The Inevitable Unraveling of Saudi-UAE Ties

The once-close Saudi-Emirati relationship is weakening -- or, put in another way, normalizing -- as overlapping economic competition and strategic differences on issues like Yemen and the Muslim Brotherhood finally pop up into the public spheres. It is not a shift towards a virulent rivalry like others in the region, but rather a turn away from a period of unprecedented closeness that emerged after the Arab Spring in 2011. And like the external factors that brought Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates close for nearly a decade, changes in regional and global geopolitics are now again forging new wedges between them by periodically putting their interests at direct odds....