The Saudi Mask SlipsRiyadh's reversal reminds us: America has only one real ally in the Middle East.February 18, 2026 by Josh HammerFor decades, the House of Saud played a rather duplicitous game on credulous Westerners.
Officially, Riyadh was a longstanding linchpin of America’s geopolitical strategy in the ever-volatile Middle East—condemnatory of Islamist excess and vocally critical of the revolutionary Shiite regime in Tehran. Unofficially, the regime still spread Islamism—primarily through Salafist and Wahhabi clerics and madrasas, which the House of Saud funded and exported far beyond its petroleum-rich shores. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, to take but one particularly macabre example, were Saudi nationals. The kingdom mostly talked the talk, and it certainly was preferable to the monstrous Khomeinist regime—but it didn’t exactly walk the walk, either.
It took the rise of a ruthlessly ambitious and Western-curious young crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), to crack down on the radical clerics and straighten out Saudi Arabia’s image.
In 2014, the kingdom declared the Muslim Brotherhood, the organizational mother’s milk of Sunni Islamism, as a terrorist organization. For nearly four years, beginning in 2017, MBS oversaw a Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar due to the emirate’s infamous support of the Brotherhood and its dissemination of Islamist propaganda via its state-sponsored Al Jazeera network. It is also commonly accepted that Riyadh gave its imprimatur of legitimacy when fellow Gulf monarchies Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed the Abraham Accords in 2020—the first normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab world since Jordan made peace in 1994.
All seemed to be going mostly well. But in recent months, the House of Saudi has been rebranding itself—and not for the better.
In state-sanctioned sermons in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Saudi imams recently called on Allah to support “our downtrodden brothers in Palestine,” to “reverse their weakness into strength,” and to grant them “victory against the Zionist aggressors.” In case it was missed, the same message was broadcast from the kingdom’s airwaves. A few weeks ago, Israeli journalist Amit Segal observed: “Over the past month, Al Arabiya has been worse than Al Jazeera in the texts broadcast against any normalization with Israel.” The House of Saud has also turned on its long-time moderate Sunni ally, the UAE—bombing Emirati-backed forces in Yemen on December 30 and now opposing Abu Dhabi everywhere from Somalia to Libya to Syria. In each theater, the House of Saud has taken the side of Islamists, in contrast to UAE-backed non-Islamists. Riyadh mouthpieces now condemn Abu Dhabi as Zionist-controlled.
What the heck is going on here—and most important, what does it all mean for the United States and our very real interests in the Middle East?
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-saudi-mask-slips/
