The US Navy has "LONGTERM contracts" for Dubai. The blowback, if the UAE really wants to dork with the US is..train, maintain and fly your $15 billion dollar F-16's on your own, ditto with the UAE's 30 US-supplied AH-64A Apache attack helicopters. And yea, break your deal on the ports.....dare you.
America is the sole superpower in the world for a reason, and it had NOTHING to do with little oil-rich dictatorships in the mid-east.
But today's globalists are actually intimidated about the prospect - O... M....G.... - that we might piss off some overblown city state. With will like that, we are really a pathetic thing to behold. No Great White Fleets in our future ...
You're talking about HARDWARE. Why do you think the guys in charge of OUR hardware (Franks, Pace and Rumsfeld) have been so OUTSPOKEN in support of the UAE? And beyond hardware, what about INTEL? They (and the other Arab moderates) know things that our Spec Ops folks could NEVER find out on their own. So even if there's no tangible change in the hardware, do you think the intel pipeline will be the same as before? I rather doubt it.