America Enabled the Gulf’s African Adventurism

Foreign Policy·🕐 3 sa önce·👁 0 görüntülenme

Why Washington let its Middle Eastern partners wreak havoc in Africa

Despite Western governments’ long-standing preoccupation with China’s role in Africa, the major geopolitical transformation occurring across the continent today is the expanding influence of the Middle Eastern middle powers. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have equities that extend from the Gulf of Aden in the east to the Gulf of Guinea in the west. Militarily, this includes a continent-spanning archipelago of Emirati military bases and defense cooperation agreements. Economically, this involves an estimated $65 billion in investments in East Africa. The UAE alone invested $47 billion in projects related to infrastructure, security energy, mining, ports, and agriculture, making it the fourth-largest foreign direct investor in Africa behind China, the European Union, and the United States.

In the last year, there has been growing attention to the ways in which this expansive influence in the Horn of Africa informs U.S. policy. During his visit to the White House in November 2025, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman nudged U.S. President Donald Trump to take action on the Sudanese civil war, after nearly a year of Trump explicitly avoiding the conflict. Following the meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held talks with members of the Quad—the United States, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—to affect a humanitarian truce. But he failed to achieve any demonstrable progress, partly because of the substantial military and economic relations that the United States maintains with the UAE. Forcing the UAE to change policy on Sudan would cost the United States considerable diplomatic capital with a key regional partner.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Since at least Barack Obama, U.S. presidents have accommodated and even enabled Gulf foreign-policy adventurism in Africa. Because the Middle East is considered more important, African interests are repeatedly sacrificed—something that Judd Devermont has called a “bureaucratic tax” on Africa policy. The result is a policy approach that fuels conflict and instability across the continent and undermines U.S. interests.

Over the past decade, the Gulf states have emerged as a new type of middle power, both militarily assertive and increasingly unbound by the tattered norms of the U.S.-led international order. They owe this newfound status, in part, to U.S. policy. Starting with the 2003 Iraq War, the United States built Gulf states into military powers in exchange for their help sustaining oil and gas production, containing Iranian influence and maintaining U.S. military access, basing, and overflight across the region.

Initially, the George W. Bush administration turned Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into literal launching pads for U.S. power projection during the second Gulf War. Every U.S. president since has supported the transformation of the Gulf states into independent military powers with strong conventional arsenals. In the wake of the Iraq War, arms exports from the United States to Saudi Arabia and the UAE more than tripled. On the heels of the Arab Spring in 2011, total arms exports from the United States to those two countries more than doubled again. With the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, U.S. arms exports to the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia increased again. A surge followed the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, as well.

During this same period, Africa became a key component of Gulf foreign policy. When grain prices surged during the global financial crisis (rice prices tripled between November 2007 and April 2008), Gulf middle powers invested heavily in agricultural land in the Nile River basin.

These investments were designed to protect their agricultural food supply—up to 85 percent of which is imported—from external shocks. They targeted East Africa because of its geographic position, its vast tracts of arable land, and Emirati success in securing long-term port concessions along the Red Sea and Horn of Africa coast. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Djibouti became major recipients of Gulf investments in land, livestock, and agroproduction. Saudi Arabia also purchased an estimated 500,000 hectares of land in Tanzania in 2009, and Qatar opened negotiations to lease 40,000 hectares of land in Kenya. Emirati investments transformed the UAE into one of the largest foreign land buyers in Africa, particularly in Sudan. These economic ties would be among several forces that set the stage for escalating middle-power military entanglements in East and North Africa, which would come to include not only the Gulf but also Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Israel.

Civil strife in East and North Africa created opportunities for the Gulf states to exercise both their growing military capacity and economic might on the continent. Beginning in Libya, and following a similar pattern in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Gulf powers used their vast financial and military capabilities to shape conflicts. In each case, Gulf middle powers exacerbated the conflicts they entered, thereby undermining local and regional stability, as well as U.S. security interests. And in each case, U.S. presidents accommodated or enabled Gulf military adventurism.

By 2014, Libya’s civil war had increasingly become a proxy conflict, pitting the UAE and Saudi Arabia against Qatar and Turkey. The UAE was launching airstrikes from Egypt against Qatari-and Turkish-backed groups, and it was financing the introduction of Russia’s Wagner Group into the conflict. Not to be outdone, in 2020, Turkey deployed hundreds of its own troops as well as thousands of Syrian mercenaries.

This military support, a clear violation of the United Nations’ arms embargo, should have triggered a mandatory sanctions review under U.S. law. Yet, the Obama administration turned a blind eye to Emirati actions, because it needed UAE support for the Iran nuclear deal. Turkey’s role in the conflict was seen as secondary to managing an increasingly strained relationship in Syria, and Ankara has long been viewed as an essential NATO military partner. Then, under the Trump administration, revelations about the UAE’s role in bringing Wagner into Libya had no impact on bilateral relations. The UAE had just signed the Abraham Accords and agreed to a $23 billion arms deal with the United States. For the Trump administration, these agreements superseded developments in Libya. Similarly, despite condemnation at the U.N., Turkey’s introduction of Syrian mercenaries into Libya got little reaction from Washington. In fact, the performance of Turkish drones in the Libyan civil war was seen by some as a benefit to the United States and NATO.

