Abu Dhabi’s exit, a summit snub, and public criticism expose a widening Saudi-Emirati split reshaping energy and security coordination
[ISTANBUL] The United Arab Emirates announced on Tuesday that it would withdraw from OPEC and OPEC+, ending nearly six decades in the oil producers’ cartel. The move removes the alliance’s third-largest producer just one day before members were set to meet in Vienna, and it comes as the war between Iran and the US-Israeli coalition enters its ninth week.
The exit takes effect on May 1. It gives Abu Dhabi full control over the production capacity it has spent years expanding toward 5 million barrels per day, freeing the UAE from the quota system through which Saudi Arabia has coordinated Gulf oil policy for decades.
… a significant blow to OPEC and particularly to Saudi Arabia
Rauf Mammadov, a former official at SOCAR, the Azerbaijani state oil company, now at Fuld & Company, told The Media Line that the OPEC exit was “a significant blow to OPEC and particularly to Saudi Arabia.” Riyadh, Mammadov said, has struggled to maintain market dominance since 2015, when the balance of global oil production began shifting from OPEC to producers outside the cartel. He estimated that UAE production accounts for 9%-11% of OPEC output and roughly 5% of OPEC+ output, the broader producer alliance that includes Russia and other non-OPEC exporters.
UAE Energy Minister Suhail Mohamed Al Mazrouei told CNBC that the country chose the timing to minimize disruption to remaining producers and described the decision to The National, the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper, as a policy-driven evolution aligned with long-term market fundamentals.
The announcement coincided with two other ruptures inside the Gulf bloc this week. Both signaled that Abu Dhabi was no longer willing to lend its political weight to Saudi-led wartime coordination.
Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE president, declined to attend the “Decisiveness Summit” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman convened in Jeddah on Tuesday, sending the foreign minister in his stead. The gathering, intended as the GCC’s signature wartime meeting in the ninth week of the Iran war, produced calls for the accelerated completion of a Gulf joint missile warning system and for expediting new oil, gas, and water projects, according to Jasem Mohamed AlBudaiwi, the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the bloc of six Arab Gulf monarchies. The Emirati president’s absence denied the summit the head-of-state authority needed to translate its declarations into binding commitments. The communique’s calls for accelerated joint defense reflected what the GCC’s most powerful non-Saudi member had refused to endorse in person.
Politically and militarily, I think their position has been the weakest historically
Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to the UAE presidency, addressed the Gulf Influencers Forum in Abu Dhabi on Monday. He used the platform to publicly criticize the Gulf Cooperation Council’s wartime performance. He drew a distinction between the GCC’s logistical coordination, which he said had functioned, and the council’s diplomatic and military posture, which he said had not. “Politically and militarily, I think their position has been the weakest historically,” Gargash said, referring to the GCC. The break with Riyadh was the public delivery of the criticism by a senior figure in the Emirati presidency, made twenty-four hours before bin Zayed snubbed the Jeddah summit and the UAE walked out of OPEC.
Ebtesam Al Ketbi, president of the Emirates Policy Centre, characterized the OPEC exit on the social network X as a transition from collective quota-based commitments to sovereign flexibility in managing production. The shift, she wrote, would enable a faster response to disruptions such as those linked to the Strait of Hormuz.
An analyst at a Dubai-based research center, who requested to remain anonymous, told The Media Line that Vienna, the Jeddah summit, and Gargash’s remarks were not coincidental. The three signals, the analyst said, are synchronized components of deliberate diplomatic telegraphing by Abu Dhabi, with Gargash’s public criticism laying the ideological groundwork, the absence at Jeddah serving as a visible diplomatic gesture, and the OPEC exit landing as the operational decision.
The three ruptures this week extended a Saudi-Emirati break visible since New Year’s Eve, when Saudi forces struck an Emirati arms shipment at the Yemeni port of Mukalla on December 30, 2025. The UAE withdrew its troops from Yemen on January 3, and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council dissolved on January 9. The pattern had been openly playing out for four months.
Bar-Ilan University energy specialist Elai Rettig told The Media Line that the OPEC announcement was both economic and political. The UAE, Rettig said, has spent years complying with OPEC production quotas while watching most other members produce above their quotas, lie about their production figures, and leave the Saudis and Emiratis to absorb the cost. Leaving OPEC, he said, is the UAE’s statement that it is no longer willing to comply with Saudi terms.
Brent crude dipped after the UAE news before recovering as traders reassessed the risk premium they attach to Gulf production. The political signal overshadowed the market response. The UAE chose a moment when Saudi Arabia faced its weakest negotiating position in the Gulf in a generation to make the most public possible declaration that the joint Saudi-Emirati posture underwriting US Middle East policy for two decades is over. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had functioned as paired pillars of the security and energy architecture Washington built after 2003, with the Abraham Accords formalizing the convergence in 2020. That convergence ended this week.
The Dubai analyst told The Media Line that the timing reflected Abu Dhabi seizing a unique window. Global markets are short of reliable supply, the analyst said, and the UAE possesses both the spare capacity and the infrastructure to deliver it. Adhering to OPEC+ quotas in this specific crisis environment, the analyst said, had become strategically untenable.
Amer Al-Shobaki, an economic researcher specializing in energy affairs, told Al Jazeera the move marks a transition to a deeper conflict over leadership of the oil market, dangerous because it comes from a central Gulf producer with high productive capacity rather than a marginal one.
The Iran war wiped out 7.88 million barrels per day of OPEC production in March, The National reported. OPEC output fell 27% to 20.79 million barrels per day, the largest single-month supply drop for the group in recent decades.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz hit Gulf producers asymmetrically. Saudi Arabia, with the East-West Crude Oil Pipeline that runs from its eastern oil fields to terminals on the Red Sea, weathered the disruption better than Qatar, whose liquefied natural gas exports have no comparable workaround, or Bahrain, which depends on imports through the channel. The UAE has invested heavily in the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, which routes crude past Hormuz to a terminal on the Gulf of Oman.
