Saudi Arabia Picked a Fight With the Two Nations That Could Help It the Most Against the Houthis — Israel and the UAE

Riyadh is running out of options, and more importantly, it is running out of time. In less than two weeks, Iran and its proxy militia in Yemen have effectively checkmated Saudi Arabia by severing two of its three vital oil-exporting routes. Following Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis launched an aggressive coastal sweep, seizing Yemen’s strategic port city of Mocha, alongside critical Red Sea islands, thus controlling Bab Al-Mandab Strait and declaring it off-limits to Saudi shipping. The Houthis also resumed lobbing projectiles into the Saudi homeland. Riyadh’s response has been dangerously quiet, limited to celebrating minor defensive intercepts while its state pundits remain noticeably silent. The kingdom is facing a direct threat to its sovereignty, while its decades-old strategy of inviting distant foreign capitals to defend it has failed. If Saudi Arabia wants to survive this onslaught, it must abandon its diplomatic paralysis. It needs to knock on the only two doors that actually possess the proven capability to beat back Iran and the Houthis: Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To dig itself out of this intractable problem, Riyadh must publicly normalize ties with Jerusalem and patch up its strained relationship with Abu Dhabi. Israel’s elite intelligence apparatus and unmatched air defense capabilities, combined with the UAE’s proven track record of successfully countering Houthi advances on the ground in southern Yemen, represent the only credible alliance capable of shifting the balance of power. Instead of building this vital coalition, Riyadh has spent the last two years picking political fights with both nations while trying to buy off the Houthis with passive ceasefires. Saudi forces looked the other way as the militia smuggled weapons through territory of Saudi Arabia’s Yemeni allies. The Houthis used that breathing room to prepare for this month’s offensive. Relying on makeshift and locally produced weaponry, a non-state militia has managed to act like a military superpower next to an established state that spent a staggering $83 billion — seven percent of its GDP — on defense in 2025 alone, and yet, Riyadh has nothing to show for its military spending, the fifth highest in the world. Saudi military vulnerability is compounded by economic headwinds at home. Long before the first Iran War in June 2025 and the second one in February 2026, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) ambitious vision for structural modernity had run out of steam. The kingdom desperately needed oil at $95 a barrel to balance its books. Instead, the price has hovered at $65 since 2023, forcing Riyadh deep into red ink and driving its national debt up to 35 percent of GDP. The crown prince’s flagship mega-project, the sci-fi capital city of Neom in the country’s northwest, has been abandoned. The grand plan to emulate the UAE’s economic success, which lowered its reliance on oil from 90 to 25 percent of GDP, stalled, likely due to political meddling and micromanagement that undermined the rule of law and meritocracy, the two pillars of service economies. Without a radical transformation, Saudi Arabia will lose the remaining economic leverage it needs to modernize. Blaming the Crown Prince entirely, however, misses the broader historical context. MBS did not inherit a muscular, self-reliant superpower. He inherited a weakening state that was already falling behind on vital human and economic indicators. Decades of unearned prosperity funded by the discovery of massive oil reservoirs after 1932 turned the descendants of the peninsula’s fierce desert warriors into a society reliant on foreign labor for growth, and external forces for defense. The founder of the kingdom, Saud Bin Abdulaziz, perfected the law of the desert, launching an offensive from landlocked Riyadh that swept coast to coast to forge a nation through sheer force. None of the founder’s muscular leadership remains today. Saudi weakness risks validating the cyclical theory of the medieval sociologist Ibn Khaldun: the founders build, the sons maintain, and the grandsons lose. MBS is the third generation. During the Cold War, Saudi Arabia benefited from America’s anti-Soviet defense umbrella. Since that war ended, the Saudis have felt insecure in their defense reliance on America. Riyadh thus started shopping for middle powers and stumbled on Pakistan, which is too far away to project power in Yemen, and Turkey, whose ascendence threatens Riyadh as much as Iran does. This week, MBS visited Egypt, the most populous Arab country, perhaps to enlist Cairo to war with the Houthis on Saudi behalf. But it’s been a while since the Egyptian junta, immersed in the country’s corrupt and underperforming economy, fought or won any real war. Saudi Arabia has run out of ideas, but — with its very existence at stake — it cannot afford to do nothing. To defend itself, defeat the Houthi threat, and refocus its energy on modernization, Riyadh must put pride aside, recognize who its true regional allies can be, and forge an overt, powerful military partnership with Israel and the UAE. Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the author of The Arab Case for Israel.