What the UAE meeting with Syria’s Assad tells us about changing Middle East power dynamics

The UAE – voraciously practical when it comes to its national interests – has long wanted to normalise relations, writes Bel Trew

The UAE’s Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, left, talking with Syrian president Bashar-al Assad (EPA-EFE/Sana)

I ​think few would disagree that Syria’s ill-fated hope of revolution is over and President Bashar al-Assad has won.

That victory is a miserable and bloody one. Half the population of the war-blasted country is displaced, more than are 300,000 dead, and an unprecedented financial crisis is pushing families into unthinkable poverty which together with record drought and pollution is raising the spectre of famine.

The country itself is carved into areas of foreign influence, with Turkey, the US, Russia and Iran all holding their corners. But still. Assad has won.

And that was hammered home last week with the UAE foreign minister’s trip to Damascus, the first since the start of the bloody civil war in 2011. The visit by Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (the brother of the UAE’s de facto ruler Mohamed Bin Zayed or MBZ) was perhaps the loudest and most public signal that the Arab world was willing to engage with Assad. That he is indeed the victor.

This was gleefully pointed out by Hassan Nasrallah, chief of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is closely allied to Assad, who said it was a recognition of Assad’s “victory” over the rebels. But while the announcement was a surprise, the move is not surprising.

The UAE, voraciously practical when it comes to its national interests, has long wanted to normalise relations with the Assad regime. Ahead of the visit, Syria state media reported that MBZ received a rare telephone call from the Syrian president to discuss strengthening relations and cooperation.

In 2018 UAE fully reopened its embassy in Damascus for the first time since the start of the war, which prompted Bahrain to do the same. While in truth, the embassy never fully closed (Emirati diplomats were apparently still stationed there), the move was still a message. And experts claim over the last 10 years contact between the Assad family and the Emirati rulers has continued.

But clearly, the tiny but feisty Gulf state feels like it must position itself as the public go-to mediator for Syria as it continues to sculpt itself as a power broker in the region. It became the first Gulf country to recognise Israel last year, and has been involved in multiple conflicts from Libya to Yemen.

“Somebody had to do this job and the UAE did it,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati analyst who believes there is already consensus in the Arab League that it should welcome Syria back. He said the UAE was uniquely placed to act as mediator as many countries in the region are suffering internal problems, particularly in the pandemic.

“The UAE’s position is ‘enough is enough, let’s start a new page’. For one Assad is here to stay… no one likes him as a person or what he has done but in many ways he has won,” Abdullah said. “The Syrian opposition is in shambles... Squaring the realities on the ground will help the Syrian people.”

For Abu Dhabi, having a monopoly on reintegrating Assad could award it financial and business opportunities including, according to rumours, a coveted Mediterranean port. But it could also win important political capital globally as well as some personal goals.

“It’s part of the UAE approach for the whole region to counter the Turkish influence and the Islamic influence,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, a London-based Syrian journalist who covers domestic affairs for Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

And so Hamidi said that the UAE’s visit to Syria was not so much about Damascus as it was about Ankara, Tehran, Moscow and Tel Aviv.

“He wants to loosen Tehran’s and Ankara’s influence on Syria and to try to open some channels between Damascus and Tel Aviv... There are geopolitical goals and time will tell with if he will be successful.”

The UAE is not the only regional mediator vying for the top seat at the negotiating table with Assad. Arguably the most qualified is Jordan, which shares a border with Syria and is housing more than a million Syrian refugees.

It notably never closed the doors of its embassy in Damascus, and although it recalled its ambassador in 2011 at the outbreak of the conflict, in 2018, Amman appointed a chargé d’affaires upgrading diplomatic relations.

King Abdullah II also received an October phone call from Assad “to discuss ways to enhance cooperation”. The month before that Syria’s military chief made a visit to Amman to discuss their mutual border which was fully reopened.

Hamidi said this week he has seen a confidential Jordan-sponsored document laying out a plan for normalising ties with Damascus, which would see US troops leave but also an effort to “curb Iranian influence” there. He says that the document argues that “regime change” policies had failed in Syria, and instead a humanitarian and refugee crisis as well as regional instability was more urgent.

Egypt, which has been widely praised for brokering peace deals between Hamas and Israel, also has its eyes on the role of mediator. Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Shoukry recently said that Syria would return to the Arab League, a few months after he met with his Syrian counterpart on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Hamidi believes the change in US administration is perhaps behind this. After Donald Trump’s erratic and sometimes fiery interventions (see the 2020 assassination of top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani) Joe Biden has made it clear that the Middle East and other parts of the world are not top of America’s agenda moving forward.

“Crucially the Americans have not used their influence to block any Arab normalisation, you see that with the UAE,” said Hamidi.

During the high-profile UAE visit, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the US was “concerned” about the meeting and the signal it sent but stopped there, adding that Washington would “leave it to [their] allies to characterise their position on Syria”.

Hamidi said in certain instances the Americans are actually encouraging a certain type of normalisation for humanitarian issues. One example would be the proposed gas pipeline between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and bankrupt Lebanon that Hamidi said the US will facilitate via sanctions waivers.

Then this week the US Treasury said on its website that sanctions waivers would be granted for the UN and the US government to allow them to conduct “stabilisation and early recovery-related activities and transactions involving Syria”.

“The biggest change is the absence of American power in the region that has created space for regional powers to do their business individually,” Hamidi said.