Skip Menu

Issue Brief

  • home
  • Publications
  • Issue Brief
Vol.153, No.15, 2026

From Shared Pressure to Shared Capacity: ROK–UAE Defence Cooperation After the Iran War

Date
2026-07-22
Authors
E. J. R. Cho, Nicholas Lyall
Keyword
Foreign Policy
View Download
  • abstract
      The Iran War taught the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) the same lesson by different routes. The UAE learned that when it came to the systems defending it a more expansive and guaranteed set of re-supply lines was the way forward. Korea learned that the assets defending it could leave. Both lessons have one source: a United States that now allocates its power more selectively across theatres, and says so in its own National Defense Strategy. Both countries are adapting, and their adaptations point toward each other. The UAE brings capital, wartime demand, an indigenisation strategy, and a hub position; Korea brings production scale, combat-proven systems, and an export strategy constrained only by domestic capacity. The KF-21 track, the $35 billion defence-industry MoU, and the Tawazun—LIG manufacturing hub are the early architecture of the fit. And the exchange already runs both ways: interceptors in one direction, oil and capital in the other. This brief argues three things. The partnership's lasting value lies in its structural components—co-production, localisation, sustainment, joint third-market expansion—not in mere transactions. The window for building those structural components is governed by three separate clocks, each already running and time-limited. And the obstacles—US transfer control, the transition gap between immediate needs and delivery capacity, and entanglement exposure—are manageable, but only if managed deliberately: through Washington rather than around it, up a gated ladder rather than an open ramp, and with the risks written into the plan from the start.
List