Pax Saudiana: The return of Saudi statecraft?

One useful way to read the recent escalation along Yemen’s southern coastline is not as a local quarrel over ports and militias, but as a signal that Riyadh now believes it has an opening to reconstitute a Saudi-centric regional order. [originally published at Amwaj]

The first phase of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud’s rise to power was defined by impulsive, often erratic moves designed to establish primacy. The second phase featured a more measured, introverted posture after the shock over the backlash caused by the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, with the Kingdom a mere custodian of the status quo. The third phase is now plausibly emerging: a reversion to outward statecraft, but with sharper strategic intent and a clearer theory of order.

Saudi Arabia’s strike on vessels in Mukalla on Dec. 30, 2025—framed by Saudi-linked interlocutors as an interdiction of air-defense deliveries intended to empower the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) and constrain Saudi air dominance—should be understood in that context. It was the opening salvo of an effort by Riyadh to re-establish regional primacy, contain Abu Dhabi’s ‘Axis of Secessionists’, and rebuild a regional architecture that includes Turkey, its Gulf neighbors and Egypt—but isolates Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

From commercial rivalry to geopolitical contestation

Saudi–Emirati competition is no longer confined to rival “hub” ambitions. Riyadh increasingly reads Abu Dhabi’s regional posture as a form of ringfencing: building influence through surrogate networks, cultivating secessionist or quasi-autonomous local partners and shaping outcomes via deniable logistics and financing rather than overt state-to-state bargains. That approach can be tactically agile. It can also generate persistent fragmentation, which creates local winners who are structurally disincentivized from national reintegration.

Riyadh’s strategic culture has historically been the inverse: state-centric, sovereignty-minded and patient. Saudi power is not always agile, but it is deep; when the state concentrates efforts, it can change facts on the ground through layered instruments. The last fortnight in Yemen, in this reading, is less about “Saudi impulsiveness” than a disciplined attempt to dismantle an Emirati-aligned project that threatens Saudi freedom of action in the south.

The wider point is that Saudi Arabia now appears to judge that passivity carries higher risk than initiative. If a regional order is forming anyway—one shaped by Israel’s security partnerships, Emirati network power and a permissive environment for de facto partitions—then a Saudi leadership that wants to lead must move from signaling to structuring.

A sovereignty-based order versus a network-based order

The emerging Saudi thesis resembles a sovereignty-first, territorial-integrity order. States are the legitimate protagonists; borders are not to be redrawn by militia bargains; and, regional stability comes from reconstituting governable centers, not perpetually outsourcing of authority to armed entrepreneurs. What Saudi Arabia seems to be doing is not liberal internationalism. It is conservative order-making, rooted in Saudi assumptions that entropy is the region’s core threat: state failure, uncontrolled peripheries and the diffusion of coercive capacity to actors with no incentive to build consensus.

That worldview is inherently at odds with Abu Dhabi’s ‘Axis of Secessionists’: local projects that thrive on ambiguity—neither fully independent nor fully reintegrated—and which allow external patrons to arbitrate, extract and shape outcomes. In Yemen, the STC is the most visible exemple. But the pattern Riyadh worries about extends into the Horn of Africa, Sudan and Libya, where logistical networks, air corridors and local armed partners can be leveraged to influence political trajectories without owning the liabilities of governance.

In this context, the Sudan file has become particularly toxic. Abu Dhabi has reportedly built a multi-layered network of commodity traders, logisticians, political influencers and arms dealers who underwrite a horizontal network of armed non-state actors from the Libyan National Army to the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The Emirati Libya–Horn–Sahel corridor, which has invited Israeli interlocutors, is perceived as an enduring challenge to Saudi order-making.

Why Turkey matters to a Saudi-centric order

The current regional dynamics give credence to Turkey becoming a consequential partner rather than a peripheral add-on. The emerging “Red Sea Axis”—with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as its gravitational core—allows for an immense pooling of diplomatic bandwidth, military coercive capacity and expeditionary capability that will be a serious challenge to Emirati network power in the region. From Riyadh’s perspective, Ankara’s positioning in Somalia in particular aligns with a sovereignty narrative: bolstering an internationally-recognized government’s capacity to police waters and resist fragmentation.

Moreover, Turkey has a military-industrial complex that can empower proxies, such as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in their fight against the RSF, or the Somali government in its confrontations with armed non-state actors. In a putative Pax Saudiana, Turkey could serve as both a security enabler and a coalition multiplier.

Oman, Qatar and the politics of convening

To counter the Emirati Axis built around weaponized interdependence and sharp-elbowed transactionalism, the Kingdom requires partnerships that are built on consensus regarding shared norms and values that underwrite a common vision for stability.

Oman and Qatar are particularly valuable in that role. Doha and Muscat provide Riyadh with diplomatic reach into actors and arenas where Saudi pressure alone would trigger a backlash, and they lend credibility to any “sovereignty-based” frame by reducing the perception of a project being purely Saudi. Oman in Yemen as well as Qatar in Somalia, Palestine and Syria, provide Riyadh with strategic depth to counter a policy of divide and rule advanced by Israel and subtly supported by the UAE.

What Saudi Arabia must change to lead

The core opportunity for Riyadh is that it can plausibly sell a more order-producing vision than an Emirati model that relies on fragmentation and deniable networks. To own a regional order, Saudi Arabia must evolve in at least four ways.

First, it must become more agile without becoming reckless. That is building smaller, adaptive networked instruments of statecraft that can work through intermediaries, sub-state partners and local brokers—especially in theaters where central governments are weak.

Second, it must convert narrative into action: not merely declaring a sovereignty-first order, but underwriting it with mechanisms such as security sector reform, inclusive national dialogues and comprehensive market-led reconstruction efforts.

Third, it must offer a values-and-interests proposition that resonates beyond elites. “Stability” cannot be a synonym for elite cartelism. A credible Pax Saudiana must be able to argue that territorial integrity serves ordinary people by reducing militia predation, improving service delivery and restoring predictable market conditions.

Fourth, Riyadh must accept that dismantling Emirati networks will be a protracted effort. Network power is resilient. It regenerates through money, access and local grievances. If not degraded immediately, Emirati networks can be repurposed and reorchestrated. Saudi Arabia’s advantage is scale and endurance, but those advantages only deliver if Riyadh is willing to stay engaged after the headline events and absorb the political burden of owning conflict reconstruction.

Escalation without consolidation?

The immediate risk is that Riyadh escalates its contest with Abu Dhabi without building the parallel governance and security structures required to “close” conflicts. In Yemen, striking at the STC’s hardening capabilities was one thing but converting southern politics into an integrated settlement is another challenge. If Saudi Arabia cannot tie coercive moves into consensual political architecture that local actors find preferable to militia autonomy, the result will be enduring churn rather than order.

Yet, continued paralysis while others shape the region’s operating rules now looks less acceptable to Riyadh than it did even a few months ago. If this is the opening of a third phase of the rise of the Saudi crown prince, it is not a return to impulsiveness. It is a bet that Saudi Arabia’s strategic depth, convening power and strategic culture can be retooled into something the region has lacked for a decade: a stabilizing center of gravity that can produce outcomes beyond joint statements.