L“Sparta from the Middle East”, as well as the United Arab Emirates have been described, has been distinguished for more than a decade by a strongly militarized and particularly aggressive foreign policy. Such a strategy bears the brand of Mohammed Ben Zayed, the current president of the Emirates Federation, and it is animated by obsessive hostility against the “Arab Spring”, this wave of popular protest which made the dictatorships of the region tremble in 2011.
The strength of such a strategy may reside in its counter-revolutionary coherence, it leads to many theaters the United Arab Emirates to support secessionist movements, accentuating the fragmentation of the States concerned instead of guaranteeing an authoritarian form of restoration.
The Libyan laboratory
After the civil war which led, in Libya, to the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, in September 2011, the United Arab Emirates decided to bet on General Haftar, governor of Tobrouk under Muammar Gaddafi, from 1981 to 1986, before defection in the United States. Not only Abou Dhabi encouraged Khalifa Haftar to trigger a second civil war in May 2014, but Emirati aircraft participated in the Tripoli bombing, three months later. The supporters of Khalifa Haftar do not manage to seize the capital, hence the division of the country between two governments, one recognized by the United Nations (UN) in Tripoli, the other controlled by Khalifa Haftar in Benghazi. Despite UN embargo on arms deliveries, Khalifa Haftar benefits from a continuous flow of Emirati weapons, including helicopters of Belarusian origin.
Refusing any sharing of power in a reunified Libya, the Emirates push Khalifa Haftar to launch a third civil war, in April 2019, which only leads to throwing the government of Tripoli into the arms of Turkey, without putting an end to the polarization between the west and the east of Libya. Mohammed Ben Zayed takes note of this bitter failure and now uses Benghazi and his region as a laboratory of his military cooperation with Russia, of which he more or less discreetly supports the invasion of Ukraine. This Russian dimension has been accentuated since the fall of the Dictator Assad to Damascus in December 2024, and the withdrawal on the fief of Khalifa Haftar of Russian installations hitherto established on the Syrian coast. The development of the Maaten al-Sarra air base in the South Libyan, is in this regard heavy with consequences.
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