Saudi Arabia’s Real Threat Is Not Iran

In February 2023, the first full day of my Middle East Policy delegation trip to Saudi Arabia did not begin in Riyadh’s gleaming financial district, nor in Jeddah’s historic Al-Balad quarter. It began at the Mohammed bin Nayef Center for Counselling and Care, a rehabilitation facility for jihadists named after a man the CIA loved, Al Jazeera defended, and Mohammed bin Salman jailed.

The centre disarmed me. Far from the grim, sterile space I had imagined, it felt more like a YMCA—a neighbourhood athletic and cultural complex. We were ushered into a polished presentation that the staff boasted had been shown to every major Washington think tank. We sipped qahwa and ate dates inside a Bedouin tent. The facility runs programmes blending psychological counselling, Islamic re-education, art therapy, and an Olympic-length swimming pool. It claims an 86 percent success rate. However, as John Horgan of Georgia State University, an expert on the psychology of terrorism, has pointed out, absent independent access to graduates, success claims like these are unverifiable. When AFP journalists visited and asked to interview two men in their quarters, both declined. The recreational room I walked through—billiard tables, foosball, flowers on an empty reception desk—looked less like a place in which people lived than a stage set struck between performances.

Presentation. Resources. Ambition. Three thousand graduates over a decade. Seven centres. But none of this will move the needle when set against an ideological infrastructure that Saudi Arabia spent decades seeding across the Muslim world. The entertainment megaprojects, soccer-star contracts, concerts, comedy festivals, and mixed-sex spaces are part of the same calculation—a bet that ordinary pleasure and national belonging can fill the gaps that theology once monopolised.

Mohammed bin Nayef was once described by former CIA director Leon Panetta as the “smartest and most accomplished of his generation.” He was awarded a CIA medal by Mike Pompeo in 2017. He was Washington’s indispensable Saudi partner in the war on terror. He was also, according to Saudi investigators, running front companies that siphoned US$15 billion through the Interior Ministry he controlled into his own pockets. The Western intelligence establishment lined up to vouch for him. But the Muslim Brotherhood media ecosystem’s investment in bin Nayef’s freedom tells you whose interests he served. That MBS put him in prison should surprise no one who understands what the Crown Prince is actually building.

Unfortunately, almost no one in Washington does. With the exception of budgetary strain, every analyst reaches for external forces to explain Saudi behaviour: American unpredictability, oil-price volatility, Houthi deterrence, the calculus of survival in a postwar region. Those accounts are not wrong, but they are incomplete. Anyone who understands MBS—not the caricature the West built from the Khashoggi case, nor the reformer his branding consultants sell—will know that external forces have never been what constrains him. He is constrained by an internal war inside the Kingdom that he has been fighting since the day he took power. These enemies are far more dangerous than the IRGC: they hold the deed to Mecca and they know how to cash it in Washington, Doha, and Ankara.

This is why Saudi normalisation with Israel is so frequently misread. Washington treats it as a foreign-policy item—a regional prize, a security bargain, an American deliverable. It is not. For MBS, normalisation is the only move that could either prove he has subordinated transnational Islam to the Saudi state—or reveal that he has not.

The Internal War

A Saudi family I had known for years—in what now feels like a distant life—carries the fault lines of this story in their blood. The woman is the daughter of Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Mecca-born architect of the 1973 oil embargo and one of the most consequential figures in modern Saudi history. Her husband is a legal scholar descended from the 19th-century Grand Mufti of Mecca, a fierce critic of Wahhabism whose lineage has never made peace with Najdi religious authority. In this family, oil power and Meccan religious legitimacy, international law and anti-Wahhabi inheritance all sit at the same table.

After 7 October, they cut contact with me. In January 2024, I learned that the husband was contributing to the ICC case against Benjamin Netanyahu from Doha—a case in which the court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He and his wife had both become fiercely anti-Israel on social media, and they were not alone. In Saudi Arabia, those rejecting normalisation grew by thirty percent after 7 October.