UAE sheds its above-the-fray demeanor

Prince bulks up military, sends it to war

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan greets U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday at Mina Palace in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates’ capital. With his nation surrounded by enemies, Mohammed has spent 30 years strengthening its military.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan greets U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday at Mina Palace in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates’ capital. With his nation surrounded by enemies, Mohammed has spent 30 years strengthening its military.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Martyrs' Day was a new holiday on the United Arab Emirates calendar in November, wedged between the Islamic holy days and the Dubai Shopping Festival.

Many nations commemorate their fallen soldiers, but the UAE has always been different. The glittering towers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are monuments to an alternative Middle East, standing above the fray, where investors can forget the region's conflicts and make money. If that's now changing, it's largely the work of one man.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and a national leader, controls 6 percent of the world's oil and its second-richest wealth fund. At 54, young for an Arab leader, he's trusted by Washington and celebrated in Moscow. And he's spent three decades strengthening his small nation's military, making him one of Lockheed Martin's best customers.

Mohammed has always been security-conscious. As a young prince in the air force in 1990, when U.S. troops were massing in the Persian Gulf to fight Saddam Hussein, he drove through the sand dunes to meet an American general for lunch, stashing a rifle under the front seat in case he got shot at. Now, to Persian Gulf leaders, the neighborhood looks more dangerous than ever, with the Islamic State taking root and Iran rising. The crown prince wants his country to have more weapons.

From the Switzerland of the Persian Gulf to its Sparta is how one Western official describes the transformation. It's one full of risks because the UAE's business model has largely worked -- turning it from a $50 billion economy in 1990 to the Arab world's second-largest after Saudi Arabia, with output worth $400 billion last year.

From Dubai skyscrapers, both Citigroup and Uber run regional hubs. Abu Dhabi, the capital emirate where Mohammed holds court, has Ferrari World and branches of New York University and Paris's Sorbonne. Guggenheim and Louvre museums are under construction.

On Oct. 4, the prince was far from those glitzy landmarks, in the small northern emirate of Umm al-Quwain. There, the family of Ahmed Hebaitan al-Baloushi was in mourning. He was one of more than 50 Emirati soldiers killed by a missile attack in Yemen while fighting Shiite rebels with ties to Iran.

Mohammed has engaged the UAE in that war alongside Saudi Arabia, part of a wider effort to roll back Iranian influence. He's also joined the bombing of Islamic State fighters in Syria and struck at jihadists in Libya. Concerned about a U.S. retreat from a turbulent Middle East, he's on the offensive across the region.

Mohammed's supporters say he had no choice.

"The UAE couldn't afford to just sit there and pretend to be Switzerland and have the whole region burn down," said Mishaal Al Gergawi, managing director of the Delma Institute research center in Abu Dhabi. "You need to either put out the fire or leave the neighborhood. But countries don't have wheels."

As he raises his country's standing, Mohammed, known as MBZ, keeps a low profile. Through an aide, he declined to be interviewed. More than 35 conversations with diplomats, defense and intelligence officials, and analysts shed light on a leader whose moves are watched carefully from New York's oil markets to Washington think tanks and Middle Eastern capitals.

Mohammed isn't the UAE's president -- that's his older brother, Sheikh Khalifa, who's scarcely been seen in public since he had a stroke in January 2014. Long before that, MBZ was the prime mover on security and the point man for Washington.

Chuck Horner, the former Air Force general who met MBZ for lunch in 1990, credits him for opening UAE bases to American forces. Later, Horner helped Lockheed Martin secure the sale of fighter jets to the UAE. "They got the most modern F-16s in the world," Horner said.

Born in 1961 in the oasis town of Al Ain, Mohammed is a lifelong soldier. He graduated from Britain's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and served in the UAE's special forces and as a helicopter pilot before becoming head of the air force and then deputy supreme commander of its armed forces in 2005.

"He wants to have a military force that can at least hold any foreign aggressor until help arrives from the United States," said Bruce Riedel, who spent 30 years at the Central Intelligence Agency and served on the National Security Council.

From Mohammed's vantage point, there are potential aggressors all around. To the east is Iran, blamed for undermining Gulf Arab rulers. The Muslim Brotherhood, and the more radical Islamists of al-Qaida and Islamic State, are considered dangerous enemies.

