The Saudi Choice That Will Reshape the Middle East

Excerpt The geopolitics of the Middle East are shifting, and Saudi Arabia is the prize up for grabs. There are two possible paths forward. One involves the Saudis moving closer to the United States and Israel. The other would align them with Pakistan and Turkey. It’s fair to say the future of the region may depend on which path the Saudis choose. The Kingdom of Saud has always been a land of contradictions—an immensely wealthy country flush with oil but deliberately backward because its leaders opposed modernity. That changed in 2017 with the rise of Mohammed bin Salman, the brash crown prince who vowed to drag his country into the modern age by the year 2030. MBS’s Saudi Arabia changed course so dramatically that it was on the cusp of normalization with Israel in 2020. When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, however, the Saudi appetite for stronger ties with Israel and the United States waned. The Biden administration chose to shun MBS due to his involvement in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and it made a public show of distancing the United States from the Saudi effort to quell the threat from the Houthi terrorist group in neighboring Yemen. Jonathan Schanzer is executive director of Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor to Commentary.