How ‘Little Sparta’ UAE shocked the Gulf by going its own way on oil

DOHA, Qatar — Among senior U.S. officials, the wealthy Gulf nation of the United Arab Emirates is known by an affectionate nickname: Little Sparta.

Subscribe to read this story ad-free

Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.

The nickname, often attributed to former US Defense Secretary James Mattis, reflects American admiration for the UAE’s investment in its military and willingness to act decisively, compared to its slower Gulf neighbors.

This week, “Little Sparta” lived up to its reputation for pivoting quickly and going it alone, announcing that on May 1 it would leave OPEC, the league of oil-exporting states that since 1960 has played a major role in setting global oil prices.

The UAE says that by exiting the cartel, it will be able to set its own oil production levels and will no longer be bound by the collective decision-making of OPEC, which has long been accused by critics of imposing artificial limits on production in order to drive up oil prices.

But the move comes amid growing UAE frustration over Gulf states’ response to Iran’s attacks and tensions between the UAE and its larger neighbor Saudi Arabia playing out on diplomatic fronts and battlefields across the region.

“You’re seeing a more independent and assertive UAE policy in the region. This is the new UAE that everyone has to settle for,” Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist, told NBC News in a phone interview Wednesday.

Even the timing of the OPEC announcement seemed to reflect the country’s impatience with its neighbors. The news was announced to oil traders around the world on Tuesday shortly after 4:20 p.m. Abu Dhabi time (8:20 a.m. ET). At that time, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, was hosting a summit of Gulf states in the coastal city of Jeddah in an effort to project regional unity. While other countries were represented by their king or crown prince, the UAE only sent its foreign minister to the meeting.

The day before, a senior Emirati official publicly criticized the Gulf Cooperation Council – made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – for its “weak” response to Iranian drone and missile strikes.

FORSUBSCRIBERS

UAE leaves OPEC: what it means for global oil prices

01:23

“The GCC position was the weakest in history, given the nature of the attack and the threat it posed to everyone,” Anwar Gargash, an Emirati diplomatic adviser, said at a conference in Dubai on Monday. He accused neighboring states of attempting “a policy of containment” towards Iran through trade ties and energy partnerships. “These policies have failed miserably and we now face a major reassessment,” he added.

Saudi officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the criticism.

At the heart of the UAE’s new direction is a growing political divergence with Saudi Arabia, the largest of the GCC states. The size of the kingdom and its role as guardian of the two holiest sites of Islam have traditionally made it a regional leader. Salman, 40, has not been afraid to use his country’s financial and military clout to try to shape the region.

But UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, 65, has made clear he is not prepared to defer to his younger Saudi counterpart.

Both men are authoritarian royals often referred to by their initials: MBS and MBZ, respectively. Both are allies of the United States who are pushing for large-scale reforms of their countries’ society and economies. But they have taken significantly different paths in their foreign policy.

“The UAE and Saudi Arabia have always had growing economic competition and they now have different visions of regional security and regional relations,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

These differences have been keenly felt in Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s impoverished southern neighbor, ravaged by a complex civil war since 2014.

The Saudis and Emiratis launched a joint air campaign against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels in 2015, but the two sides subsequently supported different factions, and in December 2025, Saudi Arabia bombed a shipment of Emirati weapons, claiming they were being sent to a separatist group. The United Arab Emirates denied the accusation and responded by announcing it was withdrawing its troops from Yemen.

“The deepest difference between the UAE and Saudi Arabia is over Yemen,” said Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist.

The Saudis and Emiratis also supported opposing sides in Sudan’s bloody war. Salman provided political support to the Sudanese army, while the United Arab Emirates supplied weapons to the army’s rivals, the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), according to a UN investigative and human rights committee. The United Arab Emirates denies supporting the RSF, whose fighters massacred thousands of civilians in the city of El-Fasher last year.

Another area of ​​conflict has emerged over Israel. The UAE established diplomatic relations with Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords brokered by the United States, one of the landmark foreign policy achievements of the first Trump administration. Since then, the two countries have forged increasingly close ties in the areas of trade, energy and security.

Despite pressure from President Trump and former President Joe Biden, Salman has so far resisted the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. In a November 2024 speech, the crown prince accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, going much further than Zayed’s occasional criticism, while government-controlled Saudi media attacked the UAE’s ties to Israel. Israel has previously rejected a UN expert report that it committed genocide in Gaza, where more than 75,000 people have been killed, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures.

When the war in Iran broke out on February 28, it looked like MBZ and MBS might put aside their differences as their neighboring countries came under fierce attacks from their common Iranian enemy. The two men spoke by telephone on the first day of the war and again two weeks later, according to a call list provided by the two governments.

But the unity seems short-lived. The same list shows that they have not spoken in six weeks.