After Sheikh Mohammed, 62, who is commonly known as MBZ, ascended to the presidency last year, rumors swirled about whether he would make one of his brothers his heir.
In that case, the front-runners would have been Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, the powerful national security chief, Sheikh Mansour, the owner of the Manchester City football club, or the foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah.
Instead, he appears to concentrating power within his immediate family, as Saudi Arabia’s King Salman did by delegating wide-ranging powers to his son and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS.
Sheikh Khaled was appointed chairman of the UAE’s intelligence agency in 2016.
The United Arab Emirates, a close U.S. ally, is best known as the home of Dubai, a major international hub for business and travel.
The federation of seven emirates, including oil-rich Abu Dhabi, has rapidly transformed itself over the past half-century from a desert region sparsely populated by Bedouin tribes into a political and economic powerhouse with state-of-the-art infrastructure, including the world’s tallest skyscraper.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the first president of the UAE and the driving force behind its creation, ruled from 1971 until his death in 2004. He appointed his eldest son Khalifa as his successor and MBZ as deputy crown prince.
Sheikh Mohammed has been the nation’s de facto leader since Sheikh Khalifa suffered a stroke in 2014. Sheikh Khalifa died eight years later, in May 2022.
During Sheikh Mohammed’s rule, the UAE cultivated close ties with neighboring Saudi Arabia, initially joining it in its war against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels before largely exiting the conflict years later. The UAE has sought to project military power across the region as it has opposed the rise of Islamist groups.
In 2020, the UAE normalized relations with Israel in the first of the so-called Abraham Accords, followed by Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. The UAE and other Gulf nations had quietly maintained ties with Israel for years befoe then, drawn together by mutual suspicions of Iran.
The UAE hosts some 3,500 U.S. troops, many at Abu Dhabi’s Al-Dhafra Air Base, from where drones and fighter jets flew missions combating the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. Dubai is the U.S. Navy’s busiest port of call abroad.
But strains have emerged in recent years between Sheikh Mohammed and the U.S., long a guarantor of security in the wider Persian Gulf. The UAE and Saudi Arabia were alarmed by the 2015 nuclear deal reached among Iran, the U.S. and other world powers. The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 further fueled fears that the U.S. was pulling back from the region.
A planned U.S. sale of advanced F-35 fighter jets to the UAE appears to be stalled in part over American concerns about the Emirates’ relationship with China. Meanwhile, the UAE has been careful not to alienate Russia as Moscow wages war on Ukraine.
