Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Change: The Gulf Model in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

Abstract Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates undertook dramatic foreign policy shifts after the 2011–12 Arab Spring. Long regarded by Western observers as conservative and insular kingdoms, these monarchical states more aggressively projected military force outwards, engaged the increasingly multipolar international system, and executed lavish nation-branding schemes. This paper argues the rise of this new Gulf model of foreign relations reflected not just macrostructural variables, such as oil wealth and declining US hegemony, but also domestic societal interests. Among the Saudi and Emirati publics, popular demands for performance legitimacy as well as ontological security narratives linking state behavior to national stability played a substantial role in accounting for how these royal autocracies adapted to regional crises and began acting like middle powers. Such a finding contravenes prevailing views that mass interests have little influence upon foreign policy in authoritarian settings, while bringing two critical Middle East cases into theoretical discussions about the evolving positionality of supposedly weak or vulnerable states in the modern era.