Iran said on Tuesday that it has the right to take “necessary and proportionate measures” in the strait, blaming Washington for the disruptions to shipping.
The Dubai analyst commented that the asymmetric Hormuz disruption fundamentally altered the risk-reward calculus of OPEC+ membership for Abu Dhabi. Producers reliant entirely on the strait had halted extraction as their storage filled, while the UAE retained the physical ability to export crude directly to the Gulf of Oman through the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline. Remaining inside OPEC+, the analyst said, effectively meant the UAE was capping its own unencumbered exports to maintain solidarity with a cartel whose other major members could not physically reach the market. The coordination mechanism, the analyst said, was no longer distributing market burdens equitably and had begun forcing the UAE to “absorb the cost of a geopolitical crisis it possessed the infrastructure to bypass.”
Rettig has tracked the energy logic of the war as it has unfolded. He told The Media Line that Washington’s temporary lift on Iranian oil sanctions reflected a calculation that the United States was willing to pay short-term market costs to buy time for more decisive action against Iran’s ability to close the strait. The closure of Hormuz, the professor added, means the UAE will struggle to export all the oil it can produce, but over the medium-term Abu Dhabi will be able to release more oil onto the market without aligning itself with OPEC quotas.
The same pressure was reshaping other Gulf arrangements that the Iran war had stress-tested. Cartel discipline was one. Qatar’s hosting of Hamas was another.
Qatar’s recalibration
Israeli political analyst Amit Segal reported earlier this week, citing unnamed sources, that Doha was preparing to end its 20-year hosting of Hamas. Gerd Nonneman, professor of international relations and Gulf studies at Georgetown University in Qatar and editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies, told The Media Line the reporting was not surprising, but its framing missed how the arrangement actually worked.
“Qatar never considered itself as Hamas’ patron,” Nonneman said. Doha hosted Hamas’ political office and channeled funds to Gaza at the request of Washington and Israel, with the Gaza funds moving through Israel itself. The arrangement had been losing utility as mediation efforts stalled. Hamas’ response to the Iranian strikes on Qatari territory, Nonneman said, may have proven the tipping point of a policy whose value to Doha had already diminished sharply.
Qatar never considered itself as Hamas’ patron
The recalibration extended beyond Hamas to a wider Gulf grievance with Egypt and Al-Azhar. Imad K. Harb of Arab Center Washington DC wrote on April 21 that Gulf intellectuals had publicly criticized Egypt’s reticence to act more directly in support of the GCC, even after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi visited Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE to condemn Iran’s strikes. Al-Azhar’s institutional condemnation of the Iranian attacks did not arrive until March 17, and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb’s personal statement came on April 7, more than five weeks after the strikes began. Skeptics in the Gulf, Harb wrote, were now “asking whether Cairo really has the GCC’s interests at heart.”
The Saudi-Emirati split has reached beyond Yemen and OPEC. February was the turning point. Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi political scientist and nonresident scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, made the rivalry visible to Washington in a report identifying the Saudi-UAE rivalry as a central GCC fault line. Despite Riyadh’s historical closeness to Abu Dhabi compared with Doha, Alghannam wrote, the Kingdom viewed the Emirates’ assertive foreign policy with alarm, particularly when Saudi and Emirati positions diverged over access to the Arabian Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Absent binding GCC mechanisms to manage such divergences, he warned, the council was liable to “drift toward inconsequentiality.” On Al Jazeera Arabic on Monday evening, hours before the OPEC announcement, Alghannam said Gulf states had the capacity to absorb prolonged pressure from the Hormuz crisis longer than Iran could.
Nonneman characterized Riyadh’s response to the OPEC departure as restrained, expecting regret rather than substantive retaliation.
Mammadov said the cascade question for Vienna was whether Kuwait or Bahrain among original OPEC members, or Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan among newer OPEC+ participants, would follow the UAE out. Qatar left OPEC in January 2019, during the diplomatic and trade blockade that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed on Doha from 2017 to 2021. Two Gulf monarchies have now left the cartel during periods of rupture within their own bloc.
The Vienna meeting on Wednesday was the last OPEC gathering in nearly six decades to count the UAE as a member. Russia, the second-largest OPEC+ producer, said Tuesday it would remain in the group and hoped Abu Dhabi’s exit would not unravel the cartel. Saudi Arabia’s options narrowed sharply this week. Riyadh can press the remaining members to honor agreed production limits and watch Abu Dhabi capture market share, or ease those limits and accept a price collapse.
The Dubai analyst noted that production sovereignty gives Abu Dhabi a diplomatic lever it could not exercise inside the cartel. Outside OPEC+, the UAE can position itself as the sole reliable Gulf supplier during a Hormuz blockade and trade unique export capacity for bilateral security partnerships with major global powers desperate for energy security.
Rettig said the UAE departure forces Saudi Arabia and the remaining OPEC members into deeper dependence on Russia, the partnership that has held OPEC+ together since 2016. Moscow’s weight in OPEC+ decisions, he said, will now grow. The shift, Rettig said, means Washington must now coordinate Gulf production diplomacy directly with Abu Dhabi rather than through Saudi Arabia alone, with both governments aligned on keeping the global market well-supplied as the Trump administration manages pressure on Iran and Russia. The UAE, freed from OPEC restrictions, is likely to increase production by roughly 1 million barrels per day, Rettig told The Media Line, “without having to take into account the interests of Saudi Arabia or Russia.”
