Erstwhile Gulf Arab allies battle one another in proxy wars in Sudan and Yemen. Pro-U.S. partners Turkey and Israel face off in Syria. These are just some of the most high-profile Middle Eastern conflicts now emerging, driven by an unfolding regional competition between two camps with very different views. One, comprising Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, aims to fill power vacuums by rebuilding existing states. The other, made up of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, intends instead to weaken embattled states or carve them up into new ones. 

But this broad framing has more to it than meets the eye; even as Cairo, Ankara and Riyadh agree on the ideal of stability, they disagree on the specifics, the importance of different geographies and the political outcomes of their campaigns. Likewise, though the Israelis and Emiratis are more than willing to experiment with proxies and border blurring, they do not share the same imperatives, nor the same emphasis, on areas of nominally mutual interest. Alignment there is, but it is shallow, interest-based and subject to alteration, rejection and substantial change. 

Filling the power vacuum

Two things unite the rival blocs: fear of Iran and partnership with the United States. But both of those factors have changed dramatically in the past few years. Iran is hobbled by sanctions, repeated U.S.-Israeli blows, a weakened proxy network, the fall of Bashar al Assad in Syria and a simmering protest movement that has pulled Tehran's power back toward its borders. The United States, meanwhile, has long ago abandoned its ideological project of nation-building and democracy, and has in fact narrowed its interests in the Middle East to a vague balance of power that favors trade, energy security and a degree of protection for Israel. In brief, Iran is no longer so fearsome that it forces states into unity, and the United States is no longer so active that it balances its partners, let alone imposes order, like it once did.

And there is plenty of disorder. Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq are all still slowly clawing out of years, and sometimes decades, of chaos. As power vacuums emerged, and neither the United States nor Iran filled them, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia steadily staked out — or deepened — their own claims, from Turkey in Libya, Somalia and Syria to Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Sudan and all three in Somalia. Meanwhile, the smaller powers of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, knowing they could not impose conditions the same way, crafted subtler, more proxy-based approaches to the power vacuums, from Emirati proxies in Yemen to Israel's Druze strategy in Syria and Lebanon. It was not — and is not — a zero-sum game, as the United Arab Emirates' and Saudi Arabia's overarching, overlapping strategies in Yemen kept them as partners until late 2024, while the Israeli air campaign against Iran in Syria served Turkey's own anti-Assad interests. But even while these rivals' interests at times aligned, competition bubbled beneath the surface and has found more recent direct expression. 

The status quo vs. the upstarts

Both blocs see regional chaos as a threat; disorder feeds extremism, threatens investment, blocks access to resources and could lead to a resurgent Iran. What they disagree on is how to address it. For the status quo powers, the restoration of order via unified, often centralized states takes precedence over secessionism, federalism, autonomous zones and redrawn borders. This comes from a unified view that such changes could create risks to their own homelands. For instance, Turkey continues to endure Kurdish secessionist threats, Saudi Arabia its restive Qatif Shiites, and even Egypt, though geographically well-anchored for perpetual unity, worries about access to the Nile River and the sectarian balance between its Christians and Sunnis. 

This contrasts with the Israeli-Emirati worldview. As minor powers, they lack the economic and military heft to unify the broken minor powers of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Sudan. But neither do they necessarily want to. For Israel, hostile, broken Arab states are forced to focus inward, as Syria did during its civil war. Additionally, as Israel seeks a path to regional normalization, it seeks to outflank holdouts by forming fresh relationships with nominally independent countries like Somaliland; if Somalia refuses to normalize, then Israel will build ties with its rebels. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates looks out at regional power vacuums and concludes that many of these states, their borders drawn up by long-dead European colonialists, are unsustainable without expensive foreign support. As a result, the Emiratis favor national breakups out of pragmatism, believing that if Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or Libya have more than one potential state inside of them, it would be cheaper and less risky to embrace the trends and allow those states or statelets to emerge so they can be influenced, traded with and exploited. 

These diametrically different approaches have formed two rival blocs with diverging visions for the region. However, unity among each side's members will not last forever. For one thing, the United Arab Emirates' goals are not the same as Israel's, nor are Turkey's necessarily the same as Egypt's. As middle powers push back against the upstart minor powers and likely gain ground against them, these divergences will become increasingly clear.

Why unity cannot last 

Divergences emerge immediately in geography. For one, Israel maintains a limited interest in the internal organization of Yemen, a distant nation capable only of launching sporadic missiles and drones, provided that its pro-Iran Houthi faction is sufficiently deterred. Israel views further constraining Iran as the crucial element in achieving this deterrence, rather than deep involvement in Yemen's affairs. Hence, Israel stood by as the United Arab Emirates' proxies were rolled up by a Saudi-backed government offensive in January, not even trying to use its diplomatic heft with the United States to halt the swing. 

