From Kulna
Why can’t Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest military spenders, stop the Houthis? The answer isn’t just weapons. It’s the bargain the Gulf monarchies were built on, which is now breaking, and a decade of MBS’s absolute power that left the kingdom no way out.
Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s biggest military spenders, yet this month, as Houthi missiles shut Riyadh’s main airport, it cannot reliably secure its own territory. Why?
Weapons, drones, doctrine and alliances all matter, but the real answer goes deeper than air defenses, training or generals. It goes to the kind of state Saudi Arabia is: why this military was built this way, why the kingdom can’t simply fight its way out, and why that threatens the Gulf’s future.
A model of statehood that sustained the Gulf monarchies for generations is under existential pressure. The crisis is happening now, before our eyes, and its roots go back much further than this war.
The analysis we present here applies across the Gulf, but Saudi Arabia makes the clearest case. Its decade under MBS was unusually dramatic, and it had perhaps the Gulf’s greatest chance to change course.
To understand what went wrong, we have to understand two bargains that made this whole political order possible.
The two bargains that built the Gulf
A state’s social contract is the foundation of its political order. It determines what rulers owe the citizens; what citizens owe the rulers; who has power; and what citizenship even means. The social contract sits even deeper than a constitution. Institutions, legitimacy, and political expectations are consequences of it.
The social contract of Gulf states can be viewed as being made up of two grand bargains: One is internal, between ruler and citizen; the other is external, between the state and the hegemonic power that protects it. These two bargains reinforce each other. Today both are shaking, and that is the heart of the crisis.
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