Not long ago, Turkey was running a neo-Ottoman project across the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood was the tool. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, the Gulf media wars. Western analysts called it one of the defining threats to the regional order. They were right!
That era is over!
It did not end through Western pressure. It ended because Saudi Arabia spent a decade building the economic, religious and diplomatic weight that made accommodation with Riyadh worth more to Ankara than confrontation. Investment. Mediation. Religious authority. Doors quietly closed. Soft power in its least glamorous form, and its most effective.
I think we should be grateful for that. We rarely are.
Turkey is now moving toward the Arab world, not away from it.
On 7 August, in Mecca, Erdoğan, Mohammed bin Salman and Shehbaz Sharif signed a joint defence agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all three. It did not come from nowhere. Ankara joined a Riyadh-led maritime coalition in late July, one of fourteen founding members. The 2023 drone contract was Turkey's largest defence export deal at the time.
This is the Middle East Western analysts spent fifteen years asking for.
Two days before the signing, @stevenacook published a column in Foreign Policy arguing that strategic blunders have plagued Saudi Arabia's approach to the region. The verdict arrived before the ink was dry.
Read it closely and it collapses.
Cook says Riyadh has no strategy. Then he lists it: protect the economic transformation, avoid a wider war, lower tensions with Iran, stop armed factions from imposing facts by force, tie normalisation with Israel to a Palestinian state. That is not the absence of a strategy. That is a hierarchy of priorities.
His real objection is that it is not his strategy- one that would have Saudi Arabia tolerate the STC, hold the UAE partnership regardless of conflicting aims, welcome an Israeli foothold in Somaliland, and stand as the front line against Iran.
He says the Sanaa runway strike was unnecessary. In the same breath he concedes Mahan Air is tied to the IRGC, and that the Houthi delegation may have carried more than pistachios and carpets.
He accepts the violation, then faults the attempt to stop it. He also assigns the strike to Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia never claimed it. Yemen's internationally recognised government announced it.
Then the pattern. Restraint is weakness. Action is recklessness. De-escalation is buying calm. Interdiction is provocation. Cook recommends retreat, then cites the retreat as proof there is no strategy.
And he blames Riyadh for the Houthi escalation - as if the Houthis had not been firing at Saudi cities for years, as if Iran's proxy project began this July. A possible Saudi miscalculation does not absolve Iran and the Houthis of their own violence!
Underneath all of it sits the oldest false narrative in the file: that Saudi Arabia is weak.
Remember Yemen. The Kingdom had the capability and the intent to end the Houthi project militarily. What constrained it was Western political pressure in the name of human rights - war powers votes, suspended munitions, withdrawn targeting support.
Riyadh was told to stop. It stopped. Then it absorbed years of missiles and drones on its airports, its cities and its oil infrastructure while holding a truce it was never legally obliged to hold!
You can argue the restrictions were right. You cannot impose them, watch the adversary rearm through the corridor you protected, and then call the result a Saudi failure.
Restraint imposed by allies is not incapacity.
Saudi Arabia is not the architect of this crisis. It is the state repeatedly asked to carry the cost of other people's strategies - and it is now building, with Ankara and Islamabad, an architecture that reduces its need to.
The criticism came before the agreement was a week old. That says less about Saudi strategy than about how hard it is for some analysts to read an order they no longer write.
على بركة الله تم إطلاق قناتي على اليوتيوب لتقديم محتوى مستمر عن الأديان والحضارات، وهذا أول المقاطع:
https://t.co/BNXIQNDeSc
يسعدني جدًا رأيكم وملاحظاتكم، ولا تنسونا من اللايك والاشتراك وتفعيل التنبيهات 😂🩵
على بركة الله تم إطلاق قناتي على اليوتيوب لتقديم محتوى مستمر عن الأديان والحضارات، وهذا أول المقاطع:
https://t.co/BNXIQNDeSc
يسعدني جدًا رأيكم وملاحظاتكم، ولا تنسونا من اللايك والاشتراك وتفعيل التنبيهات 😂🩵