Senior figures in the Trump administration are urging the United Arab Emirates to take a more direct combat role in the war against Iran, including by seizing Lavan Island, a strategically vital Iranian oil terminal in the Persian Gulf.

“Go take ’em!” a former senior Trump security official told the paper, framing the proposal as a way to expand the ground campaign against Tehran without putting American forces in the line of fire. “It would be UAE boots on the ground instead of the U.S.”

The push, first reported by The Telegraph over the weekend, comes 11 weeks into a war that has redrawn the security map of the Middle East and turned the UAE — long a quiet hub for Western finance and Gulf diplomacy — into a frontline state. Since the United States and Israel launched their joint strike campaign against Iran in late February, the Emirates have absorbed more than 2,800 Iranian missiles and drones, the heaviest bombardment of any Gulf state, according to figures cited by analysts and Emirati officials. Targets have included Emirati airports, oil facilities, and the area around Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

The volume and persistence of those attacks have forced Abu Dhabi to abandon its traditional posture of hedging between Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UAE Barbara Leaf, speaking to The New York Times, said Emirati leaders are now “looking at things in pretty stark, black and white terms, of friend or foe.”

The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal have reported that the UAE has not, in fact, limited itself to defense. In early April, around the time of President Trump’s announcement of a partial ceasefire, Emirati forces using Western-made fighter jets and drones reportedly struck several Iranian targets, including the refinery on Lavan Island. The attack ignited a large fire and disabled much of the facility’s production capacity, according to those reports. Saudi Arabia is also said to have conducted a series of covert strikes on Iranian drone and missile launch sites in late March, though it has rebuffed Emirati attempts to organize a coordinated Gulf military campaign against Tehran.

Abu Dhabi has not publicly confirmed its role in the Lavan strike. Iran, for its part, has accused the UAE of being “an active partner in this aggression,” with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi raising the issue at the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting. The UAE rejected what it called attempts to justify “Iranian terrorist attacks,” but pointedly reserved “all its sovereign, legal, diplomatic and military rights to confront any threat, claim or hostile act.”

UAE Minister of State Khalifa Shaheen Al Marar, addressing the BRICS gathering, cited nearly 3,000 intercepted projectiles fired at the Emirates since late February and invoked the country’s right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Lavan Island, located off Iran’s southern coast, is one of Tehran’s largest crude export hubs and sits atop substantial natural gas reserves. Seizing it would represent a dramatic escalation — the first foreign occupation of Iranian sovereign territory in decades — and would give Washington and its allies a far stronger grip on Persian Gulf shipping lanes.

The Telegraph report lays bare what officials in three capitals have privately acknowledged for weeks: the war has accelerated the consolidation of a Washington-Jerusalem-Abu Dhabi axis even as it has fractured the broader Gulf bloc.

Israeli ties with the UAE, normalized under the 2020 Abraham Accords, have visibly deepened during the conflict. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee confirmed at a Tel Aviv University conference earlier this month that Israel had transferred Iron Dome batteries to the UAE — reportedly accompanied by Israeli personnel — to help intercept Iranian projectiles. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has separately disclosed that he made a secret visit to the UAE in March, at the opening of Operation Roaring Lion, and that the talks produced a “significant breakthrough.” Abu Dhabi has denied any such visit took place.

Relations with the UAE’s Gulf neighbors have moved in the opposite direction. According to The Telegraph, Emirati officials say the UAE asked both Saudi Arabia and Qatar to join in counterstrikes against Iran early in the war, but those approaches went nowhere. Emirati officials have publicly complained of a “weak response” from the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council, and have privately faulted Pakistan — long a recipient of UAE bailout money — for taking too conciliatory a line with Tehran. Earlier this month, the UAE announced it was withdrawing from OPEC, the Saudi-dominated oil producers’ cartel, in what was widely read as a rebuke of Riyadh’s posture during the war.

Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and a longtime hawk on Iran, said in April that Tehran’s attacks would “concretise” the U.S. role in the Gulf rather than reduce it, and that Israeli influence would “become more prominent in the Gulf, not less.”

Dr. Burcu Ozcelik, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told The Telegraph that the war had “accelerated a U.S.-Israel-UAE alignment.” She cautioned, however, that the deeper this military cooperation runs, the more other Arab states will view the Emirates as complicit in Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza — a perception that could carry costs across the wider Muslim world.

Even as President Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing late last week to discuss the war, maritime incidents continued in and around the Strait of Hormuz. British authorities reported a commercial vessel seized near Fujairah and diverted into Iranian waters; an Indian cargo ship was sunk off the coast of Oman. Iran has repeatedly warned that any country hosting American or Israeli forces, or allowing its territory to be used for attacks on the Islamic Republic, would be treated as a legitimate military target.

Whether the UAE will act on the encouragement coming from inside the Trump administration’s circle is, for now, unanswered. Seizing Lavan would push the Emirates from covert combatant to declared occupier of Iranian soil — a line no Gulf state has crossed in the modern era. But for officials in Abu Dhabi who have spent eleven weeks watching Iranian drones come over the horizon, the calculus, as one Emirati official put it to The Telegraph, no longer looks the way it did before the war.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)