Meanwhile, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are deeply involved in Sudan's civil war against the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, but Riyadh is in no position to support a military campaign like that seen in Yemen, given both the geographic size of Sudan and Saudi Arabia's limited military reach. It falls to Egypt, instead, to consider the risks of direct intervention as the RSF gains ground against the Sudanese government. After all, Yemen matters more to Saudi Arabia since they share a border, and Egypt likewise feels greater pressure to stabilize its neighbor, Sudan, and its control of the Nile. Meanwhile, Syria is comparatively distant from both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, neither of which has Kurds anyway, so the burden of stabilization falls on Turkey, as well as the risks of suppressing extremism and opposing Israel's strategy in the country. 

Here, the threads of alignment will be pulled taut. As the Saudi-Emirati relationship began to break down once the United Arab Emirates withdrew most of its forces from Yemen in 2019, which Riyadh saw as a betrayal, so too could Saudi-Egyptian cooperation break down if Saudi Arabia sees Sudan as a black hole of influence and reduces its involvement there. Turkish-Saudi-Egyptian cooperation in Somalia could founder if the United States recognizes Somaliland and pressures these three partners to follow suit, a campaign that Turkey could resist, but Saudi Arabia and Egypt, more dependent on the U.S. military, would struggle to deny. 

There are other divergences as well, particularly along political lines. For instance, Egypt remains wary of Islamism, leading Cairo to break from its bloc by not supporting Libya's Turkish-backed, Islamist Tripoli government. Saudi Arabia is not keen to see Islamists gain stature in places like Lebanon either. And neither Egypt nor Saudi Arabia would welcome a Syrian drift into a Sunni, pro-Turkish authoritarian state that produces an Islamist government seeking to spread its political influence to countries abroad. Here, they would once more find alignment with the United Arab Emirates, an ardent opponent of Islamism, as well as, more latently, the Israelis. Meanwhile, Turkish influence in the Arab world will generate Arabist backlash regardless of its political nature, driven in part by cultural and historical differences but also by Turkey's own core geographic imperatives that push it to treat the Arab world as an extractive buffer zone rather than a place to invest in and develop. 

Additionally, the degree of each country's risk tolerance differs, driven by these geographic and political divergences. Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as minor powers (and for different political reasons), are casualty-averse in their campaigns, and even Israel's regionwide campaigns put a heavy emphasis on force protection. As a result, they lack the appetite for large ground campaigns to achieve their goals. Egypt and Turkey, on the other hand, have both historical and recent examples of high-casualty campaigns; while the minor powers draw down in the face of a small number of losses, Egypt and Turkey have fought long-term, grinding campaigns, as seen with Egypt in the Sinai against the Islamic State, and with Turkey in Syria and Iraq against Kurdish militants. But though they can put together the ground forces needed for large wars, Egypt and Turkey will struggle to pay for them, let alone rehabilitate the countries in which they are deployed. While Gulf Arab states like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have fewer economic constraints, they have both tired of endless aid for political projects that only produce paralysis. Saudi Arabia has only recently started reversing this trend as it aligns with the Turks and Egyptians, but there is no reason to believe that, should oil prices weaken or the Saudi economy slow, Riyadh will remain generous with Syria, Sudan and Yemen.

There is a final reason to question the long-term viability of these rival blocs: as one bloc gains at the other's expense, mutual suspicions and concerns about the regional balance will erode both sides' unity. Too much success for the status quo powers would raise concerns in Saudi Arabia, the bloc's minor power, that it has ceded too much influence to Turkey. For that matter, Egypt might worry that a Turkish role in a stabilized Sudan would encircle it with a neo-Ottoman sphere of influence running from Tripoli across the deserts to the Red Sea. If, on the other hand, the minor power upstarts succeed in their goals, mutual suspicion of one another would flourish; the Emiratis would see too much Israeli success as a plot to weaken the Arab world and facilitate expansionism into the West Bank, while the Israelis could see proto-states in Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somaliland as fickle Emirati client states that put Israeli interests second.

When — not if — those alignments weaken or break, it will allow old competitions, like Saudi Arabia against Turkey, to reemerge, and establish new ones, potentially including an Israel-UAE rivalry as the Israelis fret about Emirati proxies' pro-Palestinian alignment and the Emiratis worry about Israel's willingness to weaken its Arab partners, like Jordan. These competitions could force Egypt into a more confrontational role in its African backyard, nudging the sleeping military giant toward a more assertive defense strategy as its Turkish and Saudi partners prove unreliable. Inter-bloc rivalries might cause even the stability-focused states to reassess their commitment to old borders and existing governments; Saudi Arabia might conclude that Yemen is easier managed as two states, while Egypt might think the same of Libya. The fundamental weakness of these blocs guarantees their unraveling, and the events that lead to their devolution will define where the next era of Middle Eastern geopolitical competition unfolds.