By Meng Kit Tang

Key Takeaways:

• In November 2025 Seoul and Abu Dhabi agreed to pursue joint KF-21 variant work, local production, and third-country exports, valued above $15 billion—after F-35 talks stalled and the UAE bought French Rafales.
• The jet uses licensed GE F414 engines under U.S. ITAR, so third-country sales still need Washington’s approval; Britain has pitched a Rolls-Royce engine as an export workaround, and Korea is funding its own engine for the late 2030s.
• Indonesia’s 2010 co-development deal shrank and ended in 2026 as a buy-only arrangement; as of mid-2026 no KF-21 export contract was signed, so the UAE offer is still a framework, not proven autonomy.

On November 18, 2025, in Abu Dhabi, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced something more ambitious than a fighter jet sale.

The two governments agreed to move beyond a simple export-purchase structure and pursue joint development, local production, and third-country joint exports of future KF-21 Boramae variants.

Korean officials put the prospective value at more than $15 billion. Seoul was offering Abu Dhabi a stake in how future variants are built, maintained, and exported.

The question is what that stake actually buys. The UAE has spent the better part of a decade trying to diversify its fighter fleet and reduce dependence on any single supplier. On paper, the KF-21 offers something the F-35 cannot: a greater role in the industrial relationship behind the aircraft.

But can Seoul really offer strategic autonomy, or only a different supplier to depend on? The answer may depend on a piece of hardware that sits beneath the entire proposition: the engine.

What Washington Wouldn’t Sell

The UAE wanted F-35s, and the effort has a paper trail. Talks over a $23 billion package began in earnest during the final months of the first Trump administration, part of the normalization dividend that followed the Abraham Accords, and they have never quite closed.

Andreas Krieg, a security analyst at King’s College London, has described the deal as effectively stalled, caught between American unease over the UAE’s ties to China and Emirati reluctance to accept the operational restrictions Washington wanted attached. When Trump returned to office in 2025, Emirati officials again saw reason to hope.

But that hope did not last. By the end of that year, reporting on the region’s fighter jet market noted a specific sticking point: the UAE’s use of Huawei network infrastructure, a detail US officials treat as a live security concern rather than a negotiable inconvenience.

Abu Dhabi did not wait. In early 2025, it began receiving its first Dassault Rafales, part of an 80-aircraft, roughly $19 billion deal. The purchase papered over an immediate capability gap, but the Rafale is still a fourth-generation-plus fighter, not a fifth-generation platform. Buying aircraft from France does little to build the domestic industrial base, technology transfer, and local maintenance and production capacity that Abu Dhabi wants.

France sells the aircraft. Korea is offering to build the industry around it, and that difference is what Seoul is now trying to sell.

The Indonesia Precedent

The KF-21 courtship of the UAE did not begin in Abu Dhabi. It began with a friendship flight. In August 2025, UAE Defense Undersecretary Ibrahim Nasser Mohammed Al Alawi climbed into the rear seat of a KF-21 prototype at Sacheon Air Base and flew with South Korea’s Air Force Chief of Staff.

The previous April had already produced a letter of intent committing both countries to comprehensive cooperation on the aircraft. The November summit turned that intent into a figure, and the figure into a model: joint development, local assembly, co-export rights on future variants sold to third countries.

Korea has offered this model before. Indonesia signed on as the KF-21’s original development partner in 2010, agreeing to fund roughly 20 percent of the program in exchange for technology transfer, workshare, and eventual acquisition of up to 48 aircraft.

Sixteen years later, that partnership has effectively ended. Jakarta’s contribution was renegotiated downward in 2025 to around 600 billion won, a fraction of the original commitment, after years of payment delays, disputes over workshare allocation, and an alleged incident of Indonesian engineers attempting to remove technical data from KAI’s facilities without authorization.

On June 30, 2026, Indonesia confirmed it would abandon local co-production entirely and switch to direct purchase, closing out a decade and a half of industrial partnership with a whimper. KAI reportedly marked the formal end of the joint development project in late July with a completion ceremony attended by Defense Acquisition Program Administration officials, a bureaucratic bookend to a relationship that started as a partnership and finished as a supplier contract. One prototype airframe is reportedly still owed to Jakarta as compensation, the mechanism for its transfer unresolved as of this writing.

The Gulf International Forum, which has been tracking the UAE talks, suggests Indonesia’s experience may have made Abu Dhabi more cautious about how Korea manages the program. That would make sense. Both deals were built around industrial participation, an offer well beyond a simple purchase. Indonesia’s experience shows how difficult that promise can be to deliver. Whether the UAE has accounted for those lessons is not yet clear.

The Limit of What Seoul Can Sell

In June 2025, the Financial Times reported that the United Kingdom had launched a lobbying effort aimed at persuading Seoul to abandon General Electric’s F414 engine in favor of a co-developed Rolls-Royce alternative for future KF-21 variants.

The pitch was explicitly framed around export freedom: a British-built engine would let Korea sell the aircraft to whomever it chose, without routing the decision through Washington. The same reporting named the UAE and Indonesia directly as the customers currently caught in that bottleneck.

