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Delivering a landmark address at the University of Cambridge during an official diplomatic visit to the United Kingdom on Monday, Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi laid out a bold new vision for Gulf regional security that would break decades of dependency on outside global powers. His proposal calls for the six core Gulf Cooperation Council member states — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman — alongside Iraq and Iran, to sign a collective, inclusive non-aggression security framework fully owned and administered by regional stakeholders.
Busaidi argued that longstanding gridlock over two of the region’s most intractable disputes, the Iranian nuclear program and maritime security in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, stems directly from external powers dictating the terms of engagement, rather than local states coming together to negotiate mutually acceptable solutions. He pushed back against the decades-long dominant narrative that frames Iran as an inherent existential threat to Gulf Arab states, describing that externally imposed framing as the single most harmful priority forced on the region by outside actors. Busaidi emphasized that the purported fundamental, irreconcilable antagonism between Arab Gulf states and Iran is a completely false perception, noting that Arab and Persian communities have coexisted peacefully across the Gulf for centuries, with only manageable, resolvable differences between them. He stressed that any regional security architecture that excludes Iran is structurally unsound and inherently unstable, with recent cascading crises proving the catastrophic human and economic costs of perpetuating that false narrative of division.
The Omani foreign minister’s high-profile address landed on the same day that a delegation from the Mecca Defence Alliance, comprising senior representatives from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, held closed-door negotiations with top Iranian leadership in Tehran. Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s highest-ranking security official, framed those talks as the opening of a genuine, transformative shift in regional dynamics, noting that U.S. threats had failed to derail independent regional diplomatic efforts. The flurry of shuttle diplomacy comes as regional powers race to mitigate the fallout from the ongoing Israel-U.S. military campaign against Iran, which began on February 28, and growing widespread fears of fresh U.S.-Israeli strikes that could escalate the conflict even further.
The ongoing conflict has already inflicted staggering economic and security harm across the Gulf, according to verified economic data cited in the address. By late March, the war had erased more than $120 billion in combined market capitalization from the Dubai and Abu Dhabi stock exchanges, while more than 18,400 commercial flights to and from the UAE were cancelled, disrupting global travel and supply chains. The persistent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which roughly a third of global seaborne oil trade flows, has sent ripple effects through the entire global economy, driving up energy prices and disrupting industrial output worldwide. Gulf states have also voiced growing public frustration that their longstanding security partnerships with the United States failed to deliver promised protection from Iranian retaliatory strikes targeting U.S. military bases stationed across the region.
Busaidi concluded that the era of unconditionally relying on external security guarantees is no longer viable, urging regional states to move past the habit of shifting blame to outside actors and launch immediate, inclusive new dialogue on the proposed non-aggression pact before external powers impose a new, rigid security order that locks in cycles of dependency and exclusion for generations. He noted that over the long term, regional partnerships with traditional external allies such as the United States should gradually shift away from heavy military commitments toward mutually beneficial economic, trade, and investment collaboration.

