On September 23, 2024, President Joe Biden designated the United Arab Emirates (UAE) a major defense partner, a largely rhetorical title previously held only by India. The designation came during a visit by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) to the White House — the first ever by an Emirati president. On May 16, 2025, Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, reaffirmed the partnership in the UAE’s capital of Abu Dhabi, signing a letter of intent for comprehensive and long-term “bilateral force readiness, interoperability, and innovation.”

In some ways, this partnership is MBZ’s crowning achievement. The Al Nahyans, monarchs of a small state in a turbulent neighborhood, have spent forty years making themselves indispensable to the world’s strongest safety net: the American military-industrial complex. This agreement basically guarantees that for the foreseeable future the UAE will continue hosting American bases, fighting alongside American troops, receiving American training and weaponry, and jointly inventing the most high-tech tools of violence.

This “unprecedented cooperation” with a repressive monarchy not only reveals the American empire’s true nature, rarely hidden all that well, but sheds light on how the Emirati elite protect themselves and prosper. The UAE certainly is a “connectivity hub and security pillar across continents” but only in the political doublespeak of globalized exploitation and militarism.