Alistair Campbell
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Bombed an Emirati vessel coming in with arms into the port.
The UAE withdrew its troops and the Saudi government has now pushed all the way down south to Aden again.
Over to you.
The story...
seems to have been that when Mohammed bin Salman was first established as the crown prince and pushed aside his cousins, and there was this famous, essentially, kind of internal palace coup, he looked to Mohammed bin Zayed, the great figure in UAE, as his mentor.
Yeah, he's an older man, and the two of them were sort of lockstep.
Then some of the problems maybe began to emerge about the fact that
The Saudi plan for development, which was to develop a tourism sector, get hold of quantum computing and AI, bring over finance and banks, began to seem suspiciously similar to the sort of UAE-Jubai development model.
So there was a bit of an economic competition.
Then you say they went into Yemen together.
And of course, in Yemen...
This is the beginning of the relationship between UAE and the Sudanese because it was Hameti and the RSF that were being paid as mercenaries by UAE to fight in Yemen.
That's where that kind of relationship comes from.
UAE then led under the last Trump administration, the Abraham Accords, getting Morocco, Bahrain, and UAE to sign a deal with Israel.
Which Saudi didn't join.
And again, the final moments of their really strong relationship were probably when they both turned against Qatar.
They were both on a sort of blockade and exclusion of Qatar.
But more recently, it feels as though Mohammed bin Salman is really...
presenting himself as, oddly, he's presenting himself as a force for stability.