Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan
Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan became President of the United Arab Emirates in May 2022, having exercised most of its authority for the preceding eight years. Born in 1961, the third son of Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the federation, he trained at Sandhurst and served as a pilot in the UAE air force. He was made Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi in 2004 on his father's death and deputy supreme commander of the armed forces, and took effective control after his half-brother, President Khalifa, suffered a stroke in 2014. He built the Emirati military into the most capable small force in the Arab world — professional, trained with American and French assistance, and deployed rather than decorative. It fought in Afghanistan, Libya and, most consequentially, Yemen from 2015, where the UAE ran the southern front and then largely withdrew its own troops while retaining influence through local proxies. He is the principal architect of a foreign policy defined by opposition to political Islam, and specifically to the Muslim Brotherhood, which shaped Emirati support for Sisi in Egypt, for Haftar in Libya, and the blockade of Qatar from 2017 to 2021. He agreed the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020, normalising relations in exchange for the suspension of West Bank annexation. Domestically he has pushed diversification, sovereign wealth investment on a very large scale, nuclear power, a space programme, and more recently artificial intelligence infrastructure, while political association and dissent remain tightly restricted. He is the third of Zayed's sons to hold the presidency. His full brothers occupy the national security, foreign affairs and interior portfolios, which makes the group known as the Bani Fatima the effective government.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Emirati
- Roles: President of the United Arab Emirates (2022-present)
