NEW DIMENSION TO GULF DEFENCE MARKET

The normalisation of relationships with Israel through the Abraham Accords will potentially stimulate the growth of the defence industry, not least among the signatories.

- Gordon Feller and Andrew Drwiega

Leaders in Washington DC have concluded that President Biden will probably not seek to change “the Abraham Accords”. Those are the USbrokered agreements of 2020 which normalised Israeli diplomatic relations with the UAE on 13 August, 2020 and Bahrain on 15 September 2020. Sudan normalised relations with Israel on 23 September and a formal letter confirmed Morocco’s ‘new era of relations’ with Israel on 22 December 2020. It was the first breakthrough in the normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab countries since Jordan in 1994. While defence and hi-tech trade did exist ‘out of sight’ before these Accords and agreements, these public statements will formalise such business into the future.

At the time of their signing, the broad consensus was that these Accords would alter the arms trade dynamic in the region. What might be the expected in the short to medium term is the expansion of not only international defence industries looking to grow their footprints, and their profits, in the Gulf, but also a maturing of the Gulf’s own fledgling national defence industries.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal once admitted that arms sales in the Middle East and the Gulf are ordinarily “highly secretive and subject to no ministry of finance oversight or controls.” Gulf monarchies (plus the governments of the Arab world, Iran, and some developing states) are governed in ways such that that are not subject to the same arms trade rules of the kind prevailing inside NATO members or allies.