A coalition of leading human rights advocacy organizations publicly called on all United Nations member states Tuesday to reject the recently submitted candidacy of Emirati senior diplomat Lana Nusseibeh for the top post of UN Secretary-General, warning that her long-documented pattern of denying her home government’s alleged material support for genocidal campaigns in Sudan and Gaza poses an existential threat to the foundational norms of the international multilateral system. The formal nomination of Nusseibeh, the UAE’s former long-serving UN ambassador and current Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, was announced just last week, inserting a surprise late entrant into the otherwise deadlocked race to succeed outgoing Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The bid carries unprecedented historic context: no woman, nor any public figure with Palestinian familial roots from a prominent Jerusalem-based clan, has ever led the 79-year-old global governance body. Yet the nomination immediately sparked widespread backlash from human rights circles, which point to well-documented allegations that the UAE has provided sustained military, logistical, and financial backing to Sudan’s rogue Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, a group formally designated by the U.S. government in February 2025 as having perpetrated genocide against marginalized ethnic communities in Darfur, alongside unwavering diplomatic and material support for Israeli military operations in Gaza that multiple independent global bodies have labeled genocidal. Despite these concerns, the candidacy has garnered notable high-profile backing from a cohort of former senior Biden administration officials and ex-U.S. diplomats, who have publicly praised Nusseibeh’s qualifications on social media. Multiple diplomatic sources confirmed to Middle East Eye this week that the United Kingdom is leaning toward formally endorsing her bid, while the UAE’s longstanding close strategic and economic alignment with Washington is widely viewed as a major advantage for her campaign. During a joint virtual press panel hosted Tuesday by a collective of human rights organizations, former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth emphasized the unprecedented danger of installing Nusseibeh at the UN’s helm. “We simply cannot afford to have the United Nations led by a documented genocide denier, representing a government that is actively aiding and abetting genocidal campaigns, and is demonstrably criminally complicit in those atrocities – with Nusseibeh herself serving as a leading public figure tasked with covering up that complicity,” Roth stated. “This represents the complete opposite of the moral authority and unwavering human rights leadership that the global community demands from a UN Secretary-General.” Kate Ferguson, Co-Executive Director of UK-based nonprofit Protection Approaches, framed the nomination as a deliberate power grab: “This is nothing less than a calculated attempt at autocratic capture of our most critical multilateral institution. No person on this planet is made safer by a captured United Nations – while the harms will fall unequally on marginalized communities, every single global citizen will grow less secure if this candidacy is allowed to advance unchallenged. I have seen no credible evidence that this candidate can act independently of her home government, and we cannot afford to be naive about what this is: a coordinated, U.S.-backed effort to seize control of the UN and redirect its institutional assets for narrow autocratic interests.” The calls for rejection coincide with the one-year anniversary of the RSF’s brutal seizure of El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur region. Humanitarian records show more than one million displaced people had sought safety in the city prior to the takeover; today, only 70,000 civilians remain, with widespread reports of unlawful extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, systematic torture, and pervasive state surveillance documented in new survivor testimonies published by Amnesty International. Ibrahim Alduma, a native of El Fasher and co-founder of Sudan Action Hub, detailed the tangible links between UAE policy and ongoing atrocities: “The U.S. formally confirmed the RSF had committed genocide in February 2025, and imposed sanctions on seven companies backing the paramilitary, all of which are either based in the UAE or directly tied to Emirati state interests. Immediately after that designation, the U.S. finalized a $6.4 billion bilateral international trade deal with the UAE, and the U.S. has delivered more than $2 billion in military hardware to Abu Dhabi since January 2025, per data from the Center for International Policy. The UAE also cannot advance its aggressive AI development agenda without access to U.S.-manufactured advanced semiconductors. Last month, U.S. AI firm Anthropic publicly disclosed it had disrupted a UAE-directed global influence operation using its own AI tools, which was designed to manipulate global public perception of the Emirates’ role in Sudan’s civil war. Nusseibeh has personally blocked every viable international justice pathway for survivors in El Fasher and across Sudan, and the UAE’s support for the RSF forms a fully closed, unbroken loop: it is not just military aid enabling genocide, but a coordinated global public relations and diplomatic campaign to cover up those crimes.” The UAE has repeatedly denied any involvement in Sudan’s civil war, despite overwhelming corroborating evidence from independent human rights groups, UN investigators, and on-the-ground reporting from Middle East Eye correspondents. Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, presented new forensic data from his team’s months-long investigation that traced direct technical military support from the UAE to the RSF that directly enabled the El Fasher takeover. Since the civil war erupted in April 2023, the conflict has killed an estimated 150,000 Sudanese civilians and displaced more than 12 million people across the country. Raymond confirmed the RSF’s explicitly stated operational objective in El Fasher was not just to defeat opposing Sudanese Armed Forces units, but to systematically hunt and exterminate members of the Fur and Zaghawa ethnic communities, two of the groups targeted for mass violence during the Darfur genocide. “The UAE provided the RSF with the exact technical capabilities to effectively trap and kill civilian populations,” Raymond explained. “They supplied reconnaissance drones equipped with intelligence sensors that the RSF used to map out hiding spots for displaced civilians. The RSF also deployed UAE-supplied electronic jamming tools to block all mobile phone and internet communications, preventing civilians from calling for rescue or sharing evidence of atrocities with the outside world. In the final 72 hours of the El Fasher takeover, there was a full communications blackout deliberately triggered by drone-mounted jammers, right as thousands of people were attempting to flee the advancing paramilitary forces.” Raymond also documented a dramatic, otherwise unexplained upgrade in the RSF’s armaments over the past two years: a group that originated as the Janjaweed militia two decades ago, armed almost exclusively with horses, camels, pickup trucks, and basic outdated rifles, now operates a de facto air force, advanced electronic warfare systems, and precision AH4 lightweight howitzers capable of firing two rounds per minute continuously – weapons that could only have been supplied directly by the UAE. Amnesty International last week renewed its years-long campaign for an immediate nationwide ceasefire in Sudan, the urgent deployment of a dedicated international civilian protection force, and a global mandatory arms embargo on all parties to the conflict, with specific provisions barring weapons transfers to the UAE until it ends all material support for the RSF in violation of the existing UN Darfur arms embargo. Despite early signals from the Trump administration’s African affairs envoy Massad Boulos indicating a push for a negotiated diplomatic solution to the Sudan conflict earlier this year, no meaningful progress on that front has been publicly reported for months.

