Turkey’s red flag illuminated buildings in the United Arab Emirates and flew high in a ceremony in Dubai on Tuesday as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spent a second day in the once adversarial country mending relations and deepening commercial ties.
The new page in UAE-Turkey relations points to a wider reset in regional strategies following a decade of strained ties and proxy wars that played out between the two countries. Turkey's support for Islamists during Arab Spring protests roiled Abu Dhabi's leadership, which views the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots as an existential threat to its style of autocratic hereditary rule. So deep was their animosity that Ankara suspects the UAE backed a network behind the failed coup targeting Erdogan in 2016.
