Algeria severed diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates on 10 September. The Emirati ambassador was called in to the foreign ministry, told he had 48 hours to leave, and from the next morning the country’s airspace was closed to aircraft registered in the UAE, civil and military, with an exemption for commercial flights in and out of Algiers that runs to the end of the year. The measure is a policy signal dressed as an aviation sanction with very limited impacts practically. The ministry’s statement talked about a growing series of provocative and hostile acts, repeated warnings that went unheeded, and the exhaustion of every means of keeping the relationship alive. It did not say what the acts were. Abu Dhabi’s response was to hope the decision would be temporary, and its presidential adviser added that diplomacy should not be hostage to internal congestion, which was a pointed way of saying the problem is in Algiers rather than Abu Dhabi.
Whatever the immediate trigger, and there may not have been a single one, Algeria is joining something rather than starting it. Over the past 9 months Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Sudan have each, in different ways and with different degrees of formality, turned on the Emirati way of doing business in their neighbourhoods. Algeria is the first to go all the way to a diplomatic break, and it is doing so with the largest army in Africa behind it and a gas windfall it did not plan for.
Where the trend comes from
The Emirati approach for most of the past decade has been to treat money and force as one instrument. A port concession, a sovereign fund ticket, a security contract and a militia on retainer are not separate policies, they are one policy, and for a long time that produced a reach far out of proportion to the country’s size. The problem with running a region through proxies is that the states hosting the proxies eventually notice.