Treaty of Jeddah (1974) is recorded in this encyclopedia from the source named below.
Overview
The 1974 Treaty of Jeddah was a treaty between Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, signed in 21 August 1974 between King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and President of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. The treaty intended to resolve the Saudi Arabia – United Arab Emirates border dispute (including the Buraimi Dispute). Saudi Arabia ratified the treaty in 1993, but the UAE had not yet ratified it as of 2025. The legal validity of the treaty has been questioned, since Qatar was not included in the negotiations, and the proposed settlement affects the Qatari border. However, Qatar had already reached a separate agreement on its border with Saudi Arabia in December 1965. The United Arab Emirates government has disputed the treaty since 1975 due to discrepancies between the oral agreement before the treaty’s signing and the final text of the treaty itself. The treaty has been argued to be in favor of the Saudi government owing to the weakened Abu Dhabi position after the withdrawal of Britain, the US support to the Arabian American Oil Company, and the threat of Saudi military intervention in Abu Dhabi at that time. The UAE has attempted to bring Saudi Arabia back to the negotiating table ever since.
Source and reuse
The descriptive text above is drawn from the English-language encyclopedia article Treaty of Jeddah (1974), reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and attributed in the sources block on this page. Figures in the infobox come from Wikidata and carry that project's own provenance; they should be checked against the cited source before being relied on.
Editorial note
This record is a sourced summary, not original research. Where the underlying material is silent on a point, this article is silent too. Last reviewed 2026-09-23.