the monarchies could not expect intervention by the United States, one of the only actors whose intervention could decisively reshape the balance on the ground. Diplomatic divisions between Qatar and its neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula had clearly reached a breaking point, most notably when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in March 2014. Likewise, while these monarchies were not concerned by increasingly extreme ideologies of the groups that they and their citizens supported further away in the Levant, the rapid expansion of ISIS through much of Iraq in the summer of 2014 made it clear that there was a significant risk of blowback in the form of extremist attacks in the Arabian Peninsula.

The failure of the original strategy in Libya and Syria laid the groundwork for a shift in the Gulf monarchies’ strategy. In both countries, hopes for rapid victory gave way to ongoing quagmires with little hope for success, paving the way for the Gulf Arab governments to revisit their initial calculations of the utility of proxy intervention.

Although the Gulf states had scored a quick victory in Libya, the fragmented militia groups on the ground failed to coalesce into a coherent state. The killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the Benghazi consulate in September 2012, in an attack carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, highlighted Libya’s discord. In the run-up to elections in the summer of 2012—Libya’s first in more than 40 years—Libyans and Western observers argued about whether elections should even go forward before militias had been demobilized and reintegrated.¹⁰¹ According to New York Times reporting about the election, “regional rivalries spilled out in armed assaults on polling places….Libya went to the polls with its cities still under the control of fractious militias, reeling from bloody trial feuds, and with armed protesters across the east determined to thwart the election for fear of domination by the country’s western region.”¹⁰²

Likewise, while Syria’s insurgency had scored a number of tactical victories, the fragmented nature of the opposition had complicated the conflict exponentially. Approximately 6,000 different armed groups and military councils formed a continuously evolving network of more than 1,000 unique groupings on the ground.¹⁰³ Fragmentation and fighting among rebel groups hindered their efforts to fight effectively and take and hold territory.

The armed opposition’s internal challenges were compounded by Iran’s intervention to shore up the regime. From 2011, Iran had provided assistance and advice to Assad’s government. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) led efforts within Syria to organize local militias. In 2013, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon Hezbollah intervened in Syria. Hezbollah assisted in the battle of al-Qusayr near the border with Lebanon, leading to the Syrian regime’s first major victory of the conflict, and then advanced deeper into Syria, helping to secure territory from northern Lebanon through Zabadani in the south.¹⁰⁴ Explaining Hezbollah’s intervention in a later speech, Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, explained that it was important to protect “a front [the Axis of Resistance] that the world wants to destroy…targeted by an American, Israeli, takfiri project.”¹⁰⁵ Iran also deployed several thousand of its own regular and IRGC forces to Syria, and organized weapons and training for about 25,000 Shia fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.¹⁰⁶

In a tacit acknowledgement of the increasing consensus that the Assad regime would survive the war in some form, if not with control over all Syrian territory, the Gulf states began to explore diplomatic options to normalize relations with the Assad regime in late 2018, when the UAE reopened its embassy in central Damascus. A statement from the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that “the move underscores the UAE government’s keenness to restore relations between the two brotherly countries to their normal course.”¹⁰⁷

Any hopes that the United States might intervene in Syria as a counterweight to Iranian support had been dashed by 2014. The Obama administration’s refusal to carry out air strikes in 2013 convinced Gulf governments that the United States intended to draw down its presence in the region, and would not provide backing for further revisionist actions in the Middle East.

U.S. military backing had encouraged the three Gulf monarchies, whose stability and security had been an explicit U.S. geostrategic interest since the Carter Doctrine of 1980, to behave more adventurously, secure in the knowledge that the United States would step in to support them if they ran into trouble. In the late 1980s, for example, the United States had stepped in to provide protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, and deployed forces to Saudi Arabia in 1990 in the lead-up to the first Gulf War at the request of King Fahd to head off a potential Iraqi invasion.

The Obama administration’s initial reaction to the Arab Spring had already raised Gulf states’ concerns that the United States would not guarantee their security. President Obama’s public calls for Egyptian President Mubarak to step down in February 2011 signaled to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that something in the relationship was amiss. Saudi and Emirati leaders hoped that the Obama administration would take a more conservative line towards a regime they considered a key regional ally. Mubarak’s fall was “a wake-up call for the Gulf monarchies that traditional Western support could no longer be taken for granted” and that they would need to be more proactive in managing regional security.¹⁰⁸

In mid-2013, the Syrian opposition, as well as Gulf governments, believed that the United States might yet step in to break the stalemate on the ground—while the Syrian opposition had made tactical gains in noncontiguous territories, it had failed to make significant territorial advances. “Some combination of a Western enforced no-fly zone or direct Western attacks against regime targets became the central goal of” the Syrian opposition, who increasingly considered western intervention to be “the only way to break the stalemate” according to Syria scholar Samer Abboud.¹⁰⁹ President Obama’s now-infamous August 2012 “red line” statement led Syrian opposition groups and Arab gulf countries alike to believe that the United States would intervene directly in Syria. Indeed, these countries reportedly assured their Syrian proxies that the November 2012 elections prevented the United States from intervening immediately, but they could expect a U.S. intervention soon afterwards.¹¹⁰ It is also likely that NATO’s intervention in Libya shaped this expectation. As a Syrian rebel told a reporter in the summer of 2011, “It’s similar to Benghazi. We need a no-fly zone.”¹¹¹