After four years of strained bilateral relations sparked by the deadly 2020 Galwan Valley border clash, India and China appeared to be on a cautious path to diplomatic detente in 2024, with high-level engagements, restored direct flights, and eased post-conflict visa restrictions stoking widespread optimism for full ties normalisation. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s September visit to India for the BRICS summit, his first trip to the South Asian nation in seven years, was widely hailed as a landmark milestone marking the end of the post-2020 freeze. However, recent on-ground developments along the 3,440-kilometre undemarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) have exposed how precarious that perceived thaw truly is.

The controversy erupted after Shatrujeet Singh Kapur, Director General of India’s Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), made uncharacteristically public remarks at a recent officers’ gathering in Rajasthan, revealing that Chinese troops had begun advancing into India-claimed territories in Arunachal Pradesh as early as July 2025. Kapur stated that after initial mutual withdrawal following the first round of face-offs, Chinese forces returned in far larger numbers, setting up permanent encampments 6 to 7 kilometres inside the section of the LAC that New Delhi recognises as its sovereign territory. Such public disclosures from active serving security officials are extremely rare in India, as sensitive border matters are traditionally handled exclusively through formal channels by the national defence and external affairs ministries, immediately triggering a fierce domestic political backlash in New Delhi.

The long-simmering Himalayan border dispute dates back to the 1947 partition of British colonial India, and resulted in a full-scale 1962 Sino-Indian border war that ended in a crushing military defeat for India. To this day, the LAC remains a loosely defined, unmarked boundary, with overlapping territorial claims on both sides compounded by the region’s unforgiving, rugged terrain of shifting river courses, glacial lakes, and permanently snow-capped peaks that make formal demarcation nearly impossible. China has long laid formal claim to the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh, asserting it is part of southern Tibet, a position New Delhi has consistently and categorically rejected, framing the state as an inalienable core part of Indian national territory.

The 2020 Galwan Valley clash marked the first fatal confrontation between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in 45 years, leaving 20 Indian and 4 Chinese soldiers dead, and prompting a near-total breakdown of bilateral diplomatic, travel, and trade ties. After 20 rounds of tense military and diplomatic negotiations, both sides agreed in early 2024 to take incremental steps to de-escalate border tensions and gradually restore normal bilateral exchanges. The latest reported troop incursions have completely upended that fragile progress, with India’s main opposition Congress party launching scathing attacks on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, accusing it of remaining conspicuously silent on the alleged territorial encroachments and making unacknowledged concessions to Beijing. Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh posted on social platform X that the prime minister and his entire governing apparatus had failed to address the grave national security threat posed by the new Chinese deployments.

