As noted in the previous post in this series, the UAE has reoriented itself away from the Global North and toward the Global South, in particular Africa. There is a military aspect to this: the emirates have been active in the Yemen conflict, dwelt in the murk of post-Qaddafi Libya, and picked a side in the renewal of Sudan’s civil war. None of these adventures have gone well and enthusiasm for them among UAE officials is distinctly muted. The UAE is “much more geoeconomics than geopolitics,” according to Dr. Narayanappa Janardhan, director of research and analysis at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi. Economic engagement is viewed as strategic. Janardhan saw the US and China as having wanted to keep the focus on geoeconomics but being unable to sustain it, slipping back instead into geopolitics. The UAE, by contrast, aims at both strategic autonomy and strategic ambiguity, a process without an end: “We are not looking at conflict resolution anymore,” Janardhan said, “but at conflict management.”
Because the Global North has somewhat withdrawn from geoeconomics in favor of security-led geopolitics — and with nearly all the northern economies, including across East Asia, at or near demographic stagnation — the UAE’s turn to the Global South is a strategic one. The exception to it is the US, which the UAE continues to see as useful for security reasons but which it mainly values as a prosperous economy uniquely able to develop new technologies. The US’s position is not altogether solid, however: there is strong resentment in the UAE at the questioning by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) of the UAE-controlled tech investor G42’s proposed stake in US-based AI chip developer Cerebras. (The UAE is obsessed with AI, mainly for demographic and post-carbon reasons.) CFIUS’s move was quintessentially geopolitical. The fear is that Cerebras technology would leak to China via the G42 channel. This is just the sort of geopolitical blockage of UAE growth and development that the emirates is struggling to avoid.
The Global South seems simpler. The UAE puts India in a privileged role. Janardhan stressed the importance of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which reaches from Piraeus across Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to Mumbai, and I2U2 (launched 2022), which links Israel and India with the US and the UAE. India is not far behind China as a UAE trading partner, and is followed by Africa. India anchors the UAE in shifting the center of economic gravity from the G7 (US, Japan, UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada) to the E7 (China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and Turkey), the latter having already surpassed the former in economic size.
The India-dominated non-alignment of the 1950s and 1960s centered on not taking sides in economic ideology, political philosophy, or the nuclear strategic balance, with the main goal being peace. The non-alignment being pursued by the UAE and India today is centered on not allowing economic growth to be hampered by … economic ideology, political philosophy, or the nuclear strategic balance. The goal is not so much peace as prosperity. In conversations around the dramatic changes in Syria, one even heard it said that “instability is good for us.” That is perhaps too cynical. What is clear is that the UAE sees itself as a stable node at the midpoint of several networks and corridors of trade that it is determined to strengthen: between the Chinese Belt and Road and Africa, between India and Africa, between India and the EU, linking the Gulf and Iraq with Turkey and the EU and building ties between the UAE, Iran, and Russia. The UAE’s power and prosperity lie precisely in its ability to privilege trade over politics. As point 3 in Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s 8 principles of Dubai reads, “Dubai does not invest or involve itself in politics, and does not rely on politics to ensure its competitiveness.” But it can also only have so big a domestic market with just 10 million people who already have the region’s highest per capita food consumption rates. India is the missing piece. It signed the first of the UAE’s Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements (CEPAs) in 2022. There have been more than 20 since then, at various stages of ratification. All in the context of what is called the retreat from globalization.
It can be difficult to see from the US or Europe, but there is a genuine re-alignment of global trade and investment flows in favor of the Global South. For many decades, development of the Global South has been framed by a discourse of imperialism followed by uneven development and a morally urgent redistribution. But the Global South revival being led by the UAE and India (among others) has almost no moral inflection at all as it is occurring between and among former colonies. The point is growth, without further attempts to settle imperialist accounts. Western investors can definitely benefit from understanding this and finding opportunity in it: thus the soaring attendance at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, and the genuine plausibility of labelling “the capital of capital” what was a quiet and isolated emirate just a generation or two ago.