A similar logic applied to the Tigray war in Ethiopia. The conflict broke out in November 2020, following the signing of the Abraham Accords, and the UAE allegedly deployed drones from the Eritrean port of Assab to support federal authorities in Addis Ababa. The following year, the UAE conducted at least 90 flights, providing extensive military support to Ethiopian forces to beat back a Tigrayan advance. For the Trump administration, none of this was treated as a significant problem; to the contrary, some in Washington took the view that supporting Emirati influence in Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa would deepen U.S.-Emirati ties and the Abraham Accords, as well as serve as a new bulwark against China’s established regional presence.

The Biden administration did more to push back against the UAE’s military involvement in Ethiopia. It argued the conflict was undermining regional stability and therefore U.S. interests. But when the UAE did not change course, the administration continued to accommodate it. Tellingly, at no point did the administration publicly disclose the UAE’s escalatory impact on the conflict. When Turkey intervened—providing drones to Addis Ababa that were credibly linked with civilian massacres—the administration’s response was similarly tepid.

Sudan is perhaps the starkest example of the United States accommodating and enabling the Gulf powers in Africa. Abu Dhabi has long-running ties to Sudan. When the conflict between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) erupted in 2023, the UAE started using a Chadian air base to ship weapons to the RSF. Throughout the conflict, the RSF has been implicated in numerous large-scale atrocities against civilians—using Emirati-supplied weapons that were ferried on Emirati planes and using a network of airfields and military bases that the UAE had established throughout North and Central Africa, including Libya. The Emirates also used the Wagner Group to move weapons via an airstrip in the Central African Republic.

Against the backdrop of normalizing relations between the UAE and Israel, as well as attempts to secure a Gaza cease-fire, the Biden administration repeatedly stalled any effort to rein in the UAE. The motivating concern was that pressuring the UAE on Sudan could have unintended consequences in other theaters. Instead, the administration named Abu Dhabi a “major defense partner” in September 2024, several months after the RSF launched its siege of El Fasher, wherein its began a systematic effort to destroy regional food production to starve civilians out of the city, setting the stage for the October 2025 massacre of an estimated 10,000 people.

The second Trump administration continued the policy of accommodation and enablement, deepening ties with the UAE by signing multibillion-dollar deals to bolster critical mineral supply and expand U.S.-backed AI investment in the Middle East. While Rubio did come close to publicly calling out Emirati involvement in Sudan in November 2025, it never translated into actual political pressure.

Needless to say, if the UAE has been the most destabilizing external actor in Sudan, it is not the only one. The U.S. approach to other regional powers—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey—largely operated from the same script. Collectively, these states have provided crucial military and political backing to the SAF, enabling its leader’s consistently obdurate position on peace talks and fueling serious civilian harm.

The conventional wisdom that U.S. interests in the Middle East far outweigh those in Africa deserves increasing scrutiny. The continent’s burgeoning demographics and accelerating economic integration leave it poised to be an engine of global economic growth and innovation in the decades ahead. Africa also sits at the center of the next generation of great-power competition over critical minerals, renewable energy, and the expanding role that key states from the global south will play in international affairs.

Yet, regardless of the political party in the White House, the United States has been unwilling and unable to manage—and push back on—the destabilizing interventions of its Middle Eastern allies across Africa. The reason is simple: U.S. policymakers attach greater strategic value to their relations with the Gulf states (and other Middle Eastern partners) than any set of priorities in Africa. Not only has Africa paid the price, but this policy approach has failed to protect the core U.S. interest of stability across the African continent.

Presidents after Trump will need to resuscitate U.S. leadership in Africa vis-à-vis the Gulf. One approach is finally conditioning arms sales to Gulf states on their behavior in Africa, perhaps building on currently stalled initiatives advanced by several Democratic members of Congress. At a minimum, the U.S. State and Defense departments could develop formal criteria to review Gulf actions in Africa ahead of new arms sales, rather than treating Gulf conduct on the continent as irrelevant.

At the same time, the United States needs to engage Africa in a manner that bolsters African agency and the continent’s ability to manage the surge of Gulf and broader Middle Eastern influence. It must reinvest in African partnerships, but not transactionally as in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Increasing support to the African Union to facilitate dispute resolution and reinvigorating U.S.-Africa trade relations, potentially with preferential trade deals, are additional mechanisms to strengthen the autonomy of African states vis-a-vis the Gulf.

The United States made the Gulf states into middle powers, and they made war. These conflicts have remade the politics in large swaths of East and North Africa. Changing this dynamic will require that Washington begin treating the continent as a region of genuine strategic value, rather than as expendable at the altar of its Middle East agenda.

Zuri Linetsky is head of research and analytics for Dandelion Works.

Michael Woldemariam is an associate professor and the Ph.D. program director in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

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