The Indian federal government has not issued an explicit refutation of the ITBP chief’s on-ground claims, with External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal only noting that border stability is periodically disrupted when Chinese forces deviate from long-established mutual patrolling protocols, and affirming that both nations are employing joint military and diplomatic working groups to resolve outstanding border grievances without providing specific operational details. For its part, China’s Foreign Ministry maintained that it has always strictly abided by all existing bilateral border agreements, and that its patrol activities in the region are routine, legitimate exercises to safeguard national territorial sovereignty.

Veteran Indian diplomats and military analysts have framed the new border posturing as part of a broader, increasingly assertive pattern of Chinese military probing along the LAC designed to create new de facto facts on the ground without triggering a full-scale armed conflict. Former Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, who led multiple rounds of Sino-Indian border negotiations in the mid-2000s, noted that these incremental incursions are calibrated to fall just below the threshold that would spark open warfare, while steadily expanding China’s effective control over disputed zones. Retired senior PLA colonel and Tsinghua University scholar Zhou Bo added that both nations have drawn critical lessons from the 2020 Galwan bloodshed, and are intentionally taking measures to avoid a repeat of large-scale violent clashes, a dynamic that has allowed gradual, low-level territorial encroachment to proceed largely unreported in Chinese domestic media.

Beyond the immediate border standoff, the renewed tensions are casting a long shadow over the complex, deeply intertwined Sino-Indian economic relationship. Bilateral trade hit $151 billion in 2024, with a lopsided trade balance heavily favouring China, which accounts for the vast majority of India’s imports of critical industrial inputs including heavy machinery, electric vehicle batteries, rare earth magnets, and active pharmaceutical ingredients. Recent Chinese export restrictions on tunnel-boring machines, imposed on vague national security grounds, while not explicitly targeted at India, have already created major bottlenecks for New Delhi’s ambitious national infrastructure expansion plans, following similar 2024 curbs on rare earth magnet exports that disrupted Indian EV, renewable energy, and medical device manufacturing supply chains. University at Albany international relations professor Christopher Clary argues that current Chinese strategic policy toward India is intentionally structured to slow India’s technological and industrial rise by restricting access to core advanced components and materials.

For the tens of thousands of civilian residents living in remote Himalayan border villages, the latest escalation has immediate, tangible daily consequences. Local Arunachal Times senior journalist Tongam Rina reports that many high-altitude traditional grazing grounds and hunting zones that local communities have relied on for generations are now effectively off-limits due to Chinese military encroachments, barring villagers from accessing land used for yak rearing and subsistence activities and fostering widespread, pervasive public insecurity across border settlements.

Strategic analysts also warn that the simmering border tensions carry far broader global geopolitical ramifications, as the second Donald Trump administration’s stated priority of deepening U.S. economic engagement with China is widely expected to reduce Washington’s willingness to offer unqualified diplomatic or military backing to India in the event of a future large-scale border confrontation. Most experts agree that Beijing has no immediate interest in launching a full-scale war with India, but a prolonged, low-intensity stalemate along the LAC works to China’s long-term strategic advantage, as its rapidly growing economic and military power will leave it in an increasingly dominant negotiating position over time. The latest troop standoffs serve as a stark reminder that superficial diplomatic goodwill and high-profile bilateral summits have not translated to tangible, lasting stability along one of the world’s most dangerous active disputed borders.

