India-UAE moving towards strategic defence cooperation

The UAE apart from being India’s close ally is also one of the top five energy suppliers to New Delhi.

Updated on: May 6, 2026, 15:53:38 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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A day after BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi had swept to power in West Bengal, the Indian leader took an unusual step to condemn the ballistic missile, drone and cruise missile attack on Fujairah Port in UAE by Iran across the Persian Gulf. The PM not only stood in solidarity with the UAE but also called for freedom of navigation in the Straits of Hormuz. Since the Iran-US war started, UAE has engaged 549 ballistic missiles, 29 cruise missiles and 2260 drone attacks from Iran on its territory due to US airbases in the Emirate and its ties with Israel.

PM Modi with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in New Delhi on January 19, 2026

The attack on Fujairah port by Iran was calculated as this port apart from Khor Fakkan port are both outside the Straits of Hormuz and in the Gulf of Oman. With UAE walking out of Saudi Arabia dominated OPEC, the two ports will be able to satisfy global energy hunger which is being held to ransom by Iran using Strait of Hormuz as a choke point. UAE is one country in the West Asia that has been hit by more Iranian missiles than even Israel as Tehran cannot come to terms with its growing ties with Israel as well as the Emirate being the economic development icon of Middle-East.

While Saudi Arabia and Qatar have signed a defence pact with Pakistan through a mutual defence agreement, PM Modi and his close personal friend Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE President, want to forge a strategic defence partnership after the two countries signed a Letter of Intent when MBZ came to India for three hours on January 19 with his entire Cabinet. The two sides have planned to establish a Strategic Defence Partnership Agreement in six months after signing of LoI and expand cooperation in areas such as defence industrial collaboration, defence innovation, special operations and interoperability, cyber space and counter-terrorism. Recently, UAE decided not to roll-over Pakistani debt to the tune of USD 3.45 billion as a result of which Islamabad had to borrow from Riyadh to pay Abu Dhabi.

With PM Modi scheduled to land in Abu Dhabi on May 18 while en-route to Netherlands, all eyes are on the two countries as they cement their bilateral relationship with Mundra-Fujairah-Aqaba being projected as the new trade axis. UAE last month has formalized a USD 2.3 billion agreement to construct a 360 km railroad to connect Jordan’s rock-phosphate and Potash mines to Aqaba port in the Red Sea. Both rock phosphate and potash are used for making fertilizer, which is in high demand for India.

The UAE apart from being India’s close ally is also one of the top five energy suppliers to New Delhi. In 2024-2025, India imported USD 13.6 billion (almost 10 percent of the country's total crude imports which is about 23 million tons), LNG and LPG worth USD 7.51 billion from the Emirates.

With both US and Iran jostling over Straits of Hormuz for dominance and leverage on global energy, India is expected to further deepen its relations with UAE so that both countries mutually benefit each other as New Delhi needs energy security and Abu Dhabi needs food security with both countries against radicalization and terrorism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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