When Hedging Becomes Habit: The UAE’s Ontological Costs Amidst the Iran War

While the world watches the Strait of Hormuz and the global repercussions of the war on Iran, the UAE reveal the crisis’ deeper logics and impact. Iran’s disproportionate targeting of a state that initially remained on the sidelines, followed by the UAE’s decision to suspend all commercial activity with Iran, signals a rupture in its decades-old practice of keeping competing relationships open. Current IR research understandably investigates this rupture through the breakdown of Emirati omni-balancing and hedging strategies. Yet the UAE case points to a deeper problem: what happens when a security practice becomes so habitualised that abandoning it disrupts not only strategic behavior but the biographical continuity through which the state understands itself as secure?

The UAE at the Intersection of Competing Interests

The US-Israeli war against Iran poses an existential hyperdisruption for the Gulf, with the UAE at its center as a maritime and trading hub, conduit for Iranian transhipment and sanctions evasion, and host to critical US military facilities. For decades, the UAE leveraged this position through calibrated omni-balancing and hedging: maintaining security relations with Washington, deepening economic ties with China, keeping channels open to Iran, ambivalent relations with Israel, while extending its own power into the Horn of Africa. Emirati investment in ports, critical infrastructure, arms and security technology, and partnerships with actors in Sudan, Libya and Ethiopia has secured strategic resources and alternative trade and security corridors beyond oil. The UAE’s relationship with Israel is particularly revealing: after seeking to moderate Israel’s conduct in Gaza, a recent joint military presence in Somaliland and receipt of mobile air defenses from Jerusalem captures this balancing act. For Iran, this balancing behavior is precisely the problem: it keeps Iran’s rivals and competitors engaged in the region.

The UAE-Iran Dilemma

Iran’s attacks nevertheless disrupt a model on which Iran itself depends. Beyond bilateral trade, the UAE has served as key financial and logistical bridge for Iranian trade with China: UAE-based front companies, currency networks and shadow-banking structures have reportedly enabled Tehran to channel oil revenues and transfer billions in Yuan from Chinese buyers, prompting US sanctions in 2025 targeting these networks. This created unusually tangled sets of dependencies for Iran itself. The suspension of all trade and financial activities thus appears to be a clear warning to Tehran, but also represents a striking departure from the UAE’s quiet diplomatic and deliberately cautious foreign policy. As the war persists, specifically China and India are exploring riskier Arctic trade routes, weakening the connectivity on which Emirati hedging depends. Yet, media speculations on “what exactly prompted” this change point to a deeper dimension of the war.

The Ontological Cost of Abandoning Hedging

The UAE’s hedging is not merely a strategy for managing regional vulnerability. Decades of repeatedly balancing competing relationships have turned it into a habitualised practice of statecraft and, crucially, of national self-understanding. Bachleitner’s concept of temporal security helps explaining this: it extends ontological security by treating biographical continuity as a condition of the state’s secure sense of self, connecting routinised practices and collective memory to expectations of its future. For the UAE, managing contradiction has become part of this continuity: the ability to remain connected, resilient and future-oriented despite regional instability. This logic is increasingly institutionalised domestically; the UAE’s 2023 We the UAE 2031 vision frames national transformation, active societal participation and future-readiness as a shared national trajectory.

The war now forces a break with the practice through which this continuity has been maintained. A security practice can become constitutive through repetition: over time, repeatedly performing contradiction-management can become evidence of the state’s competence, resilience and capacity under uncertainty. The UAE thus face a problem that conventional accounts of hedging cannot capture: reversing a habitualised security practice may unsettle the continuity through which the state has understood itself as secure. The Emirates may now have to dismantle the practice without being able to simply abandon the identity this practice helped produce. This shifts the analytical question from whether hedging has failed to why hedging has become so difficult to abandon, and how the UAE will now navigate performing security after breaking with it.

Outlook

The UAE case may reveal a deeper dimension of the conflict: Iran’s attacks disrupt not only material networks but a habitualised mode of security built under very different regional conditions. Hedging therefore cannot be assessed as a purely strategic choice: once routinised, security practices become embedded in a state’s temporal self-understanding and domestic political narratives. Whether the Emirates can return to their established pattern, and how they narrate that return, will show whether the rupture remains temporary or forces a deeper reconfiguration. As Steffen Hertog recently noted, the possibility of a new, prolonged normal may not yet have sunk in.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.