As the 10-year tenure of outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres draws to a close on December 31, the long-stalled selection process for his successor has been thrown a major curveball with a last-minute candidacy announcement from the United Arab Emirates: Lana Nusseibeh, a veteran Emirati diplomat, former permanent UN representative, and current Assistant Minister for Political Affairs in the UAE’s foreign ministry. For months, the 15-member UN Security Council has been deadlocked after six rounds of anonymous straw polls, where every previously nominated candidate encountered pushback from at least one of the five veto-wielding permanent members: the US, UK, France, Russia, and China. Longstanding unwritten convention has held that the top UN post rotates across continental blocs, with widespread prior consensus that the next secretary-general should be a female diplomat from Latin America, making Nusseibeh’s eleventh-hour bid a significant disruption to established expectations.

While the Security Council holds the formal power to select a nominee that is subsequently rubber-stamped by the 193-member General Assembly, the UN secretary-general wields substantial soft power as the organization’s public face, overseeing global administrative operations, shaping international agendas, and mediating cross-border disputes. But Nusseibeh’s candidacy has sparked fierce pushback from critics, who point to her decades-long track record of defending UAE foreign policy moves that run counter to core UN principles, including allegations of complicity in war crimes across multiple conflict zones in the Middle East and North Africa.

Born in 1978 in Abu Dhabi to a prominent Jerusalem-origin aristocratic family with deep decades-long ties to regional politics, Nusseibeh’s lineage includes grandfather Anwar Nusseibeh, a Jordanian cabinet minister in the 1950s who lost a leg during the 1948 Nakba, and uncle Sari Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian intellectual who served as a close aide to late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the early 2000s. Her father Zaki Nusseibeh relocated to Abu Dhabi during the 1967 Middle East War, working as a personal interpreter for UAE founding father Sheikh Zayed before ascending to the role of foreign affairs minister between 2017 and 2021. Nusseibeh received her early education at Abu Dhabi’s British School al Khubairat, followed by elite private girls’ school Wycombe Abbey in the UK, before earning a history degree from Queen’s College Cambridge and a 2003 master’s in Israeli and Jewish Diaspora Studies from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She is fluent in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew.

After stints consulting for UNESCO and the Gulf Research Centre think tank, Nusseibeh joined the UAE foreign ministry in 2006, leading its policy planning department from 2010 until September 2013 – a period that coincided with the UAE’s widespread domestic crackdown on Arab Spring-era dissent, and its widely condemned support for the military overthrow of Egyptian elected president Mohamed Morsi earlier that same July. She served as the UAE’s permanent representative to the UN for 11 years, from 2013 until April 2024.

Her publicly stated campaign platform for the secretary-general role remains deliberately vague, a common strategic choice for candidates navigating the delicate cross-factional diplomacy required to win the top UN post. She has laid out broad pledges to “act earlier, bridge divides and pursue practical first agreements,” prioritize protection of humanitarian aid while supporting low-income nations to mobilize investment, resolve debt burdens, and pursue self-directed development, and uphold the UN Charter, international law, and universal human rights “consistently and without double standards.” Yet critics have raised alarm over the UAE’s well-documented domestic human rights record, including widespread allegations of arbitrary detention, torture, and systemic exploitation of migrant labor, as well as Nusseibeh’s own history of defending controversial Emirati foreign policy decisions that violate UN norms.

