Loading "The UAE is not now and never will be a threat to stability or peace in the region," Clarke said in congressional testimony. "That is very hard to imagine. Indeed, the UAE is a force for peace." Thirty years later, Mohammed, now 58, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, is arguably the most powerful leader in the Arab world. He is also among the most influential foreign voices in Washington, urging the US to adopt his increasingly bellicose approach to the region. Mohammed may be the richest man in the world. He controls sovereign wealth funds worth $US1.3 trillion, more than any other country. His military is equipped through its work with the US to conduct high-tech surveillance and combat operations far beyond its borders. UAE Desert Falcons fly in formation with US F-35A Lightning IIs in an undisclosed location in south-west Asia. The flight was conducted to continue building military-to-military relationship with the UAE, according to the US Air Force. Credit:USAF/AP

For decades, the prince has been a key US ally, but now he is going his own way. His special forces are active in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Egypt's North Sinai. He has worked to thwart democratic transitions in the Middle East, helped install a reliable autocrat in Egypt and boosted a protege to power in Saudi Arabia. At times, the prince has contradicted US policy and destabilised neighbours. Human rights groups have criticised him for jailing dissidents at home, for his role in creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and for backing Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose agents killed dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. King Salman of Saudi Arabia, left, with Prince Mohammed bin Zayed in the Saudi port of Jeddah in 2017. Credit:AP Yet under the Trump administration, his influence in Washington appears greater than ever. He has a rapport with US President Donald Trump, who has frequently adopted the prince's views on Qatar, Libya and Saudi Arabia, even over the advice of cabinet officials or senior national security staff. Western diplomats who know the prince — often referred to as MBZ — say he is obsessed with two enemies: Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Sunni Islamist movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s. Trump has sought to move strongly against both and in late May took steps to bypass congressional opposition to keep selling weapons to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Loading "MBZ has an extraordinary way of telling Americans his own interests but making it come across as good advice about the region," said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under president Barack Obama, whose sympathy for the Arab Spring and negotiations with Iran brought blistering criticism from the Emirati prince. When it comes to influence in Washington, Rhodes added, "MBZ is in a class by himself". Mohammed worked assiduously before the presidential election to crack Trump's inner circle, and secured a secret meeting during the transition with the President-elect's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The prince also tried to broker talks between the Trump administration and Russia, a gambit that later entangled him in Robert Mueller's investigation into foreign election interference. At least five people working for Mohammed have been caught up in criminal investigations growing out of that inquiry, with the prince's Lebanese-American go-between George Nader arrested on child pornography charges upon landing in New York this week. A regular visitor to the United States for three decades, Mohammed has now stayed away for two years, in part because he fears prosecutors might seek to question him or his aides, according to two people familiar with this thinking. (His brother, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, has visited.)

Loading The UAE's embassy in Washington declined to comment. The prince's many American defenders say it is only prudent of him to try to shape United States policy, as many governments do, and that he sees his interventions as an attempt to compensate for an American pullback. But Mohammed's critics say his rise is a study in unintended consequences. The obscure young prince whom Washington adopted as a pliant ally is now fanning his volatile region's flames. By arming the UAE with such advanced surveillance technology, commandos and weaponry, argued Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former State Department official and fellow at the Brookings Institution, "we have created a little Frankenstein". The UAE is a tiny federation of city-states, yet Abu Dhabi accounts for 6 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves. It began allowing US forces to operate from bases inside the country during the campaign to liberate Kuwait in 1991. Since then, the prince's commandos and air forces have been deployed with the Americans in Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as against the Islamic State terror group.

He has recruited American commanders to run his military and former spies to set up his intelligence services. He also acquired more weaponry in the four years before 2010 than the other five Gulf monarchies combined. With advice from former top military commanders including former defence secretary James Mattis, Mohammed has even developed an Emirati defence industry, producing an amphibious armoured vehicle known as The Beast and others that he is supplying to clients in Libya and Egypt. The Emiratis are also preparing a low-altitude propeller-driven bomber for counterinsurgency combat, an idea Mattis had long recommended for the US, a former officer close to him said. Mohammed has often told US officials that he saw Israel as an ally against Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel trusted him enough to sell him upgrades for his F-16s, as well as advanced mobile phone spyware. To many in Washington, Mohammed had become America's best friend in the region, a partner who could be counted on for tasks such as countering Iranian influence in Lebanon and funding construction in Iraq. "It was well known that if you needed something done in the Middle East," recalled Richard Olson, a former US ambassador to Abu Dhabi, "the Emiratis would do it."

When he meets Americans, Mohammed emphasises the things that make the United Arab Emirates more liberal than their neighbours. Women have more opportunities: A third of the cabinet ministers are female. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the UAE allows Christian churches and Hindu or Sikh temples, partly to accommodate a vast foreign workforce. (The country is estimated to have 9 million residents, but fewer than a million citizens; the rest are foreign workers.) A priest waves to the crowd at Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi during the UAE's first-ever papal Mass in February. Credit:AP To underscore the point, the prince last year created a Ministry of Tolerance and declared this the "Year of Tolerance". He has hosted the Special Olympics and Pope Francis. After the Arab Spring uprisings, Mohammed saw the UAE as the only one of the 22 Arab states still viable, with a stable government, functional economy, able military and "moderate ideology", said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist with access to the country's rulers. "The UAE is part of this very dangerous region that is getting more dangerous by the day — full of chaos and wars and extremists," he said. "So the motivation is this: If we don't go after the bad guys, they will come after us."