The Obama administration’s decision not to go forward with airstrikes in Syria in August 2013 was therefore both unexpected and deeply frustrating to regional governments. After the Obama administration’s decision, Arab Gulf sponsors became increasingly willing to openly back more radical groups, even when they met with disapproval from Washington. Rebel fragmentation and radicalization became a vicious cycle, as militias sought to outbid each other for external support and to keep fighters from defecting to better-funded, more highly visible groups. The search for external sources of support led to increased radicalization (whether real or performative), as their leadership saw that “the more sensational their acts, the more support they would gain irrespective of their strategic importance.”¹¹² External actors including Qatar and Turkey were willing to back more radical insurgent groups even early on. For Saudi Arabia, which may have preferred to back more status-quo oriented militias, the need to compete led them to back more radical groups. In the fall of 2013, for example, Saudi intelligence brokered a merger between Liwa al-Islam and 42 other Islamist militias to form the Salafist Jaysh al-Islam, a major policy departure from Saudi Arabia’s prior support for the more moderate Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC).¹¹³ This shift suggests that the decision had at least some effect on the Gulf monarchies’ strategies in Syria.

Furthermore, U.S. policymakers’ secret engagement with Iran leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiations caused a breach in the Arab Gulf monarchies’ relationship with the United States and made them fear that the United States would no longer be decisively on their side in their regional rivalry with Iran. When details of the interim nuclear framework that the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran without GCC input first leaked in November 2013, the information triggered a hostile reaction amongst Gulf Arab leadership, especially from Riyadh, which feared that an agreement that ended international sanctions would embolden Iran’s activities in the region by providing Tehran with more resources that it could devote to supporting its regional proxies.¹¹⁴ When the final deal was announced, a Saudi diplomat described it as “extremely dangerous,” arguing that “if sanctions are lifted, Iran will try even harder to redesign the region.”¹¹⁵

The Saudis also worried that the deal could signal the beginning of a détente between the United States—their key security partner—and Iran, or even that it could signal that the United States was willing to quietly accept the existence of an Iranian sphere of influence in the region.¹¹⁶ As General James Mattis, former U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander, commented to a reporter, in Syria “[The Emiratis] are trying to keep us tight. Their biggest concern isn’t Iran. It’s American disengagement.”¹¹⁷

The apparent U.S. drawdown led the Arab monarchies to feel that they were on their own in terms of providing their own security—they would not necessarily receive assistance if their adventurism abroad went awry. This encouraged the monarchies’ leadership to focus on threats that were felt more directly via crisis management, rather than revisionist intervention. Taken together, the Obama administration’s calls for Mubarak to step down and the negotiation of the JCPOA, as well as the administration’s apparent efforts to keep the United States from becoming more engaged in the region, including rhetoric around the “pivot to Asia,” led Saudi and Emirati leaders to feel that the United States was disengaging from the region, leaving them to push back against Iran on their own.

In a 2018 interview, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expressed the Saudi leadership’s view of Iran as a central security threat: “I can tell you that the Iranians, they’re the cause of problems in the Middle East.”¹¹⁸ Additionally, instead of attending the May 2015 GCC Summit at Camp David in person, King Salman sent delegates in his place, a snub towards the Obama administration in retaliation for the agreement and what Saudi leaders perceived as a lack of adequate consultation prior.¹¹⁹ This was seen as one more in a growing number of indications that the United States was reconsidering its role in the region and possibly disengaging.

Growing division among the Gulf states was another driver of the shift in approach. The GCC countries were not on the same page in terms of their strategic aims, a fact that became abundantly clear once arguments typically kept behind closed doors erupted into an open diplomatic dispute in 2014.¹²⁰ In both Libya and Syria, a shared general aim of overturning the regime gave way to competition between the Saudi-UAE and Qatar-Turkey axes, as described in the previous section.

The intra-GCC tension manifested soon after the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak, an ally of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was replaced by Muslim Brotherhood-supported President Mohammed Morsi in 2012. Morsi’s election victory “tilted the regional balance of power towards Qatar’s Islamic and activist networks,” as Marc Lynch, who directs George Washington University’s Middle East Studies program, put it.¹²¹ Qatar invested substantially in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, providing an estimated $8 billion in aid.¹²²

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were troubled by the fall of Egyptian president Mubarak and by the rising political fortunes of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose calls for elections and accountability to domestic populations were anathema to these leaders. With the largest population in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also viewed Egypt as critical to an effective Sunni coalition to counter Iran.¹²³

In July 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coup that removed Morsi’s government, and within 24 hours Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait pledged about $12 billion in financial assistance and energy supplies to Sisi’s new government.¹²⁴ Between June 2013 and 2015, these three countries provided Egypt with more than $29 billion in cash deposits to the central bank as well as oil shipments and investments.¹²⁵

The visible competition in Egypt was matched by submerged fault lines within the GCC over Libya, Syria, and the future of political Islam in the region writ large, and by 2014, these tensions had reached a breaking point. As a demonstration of their deep-seated resentment towards Qatar’s regional policies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in March 2014, initiating an intra-GCC crisis.¹²⁶ The diplomatic break was quickly followed by several demands, including that Qatar stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and curtail Al Jazeera’s oppositional coverage of the Sisi regime.¹²⁷ After nine months of negotiations, Qatar made some concessions; most notably, several Muslim Brotherhood members who were living in exile were expelled from Qatar. The GCC ambassadors returned in November 2014, but the underlying divisions in the three states’ regional policies were far from resolved.¹²⁸

Finally, a renewed threat from Iran and ISIS encouraged Gulf governments to focus on preserving the status quo across the region rather than doubling down on their revisionist wagers, particularly in Syria.

