Last week Thursday, Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman visited Washington and met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Senator Lindsey Graham. The Saudi readout said the meetings reviewed “strategic relations between [the two] countries, prospects for enhancing cooperation… and efforts to advance regional and global peace and stability.”
The next day, state-sanctioned sermons in Saudi Arabia featured rhetoric that could hardly advance regional peace. In Mecca and Medina, government-appointed imams called on God to support “our downtrodden brothers in Palestine,” to “reverse their weakness into strength,” and to grant them “victory against the Zionist aggressors.” These clerics are state employees, and the content of their sermons is approved by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs.
The surge in anti-Israel – and at times even antisemitic – language, evident across editorials, columns and state-aligned media, is unmistakable. It marks a clear shift in the policy of Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince and de-facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), once described Israel not as an enemy but as a potential ally. The reasons are multifaceted.
Riyadh has been lobbying Washington to confront the Iranian regime since at least 2002, when the late Saudi King Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Texas ranch. “Cut off the head of the snake,” the Saudi monarch urged, a request Bush later recorded in his memoir Decision Points.
As Washington hesitated, Saudi Arabia gradually gravitated towards Israel, which shared the kingdom’s fear of the Islamist regime in Tehran.
In parallel, when MBS first came to power in 2015, high oil revenues allowed him to experiment with reshaping Saudi society. Islamism was repressed and women were granted expanded rights, including the ability to drive and travel independently. After 9/11, Saudi Arabia had already curtailed domestic Islamism – the kingdom’s most effective tool for projecting influence abroad. MBS went further, promising to transform Saudi Arabia into a Middle Eastern analogue of Dubai, the city many Arabs and Muslims aspire to live in.
But with revenues shrinking due to persistently lower oil prices, MBS now finds it harder to keep the Islamist genie in the bottle and appears to be loosening his grip to relieve internal pressure.
Vision 2030 – an ambitious plan to diversify Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy, reshape its society, and position the kingdom as a global investment hub – now appears increasingly out of reach. As a result, the crown prince seems to have abandoned the Emirati model of economic transformation – moving from oil rents towards services – and replaced it with a Turkish-style approach: masking economic trouble with populist appeals to restored Islamic glory, beginning with hostility towards Israel.
Saudi Arabia’s shift back towards Islamism may have been inspired by Qatar and Turkey, whose Muslim Brotherhood-aligned policies expanded their regional influence without triggering alarm in Washington, thanks in part to the strength of Doha’s and Ankara’s lobbying operations in the US capital.
Meanwhile, Iran is no longer the existential threat that once pushed Riyadh towards Jerusalem. Over the past year, Israel has weakened Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, contributed to the downfall of Tehran’s ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and – in June – directly bruised Iran itself, significantly degrading the regime’s ability to project power across the region.
Saudi Arabia thus found itself freer of the Iranian menace and, with that, saw little urgency in pursuing either an implicit defence pact with Israel or an explicit one with Washington – both of which would have required normalisation with the Jewish state.
At the same time, the survival of a weakened Iranian regime has become more valuable to Riyadh than the prospect of a sanctions-free Iran capable of flooding an already oversupplied global oil market. With additional supply expected from countries such as Venezuela – and potentially Iran itself – oil prices are likely to remain under pressure, posing a serious challenge for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose social contract rests on generous state spending.
That model worked in the 1970s and 1980s, when oil prices were high and populations small. Today, Saudi Arabia’s population has grown dramatically, while energy revenues are far less reliable. Budgetary belt-tightening now threatens the foundations of Gulf stability.
Of the six GCC states, only Qatar and the United Arab Emirates currently enjoy sustained budget surpluses. Qatar benefits from enormous gas revenues and a small population, while the UAE anticipated the end of oil-driven largesse and diversified its economy over the past two decades. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, remains heavily dependent on oil income and has struggled to balance its budget.
By late 2025, Saudi Arabia drew on its sovereign wealth fund and turned to bond markets through its state oil company, Aramco.
Despite these measures, the fiscal outlook appears increasingly strained. With political change effectively impossible—since leadership transitions could unleash unrest over austerity—Saudi has reverted to the most familiar tool for deflecting domestic discontent and bolstering popularity: hostility towards Israel.
After 9/11, the United States removed two Sunni regimes – the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq – allowing Iran to expand its Shia influence across the region. That expansion was eventually halted and reversed by Israel after October 7. Washington tolerated the post-2003 Shia expansion, a mistake with long-term consequences. Today, it is watching – at times even cheering—the spread of Sunni Islamism, which may prove just as dangerous.
Saudi Arabia sees little reason not to ride this rising Sunni Islamist wave, using it to expand regional influence while diverting attention from domestic economic turbulence. Washington must wake up to the Sunni Islamist threat before it finds itself confronting yet another variant of the same old menace.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington.
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