Antinomies of Alignment Redux: The United Arab Emirates and the United States

Over the past three decades, the United Arab Emirates has forged a sturdy bilateral security alignment with the United States. It has also pursued foreign policies that conflict with US interests in the Gulf and the broader Middle East. This contradiction is usually attributed to a hedging strategy. However, a more accurate analysis indicates that this reflects the peculiar type of alignment that exists between the two countries: a dyadic protectorate. Protectorates exhibit a tendency toward obsolescence, which gives the protected state both the incentive and the capacity to assert its self-interests. Protectors have little incentive to block such activism, partly because countermeasures are costly and partly because they tend to be counterproductive. Recent trends in UAE-US relations evidence the willingness and ability of a protected state to push the limits of a dyadic protectorate, but only after the alignment obsolesces.