The sharpest criticism centers on the UAE’s role in Sudan’s ongoing civil war, where multiple UN investigators and human rights groups have documented extensive Emirati military backing for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group whose atrocities have been deemed to bear the “hallmarks of genocide” by UN experts. Nusseibeh has repeatedly and categorically rejected all such findings, dismissing Sudanese government concerns about Emirati interference as “spurious, unfounded, and lacking any credible evidence” in a 2024 Security Council address, framing them as a deliberate distraction campaign spread via disinformation. Even after stepping down from her UN ambassador post, she continued to defend UAE policy in the Sudan conflict, telling CNN in July 2024 that all allegations of Emirati support for the RSF were “absolutely” and “categorically untrue.” In November 2025, she traveled to Strasbourg to lobby the European Parliament to remove all references to the UAE’s role in Sudan’s atrocities from a draft EU resolution, a campaign that succeeded as the final published document contained no mention of Abu Dhabi’s involvement. Sudan’s official UN mission issued a scathing statement to Middle East Eye, accusing Nusseibeh of “defending and whitewashing her country’s record of troubling the peace of Sudan by enabling genocide, enslaving our women and girls and instigating sexual violence and other atrocities, in addition to destabilising our sovereignty,” and arguing that the UAE should face accountability for its actions rather than be rewarded with the UN’s top leadership post. Senior Sudanese UN diplomat Ammar Mahmoud warned that Nusseibeh’s blanket rejection of independent UN investigators’ findings on Sudan’s conflict makes it impossible for her to exercise the required impartiality for the secretary-general role, noting that she would never launch independent probes into Emirati actions in Sudan nor accurately represent the true nature of the conflict to global leaders.

Questions have also mounted over Nusseibeh’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict, where leading human rights organizations and a formal UN commission have labeled the death of at least 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 as a genocide. Nusseibeh was a leading architect of the 2020 US-brokered Abraham Accords that normalized diplomatic ties between the UAE and Israel, ending decades of Emirati boycott of the country. While the UAE publicly claims to support a two-state solution for Palestinian self-determination and Nusseibeh has described Israeli formal annexation of the West Bank as a “red line” for Abu Dhabi, multiple diplomatic insiders have alleged that the Emirati-Israeli partnership is far closer than official public statements suggest. A European official who attended a 2026 closed-door meeting between Nusseibeh and US diplomatic counterparts told Middle East Eye that “the UAE is totally aligned with Israel” and there appear to be “no limits” to the depth of their bilateral relationship. Recent developments including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public presentation of a proposed “Israel-UAE Hexagon Alliance” that explicitly named Sudan’s RSF as a “friendly” party have further fueled concerns that Nusseibeh would not hold Israeli leaders accountable for alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Nusseibeh’s track record of defending controversial Emirati foreign policy extends across multiple other regional conflict zones. In Libya, where the UAE has been widely accused of backing warlord Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces in violation of a UN arms embargo, leaked 2015 internal Emirati emails directly addressed to Nusseibeh showed she had full explicit knowledge of secret UAE weapons shipments to allied factions on the ground. When UN investigators later formally confirmed that the UAE, alongside Turkey and Jordan, had systematically violated the Libyan arms embargo, Nusseibeh refused all comment on the findings. During the 2017 Gulf diplomatic crisis, when the UAE joined Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt in severing all ties with Qatar and imposing a full land and sea blockade on the country over unsubstantiated allegations that Doha supported terrorism, Nusseibeh rallied UN member states to back the punitive measures, describing them as “entirely legal, justified and proportionate.”

In Yemen, the UAE’s longstanding support for the secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC), which seeks to split southern Yemen away from Houthi-controlled northern territories, sparked a major diplomatic rift earlier this year between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, which opposes the breakup of Yemeni territorial integrity. Despite this dispute, the wider Gulf Cooperation Council has formally endorsed Nusseibeh’s UN secretary-general candidacy. Her bid has also received public backing from the breakaway Somaliland territory, which is only recognized as a sovereign state by Israel; the UAE has built extensive informal ties with Somaliland, constructing military bases and major port infrastructure across the region, and Nusseibeh has not yet publicly clarified her position on Somaliland’s long-running bid for formal UN membership, a process in which the secretary-general plays an influential advocacy role. Most recently, at the 2025 UN General Assembly, Nusseibeh announced full UAE support for Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a territory the UN still classifies as a non-self-governing region subject to competing claims from the indigenous Sahrawi Polisario Front, endorsing a limited Moroccan autonomy plan that is backed by the US, UK, and France but fiercely opposed by Algeria, which severed all diplomatic ties with the UAE in September 2025 over the position.