Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing. You can read it in Arabic here, and check out MBN’s flagship Arabic-language Alhurra news platform (also in English). If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe.
The UAE answers Iranian missiles with a suspension of all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran. France plans to expel two Iranian diplomats. And two Iranian designers caught up in the diplomatic brouhaha remain detained and unmentioned.
Chicken, the last protein many Iranian households could still afford, joins beef on the list of luxuries. And on Iranian sidewalks, architects and engineers are now doubling as street vendors.
Find out more below, and share your thoughts, analysis, and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe.
Don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by Farzan Sabet, Middle East expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and MBN Editorial Chair Matthew Kaminski, as we dig into whether Tehran actually wants this war to end or has decided continued confrontation serves it better.
And ICYMI: Why Tehran Doesn’t Want the War to End, my analysis this week on the Iranian regime’s current thinking.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Two Iranian diplomats in France will be expelled in the coming days.
– French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot writing on X, Aug. 18.
TOP OF THE NEWS
1. The UAE Breaks with Iran … Again
On Tuesday evening, the UAE issued its first emergency alert in over a month, warning residents to take shelter after the Ministry of Defense said it had detected two ballistic missiles fired from Iran towards the country. One fell outside UAE territorial waters and the second inside them. The ministry described this as an attempt to threaten ships transiting its waters.
Hours later, early yesterday morning local time, the UAE’s foreign ministry went further than it has at any point in this war: The director of the foreign ministry’s Strategic Communications Department announced that “all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice.” He cited “regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security.”
Within hours, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei “completely rejected” the missile claims.
How UAE-Iran relations got here: After a rough patch a few years ago, UAE-Iran relations were on the mend before the current war reset them entirely. Abu Dhabi downgraded its ties and recalled its ambassador from Tehran in 2016 in solidarity with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain after Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran. In addition, Abu Dhabi backed the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran and supported the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal.
That posture began shifting after 2019, when a wave of attacks on tankers near the Emirati port of Fujairah, widely blamed on Iran, convinced Abu Dhabi that engagement might be preferable to confrontation. As one observer put it, the UAE’s policy shift was based on a calculation that “it is more prudent to engage with the Islamic Republic to protect itself from escalation and pressure” in the hope that it “might over time moderate and influence Iranian behavior.”
By August 2022, the UAE had restored its ambassador to Tehran, and the rapprochement deepened in the ensuing years. The Emirati foreign minister visited Tehran in July 2024, and that fall UAE president Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (aka MBZ) met Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan. That was the first meeting between an Emirati head of state and an Iranian president. Further diplomatic developments ensued, and an Iranian naval flotilla made a port call in Sharjah in Feb. 2025. Trade grew alongside diplomacy: Emirati exports to Iran climbed from under $6 billion in 2018 to $22 billion in 2025 even as the U.S. reimposed sanctions after its withdrawal from the JCPOA.
The UAE simultaneously hosted approximately 3,500 American troops on its soil and, in May of last year, signed $200 billion in deals with the U.S. when president Donald Trump visited Abu Dhabi during his tour of the Middle East.
The war changed everything. In May, the UAE foreign ministry issued a statement in which it “condemned in the strongest terms” Iran’s “launch of nearly 3,000 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones toward the UAE.” As one analyst observed, this was more than Iran fired at Israel.
The day after the war began, the UAE closed its embassy in Tehran and withdrew its ambassador and the rest of its diplomatic mission. By mid-March, the UAE foreign minister was condemning “Iran’s unprovoked terrorist attacks targeting the UAE.” The UAE then carried out dozens of covert airstrikes against Iran, using U.S. and Israeli intelligence and hitting Qeshm and Abu Musa islands, Bandar Abbas, and the Lavan Island oil refinery in retaliation for Iranian strikes on Emirati energy infrastructure. The campaign ended the day after the ceasefire was announced in early April.
Since the declaration of the ceasefire, the two sides have been working to fix their relationship. In mid-April, UAE vice president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf held their first phone call since the beginning of the war, and Tehran-Dubai flights resumed in late June. The normalization was extended this week, when flydubai resumed flying its Dubai-Baku route over Iranian airspace for the first time since the war began.
The UAE’s approach since the ceasefire began has been to absorb continued provocations without escalating. Although Kuwait and Bahrain kept getting hit, no missile or drone had struck inside UAE land or territorial waters since the April ceasefire, but UAE-owned vessels kept coming under attack further out in the Strait of Hormuz. Fifteen tankers belonging to ADNOC, the UAE’s state oil company, have been struck by missiles and drones since the war began. The attacks have killed one crew member and injured twenty. The UAE’s public response to these attacks never went beyond statements and condemnation, with UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash insisting that “repeated targeting of Adnoc company tankers will not deter the United Arab Emirates from moving forward with a balanced and rational policy.”
It appears that a direct strike on UAE territory was a step too far for the Emirates to absorb without reacting. How much the suspension of trade hurts Iran will depend on how long it lasts. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the UAE to Iran. The UAE is Iran’s single largest source of imported goods, ahead of both China and Turkey, accounting for roughly a third of Iran’s annual imports. Dubai’s re-export networks and banking connections have served for decades as one of Iran’s main channels for circumventing sanctions. Retired general and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Mark Kimmitt has suggested that the UAE’s suspension of trade could be more significant for Iran than U.S. sanctions.