At first, this growth occurred within the context of the quagmires that had developed in Syria and Libya. The increasingly fragmented nature of these conflicts had given Gulf monarchies’ opponents—Iran and ISIS—the opportunity to make significant gains since 2011. In the summer of 2014, ISIS’ dramatic military gains across Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, as well as government advances in Aleppo, put the Syrian opposition in an increasingly dire position. In September 2014, a Carter Center analysis noted that “Though the opposition has shown itself capable of making consistent gains in southern Syria and in the central Idlib and Hama governorates, these limited advances, particularly in the north, will be difficult to maintain if the Islamic State succeeds in cutting vital supply routes from Turkey, and the government maintains control of the skies.”¹²⁹

Already in early 2014, ISIS was extending its influence from Syria back into Libya, where many of its foreign fighters had come from.¹³⁰ In Libya, the local ISIS affiliate captured the city of Sirte in early 2015;¹³¹ since then, a U.S. campaign of airstrikes and special-operations personnel based in Misrata fought the remaining ISIS cells that had fled Sirte and reconstituted.¹³²

The threat of ISIS’ growing strength was not limited to the battlegrounds of Syria and Libya. The Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, saw ISIS as a direct security threat,¹³³ because of its potential to develop cells on the peninsula. In May 2014, the Saudi government uncovered several organized cells that allegedly had links to ISIS, and ISIS affiliate Wilayat Najd conducted suicide bombings in May 2015 in Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, heightening these fears.¹³⁴ Writing in state-affiliated media site Al Arabiya, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, an editor with a close relationship to the Saudi regime, wrote in a column titled “ISIS Has Reached the Border of Saudi Arabia,” that in Syria, Saudi Arabia had “two rivals which we cannot take sides with: Assad and Maliki’s sectarian governments on one side, and ISIS and its terrorist affiliates on the other.”¹³⁵ Likewise, the UAE saw ISIS as a threat: prominent Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla argued in 2014 “We have some of our best men and women [flying sorties for the coalition], and I think rightly so….We should be at the forefront of fighting ISIS. Our values are at stake.”¹³⁶

At the same time, Iran began to pose a growing threat beyond the borders of its longtime partner Syria. On Saudi Arabia’s southern border, the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in September 2014, sparking another round of regional proxy conflict. Saudi Arabia had a recent history of enmity with the Houthis, having fought them briefly across the border in 2009 through 2010.¹³⁷ But from the Saudi and Emirati perspective, the Houthi advance was also Iran’s success. Tony Blinken, then Deputy Secretary of State, stated that when he traveled to Riyadh to meet with Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) at the beginning of the coalition intervention, MbS explained that “his goal was to eradicate all Iranian influence in Yemen.”¹³⁸

Iran was not shy about embracing this frame. After the Houthi coup in Sanaa in September 2014, Iranian member of Parliament Ali Reza Zakani said that Sanaa was the fourth Arab capital to fall under Iranian influence, in addition to “the three Arab capitals who are already a subsidiary of the Iranian Islamic revolution,” referencing Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus.¹³⁹ Saudi and Emirati officials saw this kind of statement as an expression of Iran’s intention to use its proxy relationship with the Houthis to expand their influence in the Gulf. Now, instead of the Arab Spring creating opportunities far from the peninsula, its fallout was opening new Iranian fronts on the peninsula itself that required management.

Following the mid-2014 turning point, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies became increasingly status quo-oriented. Where Gulf monarchies sought to partner with proxies, they did so in order to contain crises and revert to the status quo in civil wars rather than seize opportunities to expand their influence. They no longer intervened to topple established Middle East states. The Gulf monarchies’ actions as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (the anti-ISIS coalition), and in Yemen and Libya illustrate the shift in approach. However, ongoing competition in the Horn of Africa—and in parts of the Yemen war—suggests that in certain contexts, opportunistic aims continue to drive proxy competition on the part of the Gulf states.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar joined the U.S.-led international coalition against ISIS in the fall of 2014 under the banner of Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), joining more than 60 coalition members. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia contributed to aircraft-to-strike operations in Syria, while Qatar provided in-country basing and overflight authorization for U.S. forces as well as transport aircraft. All three also contributed to the training and advising mission.¹⁴⁰ While Saudi Arabia deployed F-15 aircraft to Turkey to contribute to the coalition, in practice, it carried out relatively few strike missions. Of the three countries, the UAE made the most significant contribution to CJTF-OIR: the UAE fighters flew more missions in the anti-ISIS airstrikes than any other coalition member besides the United States, and Emirati F-16 Fighting Falcons often accompanied U.S. aircraft on their missions.¹⁴¹ This discrepancy is due to significant differences in the capabilities of the Emirati and Saudi air forces, as the coalition intervention in Yemen would soon demonstrate.¹⁴²

