20JUL

Gargash warns: neither war nor peace

2 min read

11:19UTC

Anwar Gargash, the UAE president's diplomatic adviser, wrote on X on 11 August that the region cannot remain trapped between war and peace. Abu Dhabi had helped call off an American strike nine days earlier.

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Key takeaway

Abu Dhabi's senior diplomat says the region cannot stay stuck between war and peace.

Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), wrote on X on Tuesday 11 August, warning that the region cannot remain trapped between "neither war nor peace" ¹. Gargash is Abu Dhabi's most senior public voice on foreign policy, and the UAE is not a bystander in this war. On 2 August Donald Trump called off a planned strike at the request of Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi . Six days after that, the Emirates said an Iranian missile had targeted a vessel belonging to the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in the Strait of Hormuz .

Gargash is describing that position from the inside. Abu Dhabi spent political capital to stop the bombing, and its own shipping is being fired on regardless. A Gulf state can lobby Washington out of a strike in an afternoon; it cannot lobby a war-risk underwriter, and it has no lever at all over what leaves an Iranian launcher. Hence the complaint, from a government that has run out of things to ask for.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Anwar Gargash, a senior adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, posted on X that the region cannot stay stuck between 'neither war nor peace', meaning fighting has slowed without any real peace deal in place. The UAE is one of the Gulf countries that has been trying to stop the war between the US and Iran from getting worse, including helping persuade President Trump to cancel a planned strike on Iran earlier this month.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

No enforceable ceasefire mechanism exists between Iran and the US-Gulf coalition. Every halt in fighting so far has come from an individual intervention: Caine's 26 July warning to Trump over munitions stockpiles, then the Gulf states' 2 August request that called off a planned strike .

Neither halt rests on a negotiated framework, which is why Gargash describes the current state as 'neither war nor peace' rather than a ceasefire: no document exists that would make it one.

What could happen next?

Risk
Gargash's warning signals Gulf frustration that the current lull rests on individual interventions rather than a negotiated ceasefire, raising the chance a single incident, such as the disputed 8 August ADNOC vessel strike (ID:5650), could tip the region back toward open fighting.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-left-leaning sources from United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Primary parallel: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's personal intervention with Trump on 2 August (ID:5537), arguing Iranian retaliation on Gulf states would reach the global economy, achieved the same goal Gargash's statement now seeks, keeping the region short of full-scale war, through direct Gulf leverage over Washington rather than any bilateral Iran-Gulf channel.

Counter-parallel: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye signed a mutual-defence pact in Mecca on 7 August treating an attack on one as an attack on all three, though no signatory has published the text. That points the opposite way, toward formal military alignment rather than diplomatic appeal, suggesting Gulf states are hedging with collective defence commitments even while publicly calling for peace.

Consensus view: Middle East Eye reported on 11 August that US-Iranian talks remain stalled and both sides warn fighting could resume, the same framing Gargash's statement echoes. The UAE was one of three governments, alongside Qatar and Saudi Arabia, that persuaded Trump to call off a planned 2 August strike on Iran , giving Gargash's own government a direct stake in keeping that pause from collapsing.

Counter-view: The UAE was itself targeted on 8 August, when an Iranian missile reportedly hit an ADNOC-owned vessel in the Strait of Hormuz , an incident whose identity remains unresolved. That undercuts any reading of Gargash's appeal as coming from a bystander asking for calm from safety; the state he describes already includes attacks on Emirati-linked assets.

Key tension: Whether the Gulf pressure that halted the 2 August strike can hold given continuing Iranian pressure on Emirati interests, or whether 'neither war nor peace' is a fragile pause on the way back to open conflict rather than a stable middle state.

Sources:Middle East Eye

Mentions:Anwar Gargash →Riyadh →Qatar →Doha →Middle East Eye →Washington →Strait of Hormuz →Iran →Abu Dhabi →ADNOC →Emirates →Mecca →Pakistan →Saudi Arabia →Mohammed bin Salman →Donald Trump →United Arab Emirates (UAE) →

First Reported In

Update #169 · The war moved from the air to the water

Middle East Eye· 12 Aug 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Gargash warns: neither war nor peace

A Gulf capital that helped halt an American strike is now saying the halt has settled nothing.

Led to

Abu Dhabi cuts Iran's payment channel

Gargash's warning that the region cannot survive between war and peace preceded the UAE's unilateral halt.

Occurred 17 Aug 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Cross-border power traders

The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.

EDF

River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.

Gasunie

TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.

German gas-fired generators

Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.

European Commission (DG Energy)

Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.

Spain's LNG terminal operators

Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.