BREAKING: UAE Are Prepared to Join The Conflict With The US, There’s No Negations With This Regime” Uehlinger

The reported willingness of the United Arab Emirates to join military operations alongside the United States against Iran has fundamentally altered the diplomatic landscape of the Hormuz crisis, effectively closing off what little remained of any credible negotiating pathway with Tehran, according to former CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Uehlinger was direct in his reading of what the UAE’s posture signalled. “As countries like the UAE are prepared to join the conflict with the United States,” he said, “there is no apparent negotiating with this regime.” The statement reflected his broader assessment that Iran’s behaviour — marked by broken commitments, fragmented command structures, and continued military harassment — had rendered diplomatic engagement not merely difficult but structurally impossible under present conditions.

The former intelligence officer acknowledged that recent events had briefly raised hopes of a resolution. Iran had announced that the Strait of Hormuz was open, triggering a flurry of vessel movements as shipping companies repositioned to attempt a transit. Within hours, however, Iranian forces were once again warning ships to turn back, and the waterway had returned to its effectively closed state. For Uehlinger, the episode illustrated the fundamental problem with attempting to negotiate with a government whose different power centres appeared to be operating without coordination.

He argued that the central intelligence question now facing Washington was whether Iran’s diplomatic signals had ever been genuine, or whether they were propaganda designed to create the appearance of good faith while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continued to prosecute its own military agenda. The IRGC, he suggested, appeared to be ignoring the foreign ministry entirely — conducting what amounted to a separate war aimed at shutting down global trade through the strait, regardless of what officials in Tehran were saying publicly.

This fragmentation, Uehlinger stressed, made the UAE’s alignment with the United States particularly significant. Regional powers with direct stakes in the security of Gulf waterways were evidently concluding that Tehran was not a credible negotiating partner. Their willingness to move toward active military cooperation with Washington reflected a judgment that the situation had moved beyond the point where diplomacy could deliver meaningful results.

With a ceasefire deadline approaching, Uehlinger noted that American intelligence would need to make a definitive assessment of where Iranian decision-making authority actually resided. If rogue IRGC elements were operating independently of the government’s stated positions, that changed the calculus for any potential agreement. If, on the other hand, the regime itself had authorised the continued harassment while publicly signalling openness to talks, the implications were equally grave — and the path to reopening the strait would run not through negotiation but through sustained military and economic pressure.