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zenux




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PostPosted: Fri, 16th Jan 2026 20:18    Post subject: Saudi Arabia is drifting, and the region will feel it
Saudi Ara­bia is drift­ing, and the region will feel it
Quote:

Saudi Ara­bia’s air­strike on a ship­ment of Emir­ati mil­it­ary equip­ment unloaded at Yemen’s port city of Mukalla was not just another epis­ode in a coun­try accus­tomed to war. It was an extraordin­ary act: one Gulf state strik­ing the assets of another mem­ber of the Gulf Cooper­a­tion Coun­cil (GCC), des­pite ostens­ibly nor­mal rela­tions. This kind of move usu­ally points to something deeper. And that is exactly what seems to be hap­pen­ing in Riy­adh.

Accord­ing to Gulf sources, the Saudi royal fam­ily has made a stra­tegic decision to dis­tance the king­dom from the region’s more mod­er­ate Arab states and move closer to regimes and polit­ical move­ments iden­ti­fied with the Muslim Broth­er­hood. Such a shift would sig­nal a dan­ger­ous change in the regional bal­ance of power.

The Tur­key-Qatar axis is already gain­ing strength. Unlike Iran and its prox­ies, it did not take major mil­it­ary blows from Israel dur­ing the Swords of Iron war (Israel’s offi­cial name for the post-Octo­ber 7 cam­paign). It has also benefited polit­ic­ally from US Pres­id­ent Don­ald Trump’s approach, and it is being posi­tioned for an influ­en­tial role in Gaza’s future as recon­struc­tion begins. What defines this axis is its ideo­lo­gical iden­ti­fic­a­tion with Muslim Broth­er­hood move­ments, with Hamas among the most prom­in­ent.

Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emir­ates see the Muslim Broth­er­hood as an exist­en­tial threat.

What hap­pens if Saudi Ara­bia draws closer to that axis? It strengthens polit­ic­ally and poten­tially mil­it­ar­ily. Other Arab states are hes­it­ant to join the Abra­ham Accords, given Saudi.

Ara­bia’s prac­tical depar­ture from this alli­ance. Mean­while, the UAE, argu­ably the Gulf’s most genu­inely mod­er­ate state, one in which tol­er­ance is not a slo­gan but a lived found­a­tion,

becomes more exposed and less embraced by its neigh­bors.

In other words, the region’s bal­ance tilts toward Islam­ist extrem­ism, not mod­er­a­tion.

I am not con­vinced that a Trump-led US would auto­mat­ic­ally treat such a shift as neg­at­ive or respond with urgency. Trump tends not to judge regimes by their val­ues but by their will­ing­ness

to strike deals that serve his interests. However, if Saudi Ara­bia avoids delib­er­ately pro­voc­at­ive broad­casts about its rap­proche­ment with the Muslim Broth­er­hood, Wash­ing­ton’s pos­ture toward Riy­adh may not change.

I worry that closer Saudi align­ment with the Tur­key-Qatar axis might instead increase the advant­ages Trump has gran­ted it, although the oppos­ite could hap­pen.

Israel may yet find itself facing a Turk­ish naval pres­ence off Gaza’s coast­line, barely a dozen kilo­met­ers from Ashkelon. Any­one who fol­lows Tur­key’s mari­time strategy knows its con­sist­ent ambi­tion: to plant naval footholds wherever it has already estab­lished influ­ence through con­struc­tion and infra­struc­ture projects.
Israel can­not afford to remain indif­fer­ent to the change emer­ging in Riy­adh. Jer­u­s­alem must tighten coordin­a­tion with Egypt and Jordan, and even more so with the United Arab Emir­ates. A strong, mod­er­ate regional coali­tion is now extremely urgent.

However, bol­ster­ing these rela­tion­ships won’t occur in isol­a­tion. To enable a deeper part­ner­ship with mod­er­ate states, Israel will need to halt, imme­di­ately, the accel­er­at­ing annex­a­tion drive and the eth­nic cleans­ing under­way in parts of the West Bank.

As for Saudi Ara­bia, sooner or later it will have to return to the mod­er­ate regional camp. The king­dom’s ambi­tious internal reforms do not align with Muslim Broth­er­hood ideo­logy. These reforms align with a part­ner­ship among mod­er­ate, for­ward-look­ing states.

https://www.pressreader.com/israel/jerusalem-post/20260105/281767045595815

MbS has elected to return to his roots of wahhabism and salafism, closer toward Muslim Brotherhood's backers like Qatar and Turkey. Instead of choosing the more moderate ways of UAE MbS al Saud went with islamism. That's very worrying to Israel, to the entire ME region. It could be a death knell for Trump's Abrahamic Accords.
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couleur
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Posts: 14640
PostPosted: Fri, 16th Jan 2026 20:47    Post subject:
Wahabism and Salafism are evil ideologies and reason for much conflict.

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
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