From New Lines Magazine
In 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist organizations (such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State group) as an axis of evil. At the time, Saudi Arabia was fighting a proxy war against Iran in Yemen, had no diplomatic ties with Qatar and was unofficially engaged in an economic boycott of Turkey on the grounds that it supported Islamist groups.
Five years later, Saudi Arabia announced a unilateral withdrawal from Yemen, normalized relations with Iran and helped broker a ceasefire in Sudan by supporting the country’s Muslim Brotherhood-allied military. A year after that, Riyadh threw its support behind the new leadership of Ahmad al-Sharaa in Syria, despite his background as the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group that broke away from al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, the gap between Riyadh and a bloc led by the United Arab Emirates and Israel continues to widen. This goes beyond Israel’s war on Gaza; it can be seen in recent escalations in Yemen, where the UAE supported the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) as it moved into the region of Hadramawt, as well as in Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as a state independent from Somalia, a Saudi ally.
Yet these events are not best explained as part of a Saudi turn to Islamism, as some observers argue. They should be seen as evidence of a change in the strategic environment — both regionally and in Riyadh. Since 2019, when an Iranian attack on oil processing facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia destroyed half of the country’s oil production, the kingdom has followed a “zero-conflict” policy built around neutrality and conciliation. It is this policy that has, perhaps paradoxically, led the kingdom into clashes with the Emirati-Israeli bloc.
Sultan Alamer is a resident senior fellow at the New Lines Institute’s Middle East Center and a member of the editorial committee of Alpheratz magazine.
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