Day 100: Oil up, Hormuz shut, ceasefire holding by a thread
100 days of war. Brent up 50%. The Strait still closed. And Abu Dhabi quietly building for the next decade — but is the strategy working?
This weekend, a number stopped us: 100. One hundred days since the United States and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear and military installations. A war that a US president promised would end “very swiftly.” One hundred days that have reshaped the Middle East’s energy map, fractured a ceasefire architecture, and left more than 7,000 people dead. It is the kind of number that demands a pause — and a reckoning.
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The question at the heart of this edition is one that Foreign Affairs put plainly last week: Can the UAE go it alone? As Abu Dhabi doubles down on strategic autonomy — tighter ties with Israel and Washington, growing distance from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), capital diplomacy running on its own track — the answer will shape this region, and the fortunes of everyone building here, for years to come.
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Day 100: The Audit
Brent crude closed at around $95 a barrel on Thursday — up nearly 50% year-on-year. WTI traded above $100 for much of May, touching $108 mid-month before easing. Between late February and 31 May, only around 607 ships transited the Strait of Hormuz, against approximately 100 crossings a day before the war began — a near-total collapse of normal throughput. US inflation has climbed to 3.8%, and energy analysts now warn that if June inventory draws continue, a return above $100 for Brent is not a prediction but a matter of timing.
An April ceasefire has held. But “held” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. This weekend, Hezbollah formally rejected the US-backed framework that Israel and Lebanon had tentatively accepted, demanding full Israeli withdrawal, prisoner releases, and reconstruction guarantees before any deal. Hours later, a first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drone — the same cheap, GPS-guided munition that has defined the ground war in Ukraine and is now standard in Lebanon — wounded four Israeli reservists in the south. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz responded by saying troops will stay and that Israel reserves the right to strike Beirut. That is not the language of a ceasefire hardening into peace. It is the language of a door left ajar.
Al Jazeera published a photo essay (1) yesterday that puts faces to these numbers — civilians, port workers, healthcare staff, families — from across the region and inside the UAE itself. 100 days in, a bloody stalemate.
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Abu Dhabi Plays the Long Game
The Lebanon wobble matters for a specific reason beyond the obvious: UAE diplomats have been quietly working the ceasefire architecture for weeks. This makes what Abu Dhabi has been doing in parallel all the more striking — governing for the next decade while managing the present one.
On Friday, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed issued a federal decree appointing Hamad Ali Mohammed Al Kaabi as the new Director-General of the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR). The new chief can change matters in practice: the DG sets the pace of licensing for Barakah’s four operating reactors, shapes the UAE’s engagement posture with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — which raised concern last month after a drone struck within the plant’s perimeter — and will determine whether Abu Dhabi formally pursues small modular reactors (SMRs), a technology ADNOC and the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation have been evaluating since late 2024. The timing is pointed: the Iran nuclear file remains the single outstanding issue most likely to block a durable settlement, and a fresh signal to the IAEA about Emirati seriousness is worth something.
The new DG also inherits Abu Dhabi’s recently formalised target to generate 60% of the emirate’s electricity from clean and renewable sources by 2035 — an Emirate-level generation target, with the baseline set at a 75% cut in emissions intensity from 2019 levels. Barakah already supplies roughly 25% of the UAE’s electricity demand. At a moment when Brent is elevated, and scrutiny of Gulf producers is intense, Abu Dhabi is making a deliberate public case that it is building beyond oil, not despite the war premium, but in full view of it.
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Khaldoon in Washington
The week’s most consequential meetings were driven by the same logic — resilience as an active argument, not passive reassurance. Mubadala Group CEO Khaldoon Al Mubarak was in Washington reviewing the UAE’s $1.4 trillion, ten-year investment commitment to the United States, originally pledged in March 2025. The framework spans AI infrastructure and semiconductors (led by G42 and MGX), energy and manufacturing (including ADNOC’s $60 billion oil and gas partnerships with ExxonMobil and Occidental and Emirates Global Aluminium’s $4 billion Oklahoma smelter), and sovereign capital deployment through ADIA, Mubadala, and ADQ. Both sides confirmed that the first-year deployment is running ahead of target, though officials did not quantify by how much.
The AI thread is where the momentum is most visible. Stargate — the joint OpenAI-SoftBank-Oracle venture now extended to the UAE — is building a 200 MW data centre phase in Abu Dhabi, enough to power roughly 200,000 homes. The confirmation of Nvidia chip supply is the infrastructure commitment that makes the rest credible.
Abu Dhabi has understood, and is executing with considerable sophistication, that capital diplomacy and conflict run on separate tracks. The geopolitical temperature in the Gulf is high; the bilateral economic architecture between Abu Dhabi and Washington is, by design, built to outlast the weather.
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The Question Behind the Headlines
Whether that bet ultimately pays off is the subject of a searching new essay in *Foreign Affairs* — required reading for anyone trying to understand what the UAE is actually doing, and what it risks.