French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot. Photo: AFP.
2. France Will Expel Two Iranian Diplomats
On July 19, security forces raided a work meeting at the Tehran home of Aria Kasaei, 46, a leading figure in Iranian graphic design for more than two decades. He is also the founder of Studio Kargah, which describes itself as “a medium-sized independent studio that collaborates with cultural institutes inside Iran and around the globe” and which is also “active in Tehran and Paris.” Arrested in the raid were Kasaei and his colleague Elaheh “Elly” Naghilou, 36.
Also arrested in the same raid, and later released, were the cultural attaché and another staff member of the French embassy’s cultural department. The French embassy staff had requested the meeting to discuss Villa Zadig, an artist residency program the French Embassy’s cultural department runs in Tehran to foster exchange between traditional Iranian crafts and French art, language, and education.
The day after the arrests, French Foreign Minister Jean- Noël Barrot condemned what he termed an “extremely serious act of intimidation” against the two embassy staff members. Kasaei and Naghilou’s friends and family stayed silent at the families’ request, hoping for a quiet release, until a statement from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence forced their hand. The statement, headlined “The Ministry of Intelligence’s blow to the infiltration project, diplomatic interventionism, and France’s action against Iran’s independence,” spoke darkly of “the illegal presence of two French diplomats at the secret meeting place,” a “sinister project,” and “laying the groundwork for French action against the country’s independence.” The names of those detained and the details of the meeting were omitted.
The designers’ friends issued a press release immediately after, emphasizing that everything about the Villa Zadig project had been public and posted on the Villa Zadig Instagram account, on Kasaei’s own account before he was detained, and on Studio Kargah’s account. As the release put it, “Describing an ordinary work meeting between two graphic designers and members of the French Embassy’s Cultural Department as a ‘secret meeting,’ when the resulting graphic work had already been made public, presents a profoundly misleading picture of the nature of that meeting.”
On Monday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said France should apologize for the diplomats’ conduct. The dispute escalated on Tuesday, when the French foreign minister said Paris would expel two Iranian diplomats, citing the “intolerable” treatment of its embassy staff, who in his words were “scandalously and deliberately assaulted.” His statement made no mention of Kasaei or Naghilou by name.
Iran continues to hold the pair incommunicado and has said nothing officially connecting them to the “infiltration” case it announced. In the most recent edition of this briefing I highlighted the approval by Iran’s parliament of the general principles of a bill against what it terms foreign infiltration.
As I reported here on Monday, Iran’s parliament has just approved the general principles of a bill against what it calls foreign infiltration. One of the articles in the legislation forbids “Contact between private and governmental natural and legal persons with embassies, offices of non-Iranian organizations or institutions inside or outside the country without informing and obtaining written permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Chickens and dogs hanging out in Iran. Photo: AFP.
Chicken or Beef
Chicken has long functioned as the fallback protein for Iranian households already priced out of red meat by years of currency depreciation. Iranian press reports this week show the price of chicken climbing sharply as well – enough to create headlines (“Chicken is getting more expensive”).
This is part of a general trend. An Iranian press report refers to a Statistical Center of Iran finding that the most recent twelve-month period saw price increases of between 215 and 431 percent for five basic commodities, including imported rice, chicken, eggs, liquid cooking oil and vegetable shortening. The article notes that “This heavy wave of price increases is a serious alarm for household livelihoods.”
Iranians shop for fruit and vegetables in a market in northern Tehran. Photo: AFP.
Stalled Degrees
Iranwire reports on professionals with academic degrees who are now selling goods and food as street vendors. As they describe it, “The gap between professional titles and the work required to survive is summed up in a single phrase: ‘I am an architect, but now I sell these.’” One video shows different women selling snacks and trinkets on the street. Two of them tell us how they became unemployed because of the war.
ESSENTIAL READING: THE UAE AND IRAN
“Iranians in Dubai Torn Between Hopes for Change and Fear for Loved Ones Amid Iran War” – The Jerusalem Post, March 2026. Members of one of the Gulf’s largest Iranian diaspora communities describe watching the war from across the water.
“Illicit Iranian gambling network helped pull off a $4 billion sanctions dodge” – Reuters, July 2026. “A Dubai-based crypto exchange serves as a hub for moving illicit Iranian money. The exchange, Shelbit, links a vast gambling network fronted by two globetrotting influencers, bitcoin mining and Iran’s central bank. Shelbit has sent hundreds of millions in crypto to Binance, the world’s biggest exchange.”
“The World Has Ignored Iran’s Occupation of UAE Islands at Its Peril” – The National, April 2026. An Emirati legal scholar makes the case for UAE sovereignty over three Gulf islands seized by force by Iran in 1971.
The UAE-Iran Rapprochement: Causes and Effects – Gulf International Forum, July 2022. Analysts and scholars explain why Abu Dhabi pursued détente with Tehran after the 2019 Fujairah tanker attacks.
