Understanding the Schizophrenia of Saudi Arabia
If you make $100,000 a year in much of the Middle East, you live like a king. Not metaphorically, literally. The system strips you of political freedom and shared civic dignity, but in exchange it offers privilege without limits. You give up universal human equality, but you gain a private hierarchy that works in your favor.
You can hire people for pennies to serve you in ways that resemble slavery. You can bribe officials to bypass rules. You can manipulate institutions instead of submitting to them. Life becomes navigable through leverage. You learn to exploit the system because the system exploits everyone. Over time, you begin to resemble the order you live under. You compensate for what you can’t control by controlling others.
Then you move to the United States, or to any society built on real legal equality, and the shock is immediate. Your money no longer buys exemption. Your status no longer bends institutions. Whether you make a billion dollars a year or sleep on the street, the law treats you the same. If both of you stand before a judge, you are equal human beings. You can’t buy obedience. You can’t purchase impunity. You lose every artificial privilege that made you powerful.
What you gain instead is something that can’t be bought: freedom under law. Dignity that does not depend on rank. Rights that do not fluctuate with influence. The value of being a citizen rather than a client.
Understanding the Schizophrenia of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia spent most of the last century operating exactly like the wealthy man in that corrupt system. Its power came from money and immunity. Petro-dollars allowed the Kingdom to dominate weaker states, silence critics, and export influence without accountability. Funding jihadist movements, ideological networks, and proxy conflicts was leverage. It was how Saudi Arabia projected power regionally while avoiding direct confrontation.
A few years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a different ambition: reform. Modernization. Integration into a rules-based global order. Ending the practices that made it untouchable. But reform carries a cost that is easy to underestimate. The moment you enter a rules-based system, you lose the privileges that corruption provides. You cannot fund militancy. You cannot dominate through proxies. You cannot buy influence without scrutiny. You must play by the same constraints as everyone else.
Saudi Arabia accepted that cost domestically. It restructured society, tightened control over religious institutions, and tried to present itself as a modern state governed by order rather than ideology. But regionally, the price was too high.
Playing by the rules meant giving up tools that had defined Saudi power for decades. It meant abandoning the ability to shape the Middle East through money, ideology, and controlled instability. It meant becoming just another state, wealthy, yes, but constrained.
So the Kingdom split its strategy. At home, reform. Abroad, a quiet return to the old methods. The same petro-dollar leverage, the same ideological networks, the same willingness to use jihadist influence as a regional instrument.
Saudi Arabia abandoned reform as a comprehensive strategy because the old system still worked where it mattered most. The old system brought dominance, and when forced to choose between reform and leverage, Saudi Arabia chose what it had always known how to use.
This is why Saudi Arabia, the same country that promised absolute transformation, now backs Muslim Brotherhood–aligned forces in Yemen, why it helped legitimize al-Qaeda in Syria, why it supported the massacre of the Druze in Suwayda, and why it signals openness to peace with Israel while ensuring the Islamic world maintains the same hostile posture toward the Jewish state.
Domestically, superficial reform is easy to enforce. Regionally, power still depends on old instruments: Ideological leverage and controlled instability. What looks like contradiction is actually consistency, a Kingdom trying to live under rules at home while refusing to surrender the tools that once made it dominant abroad.
Very Thoughtful and on point.
Not sure you are getting Yemen correctly. The STC was backed by the UAE and was trying to oust the recognized government of Yemen which of course does not control the part of Yemen controlled by the Houthi. The same uae 🇦🇪 that is backing the RSF in Sudan which has brutalized the populace I disagree that KSA is aligned with the MB. The MB is not viewed positively and is in fact embedded in Qatar. The so called moderate GCC country.
I do agree that there is a sort of cognitive dissonance in keeping the old and the new in the same brain at the same time but I think they are doing pretty good at the evolution. The big changes only started in 2017 and the whole country was a bit on ice for almost 2 years due to Covid. There is a new generation coming up that will be different than their parents and grandparents. Not modern western secular per se. But very much more modern.