The goal of reversing Iran’s presence in Syria had also declined in relative importance for the United States. Indeed, former Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL Brett McGurk would later criticize the Trump administration for confusing the mission by entertaining broader goals regarding Iran while at the same time not committing to them.¹⁴³ In Iraq, the counter-ISIS coalition was in effect tacitly supporting Iranian proxies. Meanwhile in Syria, despite some initial hope that the Syrian opposition would form an on-the-ground partner force, the coalition relied upon the primarily Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).¹⁴⁴ From the beginning of the Syrian rebellion, Syria’s Kurds embraced a strategy of détente with the Assad regime rather than direct confrontation.¹⁴⁵ As the United States withdrew its forces from parts of northeast Syria, the SDF looked to the Assad regime for protection from Turkey.¹⁴⁶

While Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE had all supported elements of Syria’s opposition since early in its civil war, the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria saw all three revert towards a status quo-orientation, conducting airstrikes against ISIS, by then one of the most powerful opposition groups in Syria. The United States made clear that the goal of the anti-ISIS coalition was not to resolve the Syrian civil war militarily but to counter and degrade ISIS.¹⁴⁷As noted above, with the destruction of ISIS’ caliphate and Assad’s gains, Gulf states have begun to seek normalization with the Assad regime, illustrating the change from revisionist hopes of the earlier interventions in Syria.

In September 2015, Russia intervened militarily to further shore up Assad’s government. Commander of the IRGC Quds Force Qasem Soleimani reportedly traveled to Moscow several times before the intervention began to participate in operational planning.¹⁴⁸ The combination of Iranian and Russian intervention made it substantially more difficult, if not impossible, for the Syrian opposition to achieve its aim of toppling the Assad regime.

Following the Houthi takeover of Yemen’s capital Sanaa in September 2014, Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government fled to the southern port city of Aden. At the invitation of Hadi’s government, on March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of nine Arab states, with logistical support from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, launched an intervention on behalf of the internationally-recognized government headed by President Hadi.¹⁴⁹ This considerable military effort was nonetheless aimed at preserving the status quo—a weak yet relatively pro-Saudi regime governing Yemen’s territory and insulating the Arabian Peninsula from Iranian influence.

While deemed “the Saudi-led coalition,” the intervening coalition was led in practice by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with a de facto division of labor: Saudi Arabia led the air campaign in the north, while the UAE led the ground offensive in the south. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE contributed to efforts to train and equip local militias, although these efforts were dominated by the UAE in the south.¹⁵⁰

The intervention included a sustained campaign of air strikes, the blockade of air and sea routes into Yemen, and the deployment of special forces, led by the UAE but with contributions from other coalition members.¹⁵¹ According to the Yemen Data Project, between March 26, 2015, and March 25, 2018, the coalition conducted an average of 15 air raids per day (with each air raid comprising one or multiple strikes) and 453 air raids per month on average, for a total of 16,749 over the course of the first three years of the conflict. About 30 percent of all recorded air strikes in this period targeted non-military sites.¹⁵²

In contrast with the early years of intervention in Syria and Libya, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi saw proxy sponsorship alongside a broader Saudi-led coalition intervention in Yemen as a means of containing the crisis of increased Iranian influence on the peninsula, rather than an opportunity for expanded influence.

Saudi Arabia has long viewed Yemen as falling directly within its sphere of influence and as a high security priority, and perceived Iran’s support for the Houthis as a threat to be confronted.¹⁵³ Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), who is understood to be the architect of the Yemen intervention, told American reporter Jeffrey Goldberg that “I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good…. The supreme leader is trying to conquer the world….We are pushing back on these Iranian moves. We’ve done this in Africa, Asia, in Malaysia, in Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon.”¹⁵⁴ In another interview, he clarified that Ayatollah Khamenei “wants to create his own project in the Middle East very much like Hitler who wanted to expand at the time.”¹⁵⁵ Likewise, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan stated in 2015 that “Iran is not carrying out this activity only in Yemen, it is conducting the same activity in Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and in Pakistan…there is a systematic action that has been going on for years on the idea of exporting the (Iranian) revolution.”¹⁵⁶ He added, “It is not possible to accept any strategic threat to Gulf Arab states,” making clear the perception of the Yemen intervention as a response to an Iranian threat.¹⁵⁷ A prominent UAE businessman with close ties to the regime wrote in an op-ed in Al-Arabiya in 2015, “most of this region’s troubles are rooted in Iran’s thirst for hegemony.”¹⁵⁸ These statements point to a more fearful and pessimistic perception on the behalf of the Gulf states than predominated during the early Arab Spring.

