Ali Bakir

Starting the end of 2020, the Middle East has witnessed an unprecedented de-escalation among its key regional rivals. Several major players, including Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Israel, the UAE, and Qatar, have been reaching out to one another to reconcile and normalize relations, thus signaling a regional reset. As a result, a rare positive, constructive, and responsible trend of diplomatic engagement has been emerging, prompting the question of whether these reconciliatory and normalization processes will be a temporary situation or a new norm in the region. While investigating this question, the article discusses the rapprochement efforts, reconciliatory initiatives, and normalization processes between the key players in the Middle East from 2021 to 2022. It offers a net assessment of the situation, reviews comprehensively the diplomatic breakthroughs related to the cases in question, explains the primary motives and drivers of involved countries, and highlights the challenges that will likely encounter them. The article concludes by anticipating the prospects of these developments.

In the last decade, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has emerged as a leading counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East. Feeling the heat of change in the region, the small, oil-rich Gulf country adopted an aggressive foreign policy that defined the UAE as a disruptive force that aims to reverse the fledgling democratic trend in the Middle East. After succeeding in Egypt in 2013, Abu Dhabi decided to support field marshal and warlord Khalifa Haftar in Libya to overthrow the UN-recognized government in Tripoli, take over power, and control Libya by force. To that end, the UAE offered massive military, financial, and diplomatic support to Haftar. In this context, the present paper aims to discuss the UAE’s interventions in Libya in terms of their nature, extent, motives, goals and repercussions. It highlights the UAE’s efforts to weave regional and international alliances to support Haftar and tries to answer the questions why Abu Dhabi has been able to act with impunity in Libya despite being the top foreign player fueling the war there for many years, and whether it will be able to achieve its goals and continue its interventions in the oil-rich North African country or not.