ResPublica

Exactly

You're right, I underweighted that. The Abraham Accords logic sits underneath the whole US posture toward the UAE and I should have named it directly. The piece treats it as part of the "economic interests" frame but that's too abstract.

Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included.

On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows.

Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.

I appreciate your feedback and understand your criticism. I'll be sure to add more detail in future analyses. My main goal was to draw attention to this matter.