Iran and the Emirates Agree to 'Turn the Page' After BRICS Encounter
Iran’s president declared a first since the war began: “a constructive exchange with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi… It was agreed that we would turn the page, look to the future and build it together.” The UAE had suspended trade and financial ties after early-war strikes on Dubai’s airport killed twelve. The overture followed a BRICS summit whose closing declaration demanded “maximum restraint” and condemned attacks on nuclear-safeguarded sites — Washington unnamed and unmistakable.
Abu Dhabi re-engaging Tehran mid-war is the Gulf’s oldest instinct reasserting itself: the Emirates prospered for decades as the entrepôt that traded with Iran while hosting Iran’s adversaries, and the war’s severing of that hedge was always likelier to be suspended than permanent. For Tehran the page-turn is oxygen — a financial corridor reopening just as exports touch a quarter-million barrels — which is precisely why Washington will read the “constructive exchange” less warmly than Delhi’s communiqué drafters did. The BRICS language completes the picture of a non-Western consensus hardening around the war: restraint demanded of the blockader, sympathy banked by the blockaded. Watch Emirati customs data and flight schedules — détente in the Gulf is measured in dhows and Dubai landing slots.