It is a notable thing for a G7 government to spend diplomatic capital on. A hypothetical constraint would not be worth the effort. A real one, with billions in Gulf contracts at stake, is.

The constraint has a name and a mechanism. The KF-21 flies on two F414-GE-400K turbofans, built under license by Hanwha Aerospace but designed and controlled by General Electric, and the engine falls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) administered by the US State Department.

ITAR’s third-country transfer provisions require Washington’s approval whenever even a single US-controlled component appears in a system bound for a third country. The engine is not a single component in any casual sense. It is the aircraft’s most strategically sensitive part, and its presence means every KF-21 sale to a country that is not South Korea eventually needs an American signature.

This is where the comparison to Korea’s other export success complicates rather than confirms the picture.

The FA-50 light fighter, built around a related GE engine, has sold to the Philippines, Iraq, Poland, Thailand, and Malaysia without becoming an American chokepoint story. Washington did not waive the rules for a friend. The FA-50 simply never crossed the threshold that triggers the strictest scrutiny in the first place.

US export control regulations carved out a distinct category in recent years for what the rules term foreign advanced military aircraft: non-US platforms equipped with AESA fire-control radar, integrated electronic warfare systems, or beyond-visual-range engagement capability. That category, according to trade compliance filings, explicitly superseded an earlier temporary modification to the US Munitions List that had been drafted with KF-21 components specifically in mind.

The FA-50 is a trainer with light attack capability. The KF-21 carries Hanwha’s domestically built APY-016K AESA radar and is designed from the outset for BVR engagement. It was never going to receive the same regulatory shrug.

Seoul understands this better than anyone outside the program. South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration has designated an indigenous fighter engine, targeting roughly 16,000 pounds of dry thrust, as a national strategic technology priority, with Hanwha aiming for readiness by the late 2030s.

A government does not fund a decade-long engine program to solve a problem it considers theoretical. It funds one because the alternative, permanent dependence on another country’s export licensing calendar, has already cost it leverage it would rather not keep losing.

A Korean official has said Seoul expects coordination with Washington to keep the export on track, and there is no public evidence the US plans to block a sale to a security partner that hosts American forces. Even so, the underlying arrangement is undisturbed: the UAE wants an industrial partnership that reduces its dependence on any one government, and the fighter at the center of that partnership still needs American approval before it can reach Emirati hands.

Autonomy, Partial

The UAE’s interest is still understandable. Joint development, local assembly, and workforce training give Abu Dhabi capabilities it would not get from simply buying another fighter. Even if the most sensitive part of the aircraft remains foreign-controlled, building the ability to maintain and support the fleet at home still gives the UAE more room to maneuver. That matters if relations with a supplier become difficult for reasons unrelated to the aircraft, the kind of scenario the Rafale purchase does not insure against.

The UAE is not alone in thinking this way. Saudi Arabia’s air force commander visitedKAI’s facilities in January 2026, as Seoul has courted Riyadh with both the KF-21 and other defense systems. The interest fits neatly with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 push to build more defense capacity at home. Seoul appears to be testing whether the same offer works across the wider Gulf, with the UAE as only the first customer.

A Finished Fighter, Still Unsold

South Korean media declared the KF-21 program itself formally complete on August 8, 2026, closing out eleven years and more than 8 trillion won of development as the largest weapons program in the country’s history. That milestone changes the terms of the export conversation, if not yet its outcome.

Seoul is no longer selling a promising prototype or a partner a stake in an unfinished aircraft. It is selling a finished one, tested, in production, and about to enter frontline service with its own air force. The technical risk that once justified caution from a buyer has largely evaporated.

The commercial risk is still there. As of mid-2026, none of the UAE, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Indonesia has signed a binding KF-21 purchase contract with Korea Aerospace Industries. KAI’s chief executive remains confident that the first export deal will be signed this year, and Korean media have talked about more than 200 potential aircraft across these four markets. But none of that is a contract. Indonesia’s 16-year experience is a reminder of how quickly a promising partnership can unravel.

If the UAE deal is eventually signed and funded, it would show that Korea’s co-development model can work with a wealthy and demanding partner. If it stalls like Indonesia’s did or runs into unexpected problems when US licensing enters the picture, the lesson will be harder to ignore: the sovereignty Korea is offering has a limit. And that limit may ultimately be set in Washington.

The Middle-Power Bind

There is one version of this story where the engine issue is a footnote, quietly resolved through the same coordination that has allowed Korea to sell FA-50s abroad. There is another where it keeps a $15 billion framework stuck as a framework for years. Right now, both are possible.

That uncertainty points to a bigger problem. Middle powers trying to reduce their dependence on great powers often find that the hardest parts to build themselves are also the parts those great powers are least willing to let go. Korea is no different.

Seoul can offer shared production, workforce training, co-export rights and a way to reduce dependence on a single supplier. Whether that adds up to strategic autonomy or a different kind of dependence is not Seoul’s decision to make. That call belongs to Washington, one export license at a time.

• This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

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