Trump in the Gulf: The ambitious Emirates

Since Donald Trump moved into the White House for the second time, the world's greats have been queuing up in the Oval Office. Guests have included Emanuel Macron and Narendra Modi, Giorgia Meloni and Keir Starmer, the prime ministers of Ireland and Japan, and of course Volodymyr Zelensky, and Benjamin Netanyahu twice already. They are all heads of state or government. This does not apply to Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Nevertheless, on March 19, he too conferred with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Afterwards, Vice President J. D. Vance hosted a banquet in the White House in honor of this guest, who is unknown to much of the world. Tahnoon is the national security advisor to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This week, Trump himself is traveling to the Gulf and will also visit the Emirates.

The most powerful man in the world is thus honoring a country only half the size of Florida . Yet the Emirates' sovereign wealth fund towers at $1.8 trillion, and the country's army is the most powerful in the Middle East after Israel's. Together with the large Saudi Arabia, the small emirates form the powerhouse of the Arab world.

Sheikh Tahnoon – as a member of the ruling family of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, he bears this honorary title – declared in the Oval Office that the UAE would invest $1.4 trillion in the United States over the next ten years. An astronomical sum, even compared to the $600 billion Saudi Arabia plans to invest. The billions will be used to develop artificial intelligence, produce semiconductors, expand fossil and renewable energy sources, and invest in manufacturing, including the first new aluminum smelter on American soil in 35 years.

That only sounds presumptuous to those who don't have the Emirates on their radar. This isn't the case for the American tech giants. Energy-rich Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates, is sensing new business opportunities in leasing terabytes and is building massive data centers for this purpose. Microsoft, for example, is currently shelling out $1.5 billion for a project in Abu Dhabi. In return, Hussain Sajwani from Dubai , who has been a close friend of Trump for years and celebrated New Year's Eve with him at Mar-a-Lago, is investing $20 billion in new data centers in the USA.

But it wasn't just lucrative business deals that opened the door to the White House for Sheikh Tahnoon. Trump counts the Emirates among the countries whose political services he can rely on. When the world laughed at Trump's proposal to transform the Gaza Strip into a Mediterranean "Riviera," the UAE's ambassador to Washington , Yousef al-Otaiba, was one of the few who could see any merit in the idea. It was the only sensible proposal on the table, he said.

When Trump initiated the resumption of talks with Iran over its nuclear program, he instructed Anwar Gargash, the UAE's most experienced foreign policy expert, to deliver a letter from him to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And when no one in the Arab world wanted to speak to an Israeli politician for fear of reputational damage, Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's foreign minister, received his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar, in Abu Dhabi on April 4. The Emirates had overcome its reservations about Israel earlier than other Arab states.

The Emirati government currently hopes to play a key role in the reconstruction of Gaza : by financing major projects, building a security apparatus headed by former PLO security chief Muhammad Dahlan, who has been living in exile in Abu Dhabi since 2011, and training imams. There's a simple reason why they could be tasked with this: in hardly any other country in the Arab-Islamic world are state and mosque, politics and religion so strictly separated, and Islam so little present in public as in the UAE.

The Ministry of Religion was abolished and replaced by the Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence, created in 2016. The Abrahamic Family House serves as a beacon of religious tolerance.

Visible from afar, a synagogue, a church, and a mosque form a triangle between the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the National Museum. All three have the same cubic shape and size, and are also made of the same material. This unique ensemble conveys the message that different paths lead to God, that none is superior, and that there is no hierarchy between religions.

Where the ambitious Emirates aren't pioneers, they're often at least at the forefront. For example, in renewable energies. Their most recent project: a solar power plant with a capacity of six gigawatts and a battery storage system for 19 gigawatt hours, making the energy available nonstop. The plant cost six billion dollars and is just the beginning. The UAE is investing a total of 54 billion dollars to achieve a total renewable energy capacity of 19.8 gigawatts by 2030, which corresponds to almost a third of Germany's current output.

The UAE is also at the forefront of artificial intelligence. AI is the new oil, says Muhammad Baharoon, director of the Bhuth think tank in Dubai. The Emirates aims to be the first country in the world to use AI to draft and revise laws. This is intended to accelerate the legislative process. With a sovereign wealth fund and a state-owned company, the UAE is participating in "Stargate," a project announced by President Trump immediately after taking office that aims to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure.