Andrew Leber of Tulane University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that the UAE has responded to 100 days of Iranian bombardment not by changing course but by intensifying every element of its prewar strategy: closer ties with Israel, greater distance from the GCC, deeper alignment with Washington, and expanding economic reach into Africa. The UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC on 1 May — timed pointedly to coincide with a Saudi-hosted summit on regional integration — crystallised the widening rift with Riyadh and signalled that Abu Dhabi is no longer willing to subordinate its production policy to cartel consensus. Leber’s warning is not that the strategy is irrational but that it is incomplete: regional cooperation is what would actually deliver the great-power status Abu Dhabi craves, and without it, the UAE risks a future of dependence on decisions made in Washington and Tel Aviv rather than the autonomy it seeks.
It is a compelling thesis, though not uncontested. Critics point to concrete gains from Abu Dhabi’s minilateral approach — DP World’s port network, AD Ports’ logistics infrastructure, and the Abraham Accords’ tangible intelligence and defence-technology dividends — as evidence that selective, bilateral partnerships can deliver results that GCC consensus never could. The ADX delegation now in London, the Stargate chips, the FANR appointment: all are products of exactly the strategy Leber questions.
The piece was published on 5 June (2) and is already one of the most-read articles on the *Foreign Affairs* site this week.
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ADX Takes Its Case to London
That confidence is being projected outward this week. From 8 to 11 June, ADX is leading 23 listed companies to the fifth HSBC GCC Exchanges Conference in London, with a market capitalisation of AED 2.83 trillion (~$771bn) as of April and AED 66.2bn in dividends announced so far this year. The delegation spans energy (ADNOC Gas, Borouge, Fertiglobe), financials (First Abu Dhabi Bank, ADCB), real estate and supporting services, and supporting cross-support investors’ centres on market structure improvements: settlement-cycle alignment with international norms, expanded short-selling frameworks, and deeper secondary-market liquidity for smaller caps.
Dubai’s residential market recorded 66,900 property sales worth AED 196bn January to May, with 74% of transactions off-plan. A note of caution is warranted: off-plan dominance at this scale concentrates delivery risk in developers’ handover capacity, and buyers with floating-rate mortgages remain sensitive to any further move in UAE dirham interest rates, which track the US Federal Reserve.
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Washington’s New Front: Crypto
One development from last week deserves more attention than it has received, and it lands close to home for anyone operating in Dubai’s financial ecosystem. On 2 June, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned four Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges — Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex — in what Chainalysis described as the Treasury’s largest-ever enforcement action against Iran’s digital asset economy. Nobitex alone processed more than half of all Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025 and, according to OFAC, helped the Central Bank of Iran acquire at least $507 million in USDT stablecoins to prop up the rial. The four executives designated alongside the exchanges include co-founders from the Kharrazi family, who have longstanding ties to the Khamenei family network.
The immediate compliance obligation for UAE-based operators is clear. Under VARA’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing framework, virtual asset service providers (VASPs), OTC desks, and stablecoin issuers must immediately block any accounts or wallet addresses linked to the designated entities, update sanctions screening and transaction monitoring protocols, and conduct counterparty reviews for any exposure to the named exchanges. Because the OFAC designations carry secondary sanctions risk, any foreign institution that continues processing transactions for these platforms risks being cut off from the US financial system — a material threat to any Dubai operator with US dollar clearing relationships. VARA published new proliferation-financing requirements on 1 June, one day before the OFAC action; the sequencing appears deliberate.
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What to Watch This Week
Oil: Watch Asian inventory data for the week ending 6 June. A draw of more than 3 million barrels would be the threshold most traders are watching as the “return to $100 Brent” trigger. Monitor ADNOC and Saudi Aramco loading nominations for July and any Iraqi Basra Oil force majeure language following last week’s pipeline disruptions.
Lebanon: Whether Hezbollah’s rejection of the ceasefire framework produces a second-day escalation depends on whether the IDF responds to Sunday’s drone strike in kind. Watch for any public statement from UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed or a Gargash intervention; either would signal that Abu Dhabi’s patience with the Lebanon track is running thin.
Capital: ADX London roadshow investor reception signals (8–11 June); any further Mubadala or Stargate UAE announcement out of Washington; and FANR’s first public communication under new DG Al Kaabi — whether a consultation note, IAEA engagement signal, or SMR tender update.
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One hundred days in, the Gulf is neither broken nor unchanged. The structures that make this region remarkable — the sovereign balance sheets, the infrastructure, the diplomatic instincts honed across decades of navigating exactly this kind of pressure — are intact. But as Leber’s essay makes clear, and as this week’s events underscore, the strategy Abu Dhabi has chosen to protect those structures is now itself the central question. Autonomy or dependence. Bilateral speed or multilateral weight. Clear eyes and a steady hand — and the wisdom to know which path leads where.
We’ll be watching with you.
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1 https://aje.news/kygegw
2 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-arab-emirates/can-uae-go-it-alone