Telegraph Online

How Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and the United States are competing to define a post state order.

Long read analysis

The Middle East is no longer organised around the assumptions that once governed it. Sovereign borders, formal diplomacy, and the primacy of the state no longer structure outcomes in the way they once did. In their place sit competing models of power: Saudi Arabia’s attempt to reassert state order, the UAE’s preference for networked control, Israel’s reliance on permanent fragmentation, and a United States that has shifted from military dominance toward economic extraction. These models do not coexist peacefully. They collide, repeatedly, across multiple theatres, producing instability not as an anomaly but as a predictable condition.

This is not merely a change in policy. It is a change in method. Power is now exercised less through armies and treaties than through ports, logistics, recognition, finance, and non state intermediaries. Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and Iran are not isolated crises unfolding in parallel. They are connected arenas in which incompatible operating systems of regional order are being tested against one another, in real time.

Competing Models of Power

Saudi Arabia’s strategy remains state centric by design. After a decade of experimentation and error following 2011, Riyadh has converged on a clear premise: fragmentation is not manageable, and disorder does not remain contained. Sovereignty, territorial integrity, and recognised governments are not ideological preferences but security requirements. Engagement with Iran, renewed diplomatic mediation, and resistance to secessionist projects reflect a calculated effort to reconstruct a regional equilibrium anchored in formal authority. This approach is not driven by idealism. It rests on a judgment that fractured political space ultimately returns as threat, undermining borders, trade routes, and domestic economic transformation.

The UAE has reached a different conclusion. Abu Dhabi does not seek to stabilise entire states. It seeks to control nodes. Ports, enclaves, security partners, commercial corridors, and political clients form the architecture of influence. Disorder is not treated as failure but as a condition that can be segmented, monetised, and insulated. Southern Yemen, eastern Libya, parts of Sudan, and Somaliland are not exceptions to this model. They are expressions of it. The objective is not sovereignty. It is leverage, exercised through access rather than authority.

Israel operates on a third logic. Where Saudi Arabia seeks order and the UAE seeks managed chaos, Israel increasingly treats fragmentation itself as a durable strategic condition. Weak neighbours, divided polities, and legally ambiguous enclaves are not regarded as temporary security buffers but as preferable outcomes. This orientation is not reducible to threat perception alone. It is the product of internal political transformation, which has altered the incentives that now govern Israeli decision making.

The United States has, in parallel, narrowed its ambitions. Large scale military underwriting of regional order has given way to economic pressure, sanctions enforcement, selective coercion, and market access. The aim is no longer to own outcomes but to extract leverage while limiting exposure. This recalibration has created space for regional actors to pursue divergent strategies, often at cross purposes, and occasionally in open contradiction.

Yemen: Where State Order and Managed Chaos Collide

Yemen is where these models meet most visibly. For Riyadh, Yemen is not a peripheral file. It is a domestic security frontier. A fragmented Yemen guarantees instability along Saudi Arabia’s southern border, threatens Red Sea access, and corrodes any wider regional balance. State collapse in Yemen is not a tolerable risk. It is an enduring liability.

The UAE’s involvement has followed a different trajectory. Rather than prioritising a unified Yemeni settlement, Abu Dhabi embedded itself within southern security structures, aligning material support with militias and associated political bodies. Over time, autonomy hardened into de facto secessionism. The arrangement proved politically marketable abroad. On the ground, it entrenched fragmentation.

Saudi concern sharpened as Emirati linked supply chains began to alter the balance of power in eastern and southern Yemen. This was not a marginal development. It directly challenged Saudi control over escalation dynamics. Riyadh’s response, including targeted interdictions and diplomatic escalation, marked a departure from quiet accommodation. It signalled a recognition that Emirati network expansion was no longer parallel to Saudi objectives, but in conflict with them.

Yet Yemen also exposes the limits of Saudi leverage. Networks, once established, do not dissolve on command. Commercial ties, personal financial dependencies, and proxy structures are resilient. The result has not been resolution, but a prolonged contest between state centric reconstruction and enclave based control, with neither side able to impose a decisive outcome.