Iranian perception of the Yemen war also supports the conclusion that the Gulf states approached the conflict from a reactive status quo maintenance frame. Iran saw Yemen as an area of little intrinsic strategic value beyond the leverage it gave Iran over its rival Saudi Arabia: according to Iran scholars Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai, “Yemen is not a priority for Iran; it will not allocate many resources to Yemen.”¹⁵⁹ Yemen was historically an area of Saudi influence, Iran was the revisionist foreign influence in the conflict. Emirati officials also feared that the conflict in Yemen would allow Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-affiliated groups, namely the Islah political party, to gain influence in Yemen.¹⁶⁰ Islah, the Islamist coalition opposition party in Yemen that included MB elements, played an outsized role in Yemen’s politics after 2011, and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated elements were poised to gain political power in southern Yemen.¹⁶¹

However, in keeping with its initially more revisionist approach to the Arab Spring compared to Saudi Arabia, the UAE’s strategy in Yemen has also included opportunistic elements. The Emirates has sought to leverage its role to expand its military and economic access to the horn of Africa and the Bab al-Mandab strait, which is a vital link in global trade routes. Control over the port of Aden in southern Yemen, as well as much of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, would significantly expand the Emirates’ access to and control of these routes.¹⁶²

In July 2015, the coalition launched Operation Golden Arrow to retake the southern port city of Aden and surrounding territory from Houthi forces.¹⁶³ Emirati forces led the coalition’s efforts on the ground in the south: the joint Hadi-Southern Resistance offensive, which quickly recaptured Aden and advanced north to link with other anti-Houthi forces, was accompanied by Emirati and Saudi special forces.¹⁶⁴ Emirati efforts in Yemen were widely viewed by international observers as more tactically sophisticated than the Saudi-led airstrikes: the offensive to retake Aden involved “more than 3,000 troops supported by Apache attack helicopters and dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers as well as an amphibious assault.”¹⁶⁵ The UAE also provided economic aid to Aden and the surrounding area, in addition to its investments in equipping and training southern militias, many of which are united under the banner of the predominantly secular Southern Transition Council (STC) but include Salafist militia groups as well.¹⁶⁶ These militias, which numbered some 12,000 fighters, alongside Emirati Special Forces, took the lead in clearing Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) fighters from areas in the south, including the port city of Mukalla and the Masila oilfields in 2016.¹⁶⁷ The UAE deployed about 1,500 special operations troops and other forces to Yemen at the beginning of the conflict, and by September 2015, that number increased to about 4,000.¹⁶⁸ However, after a missile strike in the Yemeni governorate of Marib in September 2015 killed more than fifty Emirati troops, Abu Dhabi drew down some of its own troops, replacing them with foreign contractors operating under the UAE flag.¹⁶⁹

The UAE also deployed forces to several bases in East Africa to support training of local forces and facilitate the UAE’s operations in Yemen. The UAE deployed forces to Djibouti for this purpose, but following a dispute with Djibouti’s government in mid-2015, the Emirates relocated and began using facilities in Eritrea instead.¹⁷⁰ The UAE also expanded its relationship with Somalia, opening a new training center where Emirati Special Forces train Somali commandos in counter-terrorism operations.¹⁷¹ However, the UAE’s relationship with Somalia was subsequently complicated by the 2017 diplomatic crisis with Qatar, as the Emirates stoked conflict with Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Farmajo), who they considered too close to Qatar, by supporting rival political factions.¹⁷²

While co-leaders of the intervening coalition with ostensibly shared strategic goals, in practice, the divergence between Saudi and Emirati proxy strategies became more apparent over time. On August 7, 2019, fighting broke out in Aden between the Southern Transition Council (STC), the coalition of secessionist militias supported by the UAE, and forces supporting Hadi, which are backed by Saudi Arabia. Because Saudi Arabia’s overriding priority has been securing its southern border and opposing Iran’s presence in a neighboring country, its efforts focused on fighting the Houthis in the north of the country and supporting Hadi’s government as the sole entity deserving of international recognition. In contrast, while sharing Saudi Arabia’s concerns about Iran, Emirati officials were also deeply concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in Yemen, and sought to support proxy forces that were in some cases Salafist or Islamist but did not have Muslim Brotherhood ties. From the Emirati perspective, its support for southern militias that oppose Islah is status-quo maintenance because it meant preventing Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated militias from gaining military and political power in Yemen.¹⁷³

In part due to this divergence, as well as fatigue over the ongoing stalemate, the UAE began to draw down all of its troops in Yemen in the summer of 2019.¹⁷⁴ While Saudi Arabia has continued air strikes in northern Yemen, Saudi leadership has also engaged in talks with the Houthis, in the December 2018 Stockholm Agreement¹⁷⁵ and indirect peace talks via Oman in late 2019.¹⁷⁶ In April 2020, Riyadh announced a unilateral, two-week ceasefire in Yemen, although both sides appear to have violated it in short order.¹⁷⁷

The Emirati withdrawal and Riyadh’s willingness to negotiate pointed to the limits of Gulf revisionism in the region, and an acknowledgement that they would not be able to fully restore the status quo through the use of military force on the peninsula, let alone opportunistically revise the regional order in their favor via proxy warfare.

Despite its difference with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over the perceived threat of the Houthi gains, Qatar’s approach to Yemen remained status quo-oriented. Doha’s leadership did not perceive the rise of a Houthi government to be a security threat in the same way that Saudi Arabia and the UAE did; rather, Qatar’s participation was designed to diminish the intra-GCC diplomatic crisis by acceding to Saudi leadership on regional security issues.¹⁷⁸ As such, the Qatari strategy in Yemen emphasized objectives of crisis management in an effort to restore and support a stable status quo for Gulf security.

