You're right, I underweighted that. The Abraham Accords logic sits underneath the whole US posture toward the UAE and I should have named it directly. The piece treats it as part of the "economic interests" frame but that's too abstract.
Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included.
On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows.
Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.
"But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed"
Sure, as I understand it, it is mainly structured around flights and spread out over several logistics lines and already partly shadowed by turned-off transponders and so on. Disturbances at sea are unlikely to affect this.
However, there has already been squawks from the UAE about having to turn to the renminbi to clear oil sales and the like. China is not particularly fond of the RSF and has had good relations with the sudanese state since the fifties. Choking the Hormuz is likely to make this relation and stability in Sudan even more important to China.
More medium term the UAE now has incentive to go look for partners besides the US and Israel. At the moment they try not to, but this is highly likely to change, especially since money is pouring out eastwards from the emirates and to win it back they would need friends that seem stable in the long term, like they did until their remote and nearby allies started beating on one of their largest neighbours.
"the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet"
That "yet" does a rather hefty deadlift. The UAE has begged the US to shield them from the ICC but as I understand it, it did not result in a clear and reliable response. Perhaps they count on the US to do for them what they've done for Israel, but since the US put all their efforts into protecting Israel during this latest iranian response and left their other allies in the region to help themselves, I kind of doubt that this can last.
Russia has an interest in the gold, but I don't think they care whether it comes to them from the RSF or the state, and they are more dependent on China than the UAE. In a pinch I'd wager they would support stability as long as the gold keeps flowing and China is happy.
Edit: Personally I believe the US to be so deficient in short-term memory that they can't manage the relations to other West Asia states than Israel with any form for strategic reliability. They might promise the UAE a dollar swap line, do a press conference about it, and then forget to actually open one, or give it to them and then a few weeks later pull the plug on it because budget reasons or whatever.
Your comment is heavily downvoted because, especially the first sentence, seems AI generated. Was this comment AI generated? HN is for human discussions
Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included.
On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows.
Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.