Registration for the evening is here:
https://events.emirateswire.co.uk/
Attendance is free and on-the-record.
In the week before 9 September, everyone who has registered will receive an email inviting them to submit a question in advance. We will read every one, and they will shape what we put to the panel on the night.
The UAE’s economic story is built on being the calm place in a noisy region. Sovereign wealth funds usually don’t have air defence problems. Free zones usually don’t price kinetic risk. The whole product depends on the country reading, at any given moment, as the exception.
The last six months have tested that reading harder than any period since federation in 1971. On 28 February Iranian missiles began falling on Emirati soil. On 1 March Abu Dhabi shut its embassy in Tehran and pulled its diplomatic mission out. In early April, around the ceasefire that stopped the direct US-Iran fighting, Emirati aircraft and drones hit Iranian targets, including the Lavan Island oil refinery. On 26 June the foreign ministers were back on the phone about the Strait of Hormuz. On 8 July the ceasefire collapsed, and the fighting resumed. On 18 August the UAE cut all trade with Iran after another round of missile activity.
Rupture, retaliation, and a narrow line back to Tehran, from a country that has told everyone who will listen that its security depends on a stable neighbourhood, not a coalition against one of its neighbours.
That is not incoherence. It is a strategy — and it is expensive.
The question the title asks is not rhetorical. What the UAE is defending — its coastline, its capital markets, its diplomatic room to move — is not the same as what most people assume it is defending against.
We asked Dr Burcu Ozcelik to talk us through it.
Who she is
Burcu is Lead of the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey Security Programme at RUSI, where she is a senior research fellow for Middle East security. She has been at the Royal United Services Institute since 2024 and has spent more than fifteen years working on geopolitical risk, security, and threat assessments across the public and private sectors, with a focus on the MENA region, Turkey, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Before RUSI, she led the MENA practice at a London-based consultancy and worked with the United Nations Development Programme. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she later held the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Department of Politics and International Studies, teaching conflict, peacebuilding, and the politics of the Middle East.
She writes regularly for RUSI, Foreign Policy, and the international press, and is one of the analysts British and European outlets have turned to most often during this year’s escalations. Her May 2026 RUSI commentary on the UAE and Israel, titled “Iran War Grew UAE–Israel Security Ties: Normalisation’s Peril, Promise,” set out what the earlier fighting had revealed about the depth of that relationship, and where it still falls short of a wider regional order. It is the piece we would point anyone to first.
Plenty of people in London will offer a view on Gulf security. Fewer publish the underlying commentary, and even fewer do so without picking a side in advance.
What we are asking her
What the year’s fighting has actually changed for the UAE’s security posture, and what it has not. Absorbing an attack, defending against it, and striking back are three different problems, and Abu Dhabi has now had to solve all three in public.
Whether the UAE–Israel relationship has moved from a diplomatic normalisation into something closer to an operational one, and what that means for the next phase of the conflict. The central question, in her framing, is whether the cooperation strengthens a new regional order or exposes both states to the liabilities of each other’s wars.
How the Emirates read the June memorandum of understanding, and what its collapse in July has told them about what comes next. If a permanent settlement is not on the table, and if the fighting can resume as it did, the region will have to build something else in its place.
Where the Gulf now sits on the American security guarantee. Statements out of Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi through the spring were, in her description, unconventionally hard. Whether that language matches what the same governments say to Washington in private is a separate question.
What the UAE actually wants from Britain and Europe on security. The trade agenda is well developed. The security agenda is less so, and it is where the harder asks tend to sit.
And the one that runs underneath the others. If the Iranian regime survives the current pressure in a diminished form, and if it remains committed to the same regional posture, what does deterrence look like for a country whose economy depends on an open coastline forty kilometres from the Iranian shore?
Who else is there
Burcu will be joined by Sir Oliver Dowden KCB CBE MP, chair of the UAE All-Party Parliamentary Group, and James Swanston, Middle East and North Africa economist at Barclays. David Waddell, senior business producer and reporter at BBC News, is chairing.
We have written about James and Oliver earlier this week. Burcu completes the panel.
The evening
The UAE and the widening Gulf conflict: what happens next?
Venue: National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
Date: 9 September
Programme: drinks from 6.00 pm; discussion at 7.00 pm
Registration:
https://events.emirateswire.co.uk/