Qatar participated in the Saudi-led coalition intervention from March 2015 until it was expelled from the coalition in June 2017 following the resurgence of the intra-GCC dispute. Qatari pilots participated in airstrikes early on in the intervention, and Al Jazeera reported that Qatar sent 1,000 ground troops along with 200 armored vehicles and 30 Apache helicopters in the early fall of 2015.¹⁷⁹ David B. Roberts writes that while Qatar’s role in Yemen was “relatively small,” deploying forces on the ground represented “an assertive step for Qatar”¹⁸⁰—albeit one designed to demonstrate alignment with its GCC neighbors rather than full independence from them.¹⁸¹

When fighting picked up again in Libya in 2014, both the UAE and Qatar continued to support their preferred sides. However, in contrast with their 2011 intervention in Libya, in 2014, their competition in Libya was oriented towards crisis management, with both intervening just enough to ensure that their side did not lose. For Abu Dhabi, this meant supporting forces aligned with Khalifa Haftar, who promised to push Islamist militias out of Benghazi, while for Doha, this meant supporting the new government established in the wake of the Gaddafi regime that was threatened by Haftar’s advances.

In Libya, the UN-backed government based in Tripoli struggled to extend its political authority. Because the government had no army of its own, it “depended on the goodwill of the capital’s militias, some of whom tried to topple it. Disagreements among the representatives on the council led to gridlock,” Libya expert Frederic Wehrey notes.¹⁸² In May 2014, the second civil war in Libya since 2011 began when Khalifa Haftar, once part of the coterie of military officers around Gaddafi and later exiled for decades in the United States, launched an offensive to take back Benghazi from Islamist militias, vowing to impose military rule instead.¹⁸³ In response, Islamist militias, including Ansar al-Sharia, formed a coalition called Libya Dawn to counter Haftar’s forces. After establishing a parallel government administration in Libya’s eastern city of Tobruk, Haftar’s forces then pivoted to take on the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli. Separately, GNA-affiliated forces reclaimed the city of Sirte in 2016 after a year-long battle.¹⁸⁴

Haftar quickly received support from the UAE, post-coup Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, France, and Russia, which has sent its Wagner Group mercenaries to assist Haftar’s forces.¹⁸⁵ In 2016, the UAE set up an air base in eastern Libya to support Haftar’s operations. And in 2019, just days before he launched another offensive, Saudi Arabia promised Haftar “tens of millions of dollars to help pay for the operation,” according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.¹⁸⁶

Haftar’s forces have also recruited from local tribes and the ranks of former Gaddafi-era officers.¹⁸⁷ Haftar welcomed the support of Salafist fighters who hold the Islamists Haftar is fighting as common enemies. In spite of this odd configuration of allegiances, the UAE supports Haftar because of his strongly anti-Islamist stance, which aligns with their own. A former U.S. diplomat reportedly said of the UAE’s presence in Libya that “they are looking to stage-manage and cleave out the parties they don’t like.”¹⁸⁸ External support for Haftar and his forces “had a dramatic effect in Benghazi,” according to Wehrey: Emirati-supplied military hardware aided the advances of Libyan National Army (LNA) forces on the ground, while Emirati and French airstrikes “more precise than anything [Haftar] could manage” provided air support to advancing ground forces.¹⁸⁹

The GNA has been defended by an array of Libyan militias, and more recently Turkey, which over the early months of 2020 has sent Turkish military advisors as well as about 2,000Syrian militiamen to Libya.¹⁹⁰ The United States nominally supports the Government of National Accord, but President Trump has also “recognized Field Marshal Haftar’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and [in a phone call] the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”¹⁹¹

Qatar has continued to provide support to GNA-affiliated militias like the Benghazi Defense Brigades, founded by Ismail al-Salabi, who had strong ties with Doha, in 2016, and Misrata’s Mahjub Brigade, whose commanders were part of a delegation that met with Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha in 2017.¹⁹² Qatar has continued to back the GNA in diplomatic settings,¹⁹³ while Turkey deployed 2,000 Syrian fighters as well as some of its own military advisors to Libya to support the GNA in January 2020.¹⁹⁴

For all three Gulf monarchies, intervention in Libya post-2014 can be read as a crisis management exercise, despite the fact that they are supporting opposing sides. Abu Dhabi sees supporting Haftar as a way to push back against Islamist militias that had increasingly engulfed the country in an ongoing conflict, while Doha provides support to the status quo, internationally-recognized government. This is not to say there are no opportunistic elements to the Gulf states’ proxy strategies in Libya. However, the rhetoric of stability predominates, suggesting that management of an existing Libya crisis predominates their strategic thinking.

While Haftar has resisted efforts to negotiate a political settlement to the conflict, reportedly with the UAE’s support, international actors, including Turkey, Russia, the United States, and Europe, attempted to negotiate multiple ceasefire agreements in the early months of 2020.¹⁹⁵

The latest round of fighting has been immensely destabilizing: UN Secretary General António Guterres warned in early 2020 of “a deterioration of law and order” and reported “numerous cases of crimes and intimidation” by forces affiliated with Haftar.¹⁹⁶ In spite of international meetings hosted by Germany and Russia in early 2020, where all sides agreed to a UN arms embargo to stop providing support to proxy forces in Libya, that support has continued unabated—in fact, the UAE ramped up its support for Haftar in the aftermath of the agreement, sending cargo planes with weapons to supply Haftar’s forces, according to UN officials.¹⁹⁷