Mohammed enjoyed a rapport with former U.S. President George W. Bush, who invited him several times to Camp David during his administration. In January 2008, MBZ returned the hospitality, taking Bush to a desert camp in Abu Dhabi where they sat on carpets and watched a display of falconry, a tradition of Bedouin hunting culture.

But there's been a shift under President Barack Obama. Dennis Ross, who served on Obama's National Security Council, said Mohammed "never held back" in their conversations. When the U.S. condoned the ouster of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak during the uprising in 2011, MBZ "was very upset" and said so "very bluntly, not just to me but to every American official, including the president," Ross said. He posed the question: Is this how the U.S. treats a longtime friend?

Mohammed was also frustrated by the diplomatic outreach toward Iran that led to July's nuclear agreement, according to a former Obama administration official. Many Gulf Arab leaders worry that Iran could expand its influence once sanctions are lifted.

That's the backdrop to Mohammed's military drive. Last year, the UAE began mandatory army service for men and was the world's fourth-biggest arms importer, according to IHS Inc.

The UAE isn't just buying weapons, it's also using them. Initially, Emirati officials were reticent about their ground involvement in Yemen. By September, they were flying journalists there to showcase the troops in action.

The task MBZ has set himself goes beyond building an army. He's trying to bond a nation created in 1971 out of seven separate emirates. Abu Dhabi, the one with most of the oil, has always been in the driver's seat.

Photos hanging at the Al Ain museum show Abu Dhabi before the oil rush: A woman, her face veiled, walks by a marketplace full of men wearing turbans; children stand in front of a thatched hut, holding goats. On the wall is a quote from MBZ's father and the UAE's founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan: "Whoever has no past has neither present nor future."

The future arrived first in Dubai, but Abu Dhabi has emerged from its neighboring emirate's shadow since Zayed died in 2004. It's now barely recognizable from the Al Ain images, a sprawling assortment of high-rise buildings and grand villas. Expatriates stroll along a tree-lined corniche, a sign that the desert emirate can afford precious water resources to keep the city green.

MBZ preserves some of the old traditions. He holds a weekly majlis in the customary tribal style, sitting at the center of a horseshoe-shaped assembly. But his fiercely loyal cadre is modern-minded, largely made up of military types and young, non-royal men educated abroad. They call him "the boss."

David Mack was U.S. ambassador to the UAE in the late 1980s, and says MBZ stood out even then. Their meetings were always at 7:30 a.m., hours before most government agencies would open. "How early do you get started?'" Mack once asked. Mohammed replied that he'd begin the day by waking up his father and giving him a cup of milk, followed by dawn prayers together.

Mack remembers stories about the young prince "doing crazy things," like driving backward with one of his brothers along Abu Dhabi's corniche. But the future leader was learning about Middle East politics too. It was a time when Muslim Brotherhood members, facing clampdowns in places like Egypt, flocked to the Persian Gulf to fill a shortfall of teachers and bureaucrats. MBZ has told visitors that the period showed him how young people can be brainwashed.

Like his father, Mohammed has shown little tolerance toward Islamists. That shapes foreign policy. The UAE sent billions of dollars to Egypt to support army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi after he toppled an elected Muslim Brotherhood leader in 2013.

It's a factor at home, too. Last year, the UAE designated more than 80 groups as terrorist organizations, including some that operate legally in the United States and Britain. The Brotherhood, which advocates Islam via the ballot box, is perceived as an especially insidious threat to the UAE's absolute monarchy.

A longer-term threat is oil dependence. Mohammed's plans to end it draw inspiration from models such as Norway, oil-rich but with a diverse economy. "Fifty years from now, after we have loaded the last barrel, are we going to feel sad?" he said in a rare public speech in Dubai in February. "If our investment today is right, I think we will celebrate that moment."

For now, oil still dominates, and revenue has taken a hit with the crude slump. The UAE is ahead of Persian Gulf peers in its fiscal response. It has scrapped energy subsidies, and is considering sales and corporation taxes. That would be another big change to the model: to the wider world, Dubai means tax-free.

The UAE has limited human resources too: More than 80 percent of the population is expatriates. That's one reason Mohammed has backed a wider role for women, who have more freedom and higher-profile jobs than in nearby Saudi Arabia.

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