Eye on the Middle East | As India-UAE ties wax and wax, a nuclear star on the horizon

Naturally, then, Sheikh Khaled’s New Delhi visit yielded a number of substantial agreements including a 15-year agreement between Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and the Indian Oil Corporation Limited for the former to supply 1 million metric tonnes of LNG per annum. The agreement that stood out however, was an MoU between the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) for the operations and maintenance of the UAE’s Barakah Nuclear Power Plant. While India and UAE (and France) have discussed nuclear energy cooperation before (first in 2022), the ENEC-NPCI deal is unprecedented.

A history of geopolitical quid pro quos

In the last 10 years, Modi has secured a special relationship with Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed, calling him his “brother” in February this year. MBZ, who like Saudi Arabia’s MBS, became the Emirates’ chief executive in effect even while being Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince, has overseen the relationship grow enough to allow and even promote the construction of the largest Hindu temple in the Middle East — the BAPS temple in Abu Dhabi. In return, India has shown an ability to service the UAE’s special needs whenever the occasion arises — with Indian marine commandos reportedly helping to “return” the Crown Prince of Dubai’s daughter (Princess Latifa) to UAE in 2018.

More importantly, both India and UAE have catalysed each other’s attempts at entrenching a new local geopolitical order in their respective regions. For the UAE, India was an early and keen partner in the creation of new regional architectures that benefitted from the Abraham Accords with Israel, facilitated by the USA — evident especially in the emergence of the I2U2 framework by July 2022.

For India, the UAE has decisively tilted to India’s position on the Kashmir issue vis-à-vis Pakistan, even as Abu Dhabi maintains strong ties with both New Delhi and Islamabad. The UAE has not only shown a marked ability to respect Indian sensitivities on J&K but has also been an active partner in pushing development projects in J&K after the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir.

While Modi famously received UAE’s highest civilian honour during a visit just 19 days after the A370 abrogation in 2019, UAE-based Indian business giants such as Yusuff Ali have been among the prominent investors to undertake new large-scale ventures in post-2019 J&K. Ali’s Lulu Group announced a 250-crore project to open J&K’s first Hypermarket in a new Srinagar Mall in 2023. Similarly, even as Israel’s continuing and expanding war in Palestine scuttled hopes of the India-Middle East Economic Corridor taking off any time soon, India and UAE pushed ahead with a trans-continental trade corridor earlier this year — arguably a precursor to the first sea leg of the IMEEC.

While India has forged a balance between Israel, the Arab states, and Iran, its most expansive partnerships have been with the Arabs (UAE in particular) – outdoing the defence-heavy partnership with Israel and the Chabahar-focused relationship with Iran.

For perspective, even as India-Israel merchandise trade peaked at $10.77 billion in FY 2022-2023, it fell drastically to $6.53 billion in FY 2023-2024 exposing the vulnerability of bilateral trade to regional conflict. The overall volumes of trade between India-UAE and India-Israel are incomparable, given the prioritisation of different sectors. What is significant, however, is the difference in proportionate drop in volume as a result of regional instability between the two financial years – India-UAE trade volume fell from $84.84 billion in 2022-2023 to $83.65 billion in 2023-2024.

The politics of (nuclear) power in the Gulf

When the UAE loaded the fuel rods into one of its four new nuclear reactors in the Barakah plant in March 2020, it sent ripples across not just the other five Gulf monarchies, but the region at large. It marked the first time that one of the richest Arab oil economies moved towards nuclear energy. This is despite lingering post-Fukushima concerns (which pushed Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait to abandon immediate plans for nuclear plants) and a much-troubled process of building the reactors with South Korean help since 2012.

By March 2024, all four units of the Arab world’s first nuclear plant (second in the Gulf after Iran’s Bushehr plant) were running. In March 2020, while Qatar officially complained to the IAEA about safety concerns at Barakah, others warned of the potentially deadly impacts of a missile attack (such as one the Houthis had conducted in 2017). More importantly, as Barakah’s units started up sequentially across the last four years, Iranian reactors across the Gulf crept closer to weapons-grade enrichment.

For UAE’s principal Arab competitor — Saudi Arabia — this made matters worse. While Riyadh was already struggling to secure its own civilian nuclear programme, by 2023 MBS committed to a nuclear weapons programme should Iran reach a nuclear “break out”. Among the cascading effects has been Israel’s own concerns with Arab nuclear plants – as little as one month before the first of the Abraham Accords, Israel was protesting Riyadh’s efforts towards securing nuclear energy.

The momentum of the Abraham Accords did little to change this even as Saudi Arabia sought American nuclear expertise in the period immediately before October 7, 2023. Now, with the Gaza war increasing the rift between Riyadh and Tel Aviv and Washington attempting new security guarantees to Saudi Arabia to minimise damage, a Saudi nuclear programme still struggles to take off. While the UAE staggered on with the Barakah plant and is now also considering a second nuclear power plant to service its energy needs, Saudi Arabia still refuses key IAEA requirements such as snap inspections.

For MBS, who spearheaded the unprecedented initiatives to diversify the Kingdom’s oil-reliant economy, the challenges of securing a civilian nuclear programme are compounded by its resistance to normalisation of ties with Israel – for which Washington is coaxing Riyadh with more security and economic incentives; even dangling the nuclear energy card. While Riyadh deals with these pushes and pulls, the Emirates is evidently surging ahead with collaborations to exchange nuclear learnings with other states. While UAE signed three substantial MoUs with China in 2023 to this end, any agreement with India is unique in that it testifies to a non-NPT nuclear weapons state’s ability to project its expertise in operating nuclear power plants, having long grown out of its ‘nuclear pariah’ mould by leaps and bounds. Interestingly, the UAE concluded a 123 Agreement with the United States, just four years after India did in 2005.

For the rest of the Middle East’s nuclear power aspirants (led by Saudi Arabia with Egypt, Turkey, and Jordan in tow), safety and security remain the chief concerns in a conflict-ridden region — a concern readily highlighted by critics. Like numerous other developmental issues in the Middle East then, the future of nuclear energy too is contingent on political stability — with the most prominent question continuing to be that of Palestine and its continuing ability to prod armed militant groups into action.

Bashir Ali Abbas is a research associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi, and a South Asia Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington DC. The views expressed are personal.