Compared to the ongoing proxy wars in Yemen and Libya, the Gulf monarchies’ competition in Africa is still driven, in part, by a desire to secure new spheres of influence. Prompted by a political vacuum in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf monarchies’ designs on the Red Sea basin—and accelerated by the relative lack of U.S. engagement in the Horn—the Gulf monarchies have expanded their competition into the Horn since 2015. For Saudi Arabia, this has meant ensuring that Iran is not able to gain a foothold across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula. For the UAE, this has meant shoring up autocratic governments to prevent the rise of Islamist groups in a weakly governed region. In short, “The Gulf countries…see a chance to adjust the future economic and political landscape of the Red Sea basin in their favour.”¹⁹⁸

The Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies here are similar to their approaches in nearby regions: Saudi Arabia and the UAE seek stability by supporting autocratic governments, some of which have violently suppressed pro-democracy movements, while Qatar and Turkey are more inclined to support popular uprisings that could empower actors that they find common cause with, especially Muslim Brotherhood-affiliates and other Islamist organizations.¹⁹⁹

The Gulf monarchies’ competition in this region began with basing requirements related to their intervention in Yemen: The UAE first deployed forces to Djibouti to support the Yemen intervention, but following a dispute with the government of Djibouti in mid-2015, the Emirates relocated and began using facilities in Eritrea instead, where it also trained pro-Hadi government Yemeni forces. The UAE also established a second base in Berbera, Somaliland, while Saudi Arabia has proposed building a base in Djibouti.²⁰⁰ Additionally, the UAE has expanded its military relationship with the government of Somalia, where its special forces train Somali commandos in conducting counter-terrorism operations.²⁰¹

The intra-GCC rivalries that exploded in 2017 fueled competition in the Horn of Africa, particularly in Somalia, which has, according to journalists Ronen Bergman and David Kirkpatrick, “emerged as a central battleground” in the competition between Abu Dhabi and Doha.²⁰² Both the UAE and Qatar have provided weapons and training to the Somali factions they favor, fueling violence and instability in an already-failed state.²⁰³

For the Abu Dhabi-Riyadh axis, the Horn of Africa is also an arena where Iran’s expanded influence must be reversed. As one Saudi analyst told International Crisis Group researchers, “We needed to ensure that both flanks of Bab al-Mandab were secure. We wouldn’t want to end one war only to find that we have another conflict [to roll back Iran] on the other side.”²⁰⁴ Saudi Arabia has conditioned its aid to Sudan and Eritrea, as well as made promises of diplomatic assistance in lifting international sanctions, in exchange for those countries’ promises to expel Iran’s presence.

Gulf competition in the Horn of Africa, however, is also built around the search for economic opportunity, with countries in this region offering under-developed ports and energy and consumer markets that appear poised for rapid growth.²⁰⁵ Economic investment in the Horn offers the Gulf monarchies the opportunity to partner with China, which is planning Belt and Road Initiative projects in East Africa. This is an important opportunity to strengthen their relationships with Beijing, from the Gulf monarchies’ perspectives, as American influence in the region recedes.

The coastline of the Red Sea basin, stretching from Somalia through Yemen, is an important strategic area for trade. The Bab al-Mandab strait, the narrowest point between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, a potential bottleneck for international trade, is located between Yemen and Djibouti.

While much of the competition in the Horn takes place in the non-military sphere, Gulf economic investments in the Horn of Africa are properly seen as inextricably linked to regional competition in terms of economic gain. Security access to ports along Bab al-Mandab strait, the narrowest point between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa and a potential bottleneck for international trade, is a strategic aim particularly favored by the UAE. DP World, a Dubai-based global trade and logistics company hosted 150 operations in more than 45 countries, with over 46,000 employees.²⁰⁶ The UAE’s economic investments in particular, which are the most extensive of the three, “are not neutral economic projects. Rather, those ports, highways, security installations, and water and sanitation facilities are intimately linked to Emirati foreign policy. They are important mechanisms for the expansion of both Emirati capital and power.”²⁰⁷

Due to its character as a site of competition that has grown in the later years of the post-Arab Spring era, the Horn of Africa provides a particular caution against assuming that the chastening of the Gulf States’ optimism in Syria and Libya will prevent future conflicts or escalations.

Proxy wars aren’t just for great powers anymore. Whereas during the Cold War the primary strategic sponsors of proxy warfare were the United States and the Soviet Union, today the three Gulf Arab monarchies, two of which were not even independent until 1971, have played a core role in sponsoring proxy warfare in the Middle East.²⁰⁸

The Gulf states’ opportunistic approach to proxy warfare in the early years of the Arab Spring played an important role in initiating and escalating conflicts, as the Gulf states sought to re-order the region to their advantage.

At the same time, the growing number of sponsors, exemplified by the Gulf states’ actions, created multiple layers of complexity that challenged efforts to stabilize the region. Not only did the Gulf states represent a pole of sponsorship, but they competed amongst themselves, driving factionalization and the growth of a multiplicity of competing proxies even where they appeared to share the same goals.

While this competition was briefly put on hold due to shared perceptions of threats from ISIS and Iran, an even greater diplomatic rift opened in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE led a coalition of countries in breaking diplomatic relations with Doha, closing land crossings at the border with Saudi Arabia, and banning Qatari planes and ships from using their airspace and sea routes.²⁰⁹ The crisis represented a second attempt by the Saudi and Emirati-led GCC bloc to coerce Qatar towards adopting policies more in line with their perceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Arab Spring movements.