The Horn of Africa: Somaliland and the Weaponisation of Recognition

The Horn of Africa illustrates the same logic in legal form. Here, recognition itself has become an instrument.

Somaliland’s appeal lies precisely in its ambiguity. Mogadishu cannot meaningfully constrain what it does not formally control. Ports can be operated, facilities established, and trade corridors secured without engaging Somali sovereignty. This is not incidental. It is structural, and it explains the sustained external interest.

This logic has been echoed in parts of the United Kingdom, where recognition of Somaliland is presented as a remedy for migration, instability, and regional insecurity. The argument does not withstand scrutiny.

Stability in Somaliland is enclave based and externally underwritten. Recognition would not export stability across Somalia. It would incentivise further fragmentation. Migration pressures would likely increase, not diminish, as development is detached from national planning and concentrated around extractive port economies. Appeals to historical ties serve more as rhetorical framing than policy justification. Recognition would cut across African Union norms, complicate relations with regional states, and entangle Britain in Red Sea militarisation with limited strategic return. Somaliland’s value to external actors lies in its usability, not its viability.

Iran: Sanctions, Protest, and the Limits of Coercion

Iran completes the pattern by demonstrating the limits of both military coercion and network based pressure. Recent unrest has often been framed as spontaneous political uprising. The sequence was more complex.

Initial demonstrations were driven by economic pressure. Inflation, currency depreciation, and rising living costs were central. Escalation followed only after external activation, including communications infrastructure, coordination, and acts of disruption aimed at provoking elite fracture rather than negotiated reform. The objective was pressure, not transformation.

The United States response reflects a broader recalibration. Direct military confrontation would likely consolidate elite cohesion and trigger regional escalation. Instead, Washington has prioritised economic containment, sanctions enforcement, and calibrated signalling. The aim is leverage without ownership.

Iran’s governing system does not exhibit signs of imminent collapse. It has evolved into a military bureaucratic structure with security institutions embedded across the economy. Sanctions impose real costs on the population, but they also entrench elite control. Military strikes would more likely reinforce regime cohesion than weaken it. Structural change remains contingent on negotiated economic relief, a pathway consistently obstructed by maximalist escalation.

Israel: Internal Capture and Permanent Fragmentation

Israel’s position in this landscape is structurally distinct. Its conduct cannot be explained by immediate tactical security concerns alone. The Israeli state has undergone a completed internal transformation. Political authority has shifted from a secular, security bounded elite to coalition structures dominated by religious nationalist and demographic blocs for whom territorial maximalism is non negotiable.

This shift operates through coalition mechanics. Israel’s proportional system rewards escalation and penalises compromise. Prime ministers increasingly function as executors of coalition necessity rather than arbiters of strategic direction. Restraint carries political risk. Confrontation consolidates governing coalitions.

The consequences are systemic. Stabilisation gives way to fragmentation. Occupation becomes permanent rather than conditional. Regional disorder is tolerated because it imposes lower domestic political costs than negotiated settlement. Under these conditions, Israel no longer functions as a status quo security state responding to external threats. It operates as a revisionist actor whose internal incentives generate continuous escalation, placing it in direct tension with sovereignty based regional orders.

The New Order: Fragmentation Versus Sovereignty

The Middle East’s emerging order is not multipolar in the classical sense. It is polycentric, structured around nodes rather than borders, leverage rather than law. Saudi Arabia seeks to reverse this trajectory by restoring the primacy of states. The UAE has demonstrated how profitable managed chaos can be. Israel has embraced fragmentation as an organising principle. The United States extracts value while limiting ownership.

These models cannot all prevail. Fragmentation corrodes the trade routes, investment environments, and security assurances that regional modernisation requires. Sovereignty without enforcement is hollow. Networks without restraint metastasise instability.

The defining contest of the coming decade will not be between blocs, but between state restoration and the normalisation of disorder. Yemen, Somalia, and Iran are not peripheral crises. They are the laboratories in which the post sovereign Middle East is being constructed, or resisted.

The outcome remains unresolved.