Thanks to President Muhammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan's personal relationship with Macron, the UAE plans to invest up to $50 billion in France to develop what will eventually become the continent's largest AI hub. Despite its close ties to the US, the UAE has not written off Europe. On April 11, it was announced that it and the EU would begin negotiations on a free trade agreement.

What drives the UAE to play such a major role in the world? It was founded in 1971 as a federation of small and poor emirates. The oil wealth of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi then quietly poured petrodollars into sovereign wealth funds for a long time. At the same time, the inventiveness of the Emirate of Dubai attracted capital and talent. With the death of the state's founder, Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, in 2004, the quiet modesty of even the largest emirate, Abu Dhabi, came to an end. His sons, unlike him, strive for power and influence. They are moving into the gaps created by geopolitical shifts. As early as 2011, US General James Mattis, Secretary of Defense during Trump's first term, dubbed the Emirates "Little Sparta" – small but powerful. With the world's fifth-largest arms imports and a significant defense industry of its own, the UAE army has become even more powerful since then.

The army is the political power link for the Emirates' commercial ambitions. In 2023, they sold liquefied natural gas to China for the first time, using yuan rather than dollars. In 2024, they joined the informal association of BRICS countries led by China and Russia—not to turn away from the West, but to open up new opportunities. This is paying off. Since the start of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, the UAE has brokered the exchange of more than 3,700 prisoners of war between the warring parties.

The Emirates are a driving force in the creation of new economic corridors: The IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) is intended to one day connect India with Europe, and the Development Road will then run from the UAE via Iraq and Turkey to Europe. But the Emirates have also included Africa in their strategic planning. As a provider and coordinator of networks, if one does not cover a region, one loses relevance, explains think tank director Baharoon. In recent years, the Emirates have invested more in Africa than any other country, including China. Investments amounted to $50 billion in 2022 alone.

Ports, mining, and agriculture are high priorities. The Emirati investment offensive is welcome to African countries, as China is scaling back its involvement, Western aid has been declining since the war in Ukraine , and multilateral financing is subject to heavy bureaucratic burdens.

More than 20 African countries are helping Emirati projects finance their energy transition away from fossil fuels; they are also providing the UAE with emission certificates, which they offset against their continued oil production. At the same time, the port network is becoming more dense. Dubai Ports World and Abu Dhabi Ports already operate 13 ports in eight African countries. Their transport infrastructure includes railway lines and, across the continent, dozens of dry ports and logistics hubs. In ten African countries, Emirati sovereign wealth funds have acquired significant agricultural land to improve food security at home.

Only in recent years has the investment been followed by increased military cooperation. Bilateral defense agreements exist with 28 states. Most purchase modern products, armored vehicles, or corvettes from the young Emirati arms industry; training agreements exist with many; the UAE maintains military bases with its own troops in six states. The Streit Group, a manufacturer of armored vehicles, produces in Uganda. This gives the Emirates a greater presence on the African continent than the notorious Russian Wagner mercenaries.

The military presence serves to protect investments and, with its bases on the Horn of Africa, to ensure freedom of navigation. Furthermore, the UAE supports states in the fight against terrorist groups such as Shabaab, Boko Haram, and M23. They are also heavily involved in conflicts on the continent. In Ethiopia, they are supporting the government in the Tigray war to protect their extensive land acquisitions.

They usually justify their intervention with the fight against Islamism, but this is rarely successful. In Libya, the Emirates supported rebel General Khalifa Haftar in his failed attempt to capture the capital Tripoli from an Islamist government backed by Turkey . In Somalia, they are facilitating the state's disintegration with their bases in two breakaway regions. In the Sahel region, they are collaborating with the coup generals who expelled Western troops from their countries.

The situation in Sudan is bitter. The UAE has purchased large tracts of agricultural land there. In the power struggle between the army, whose leadership is suspected of Islamist leanings, and the rebels of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under General Hemedti, the UAE is supporting the latter, including with weapons. They are grateful to him for the fact that his units fought alongside them in Yemen, in the south of which the Emirates want to establish a vassal state. Companies based in the Emirates that smuggle gold are allegedly financing the RSF. Even more serious is the complaint filed with the International Criminal Court that the UAE is complicit in the genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the RSF in Darfur, a claim the government in Abu Dhabi denies.

The Emirates is not only the first Arab country with a Ministry of Tolerance, but also the first to be tried for complicity in a genocide. Trump is visiting a contradictory, thoroughly capitalist country. The state's purpose of not missing any business opportunity justifies the means here. He should be pleased.