The consequences of the Gulf states’ sponsorship of proxy warfare implicate the United States. The United States cannot inoculate itself from the resulting problems of instability, terrorism, and a level of social polarization that may be past the point of no return, nor can it hope to contain them in the region alone. The U.S. also cannot dismiss the moral implications of humanitarian disasters in these places, especially in contexts like Yemen, where U.S. logistical and diplomatic support has facilitated the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention. The Gulf states have not been able to achieve their strategic objectives via proxy war and even as they pull back towards more status quo aims, intractable conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen continue. At the same time, all three of these Gulf states are important U.S. security partners who receive a great deal of military support from the United States, which gives U.S. policymakers some leverage over their behavior. The United States therefore can and should take proactive measures to wind down the use of proxies and support good-faith negotiation efforts to end proxy wars in order to mitigate these global threats.

These ongoing conflicts, and the fragmentation rooted in intra-Gulf competition have provided potent recruitment grounds for terrorist organizations like ISIS in Libya and Syria, and the AQAP in Yemen. Sustained state weakness and a lack of governing institutions in these places makes it difficult to sustain military counterterrorism gains made by drones or special forces. Importantly, the Gulf states wrestling with these consequences are U.S. security partners upon whom the United States is largely reliant in the Middle East, exposing weaknesses in the current U.S. security posture in the region.

Furthermore, the ongoing wars have significantly exacerbated humanitarian catastrophes and spurred the wide-scale movement of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) and refugees. In addition to the deep humanitarian costs, these population movements have had significant implications for the politics of western countries, which have seen a corresponding rise in right-wing populism in recent years.²¹⁰ In Libya, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 1.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. Up to 90 percent of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe depart from Libya’s shores, and human trafficking remains prevalent due to a sustained lack of institutional capacity.²¹¹

In Syria, there are an estimated 5.7 million registered refugees who have fled the country as of April 2019,²¹² in addition to 6.2 million internally displaced persons. Since April 2019, the Syrian Observatory on Human Rights has documented more than 2 million civilians fleeing advances in Idlib Province by the Assad regime backed by Russian forces.²¹³ Since early December 2019, as of the time of this writing, some 900,000 people, most of them women and children, have been forced to flee.²¹⁴ These civilians are trapped between advancing forces and the Turkish border, which has been closed to Syrian refugees since 2015, and many of those fleeing have already been internally displaced at least once from other parts of the country over the last nine years of conflict.²¹⁵

Yemen’s civil war has seen the largest cholera outbreak in epidemiologically-recorded history.²¹⁶ The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 24.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and 3.6 million have been displaced.²¹⁷ There have been more than 90,000 battle-related fatalities in Yemen since 2015.²¹⁸ Across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa, Gulf support for proxy actors has fueled fighting in Somalia, a failed state that has been war-torn for decades.

Throughout the region, experts warn that conflict-torn countries and displaced populations are especially vulnerable to the outbreak of contagious disease like COVID-19, although they are already facing cuts to services and anti-migrant violence heightened by fears about the spread of the pandemic.²¹⁹ Proxy wars have directly harmed these societies’ resilience to large-scale health crises like COVID-19. At the same time, the collapse in oil prices in April will not only limit the resources that the Gulf monarchies have on hand to fund their regional proxies, but will also have wide-ranging implications for their domestic politics, economies, and societies.

Most worrisomely, these impacts are only the consequences that are visible today. The Middle East’s proxy wars will have unpredictable, long-term consequences for the politics and societies of these states and others. Frederic Wehrey has stated about Libya that “Most tragically, [the ongoing proxy war] is fueling a toxic polarization and fraying the social bonds of this country of six million. Unless swift action is taken to end the clashes and return to a political process, the damage may be irreparable.”²²⁰ Academic research suggests that civil wars are more likely to occur in states that have recently experienced political instability, institutional weakness, poor governance, and poverty: In other words, conflict begets conflict.²²¹ If the outlook in the Middle East today looks dire, the region’s future will look increasingly dire without international efforts to end the proxy wars fueled by the dynamics of competition amongst regional and global players.

This means that for U.S. policymakers, understanding the proxy wars of today—and the future—requires a deeper understanding of the regional dynamics of competition amongst state and non-state actors, as well as the strategic perceptions and decision-making of regional powers.

The best thing that U.S. policymakers can do to increase stability in the Middle East, an important U.S. strategic goal, would be to end the conflicts that provide regional states with opportunities for intervention. Research has shown that policymakers’ efforts to end civil wars via mediation can have an important effect.²²² The United States also has quite a bit of leverage with these three Gulf security partners that it can expend in order to prevent military interventions and proxy sponsorship, and encourage negotiation.²²³ The United States’ initial signals that it might back proxy war played a role in leading the Gulf states to embrace opportunistic strategies, and the cutting of that signal encouraged a shift toward status quo maintenance.

However, U.S. disengagement from proxy warfare and conflict is not enough. Even with signals regarding the United States’ unwillingness to play a major role, the Gulf States continue to compete in Libya and, increasingly, the Horn of Africa. Sustained diplomatic attention and development funding will be needed to end these deeply complex and intractable conflicts. Such efforts will be relatively small investments compared to the price of proxy war.