Macron would never do anything so crass as to present his bill before rendering a service, but he’s well aware that the traditional Saudi recompense for military support is a very large order for combat aircraft. The French desperately need such a sale to save their once-thriving Dassault firm, which has fallen on hard times because of its current offering — the non-stealthy and non-advanced Rafale fighter that nobody wants.

Back in 1985, it was British aircraft manufacturing that was in freefall. It was saved by the fabulous Al Yamamah contract, which supplied £40 billion of Saudi cash to both the British aviation industry for its mostly unwanted aircraft, and to an entire tribe of intermediaries. The latter successfully avoided scrutiny for decades, until Scotland Yard’s Serious Fraud Office belatedly launched an investigation so successful that it had to be shut down on national security ground by a remarkably unembarrassed Tony Blair in 2006.

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Now, once again, the British aviation industry is trying to survive with a jet fighter programme that nobody wants. It has a temporary partnership with the Italians, whose air-force will never be sent into combat, and who see their participation as the only possible way of keeping their engineers and manufacturing workers employed; and with the Japanese, who see the tripartite deal as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with America’s Lockheed monopoly for Tokyo’s next fighter.

The fact that Saudi Arabia turned to the weakened French and the bashful maidens of the Labour Party for military support is a sharp reminder of one of the few constants in the ever-changing Middle East: the inability of the Saudi monarchy to defend itself. That requires some explanation because Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are both well armed and also very large as compared to the country’s native-born population of 18.8 million. There is a total of 280,000 active-duty career personnel in land, air and naval forces and another roughly 75,000 in the paramilitary national guard, which has evolved from a come-as-you-are Bedouin levy into an orderly paramilitary force like Italy’s Carabinieri, so that the Kingdom has a total of 350,000 in its armed forces. By way of comparison, Turkey’s population is more than four times as large as Saudi Arabia’s, but its military and paramilitary total of 680,000 is only twice as large. Moreover, Saudi forces have well-built bases, impressive headquarters, modern weapons, and have received excellent training from American, British, and other military instructors at all levels, including newly retired US generals.

But the one thing they cannot do is fight Saudi Arabia’s enemies, including the currently very dangerous Houthi rebels, most of whose combat personnel consists of visibly unwashed men in skirts and sandals toting old AK-47s, but which also include teams trained by Iranian experts capable of launching ballistic missiles and anti-ship drones smuggled in by Iran. Wielding the latter, they have attacked Mecca and are now seriously impeding Saudi oil exports from the Red Sea terminal at Yambu.

Yet even now, there is still no sign of a Saudi offensive into Yemen to engage the Houthis in full force. The reason is that, for the Kingdom’s ruling family, the most deadly danger has long been a military coup d’état — such as the one which ended Iraq’s monarchy and killed every single member of its Husseini ruling family on 14 July 1958. On that day of explosive savagery across the centre of Baghdad, none of the monarchy’s supposed friends and allies were of any help, and local British diplomats, who had until recently ruled the country via interposed Iraqi officials, barely made it out alive.

Against that danger, the successive heads of the Saudi ruling family have implemented the most effective remedy possible: divide and rule, not against foreign enemies, but within their own armed forces. For that reason, the different combat elements of the armed forces are geographically separated in the country’s vast territory, and commanded by different princes in charge of various parts of the ministry of defence, all of which are subordinate to the minister himself, Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud. (Prince Khalid is the grandson of the House of Saud’s patriarch, King Abdulaziz, and a younger brother of the crown prince, prime minister, and real power in the land: Mohammed bin Salman.)

Even with all those royals in there to secure the House of Saud’s control, the ministry of defence is denied a monopoly of force in Riyadh and other urban centres, because the country’s cities are also garrisoned by the entirely separate Saudi Arabian National Guard which has more than 150,000 men, and is ultimately commanded by yet another grandson of the kingdom’s founding monarch. The smaller Border Guard with roughly 15,000 men plays a crucial role in emergencies because it strictly controls who enters and leaves the country by air or sea. The Border Guard is also controlled by a grandson of King Abdulaziz, as is the most closely watched and carefully controlled of all the kingdom’s forces: the Royal Guard, which protects Mohammed bin Salman. Finally, there is the elite Saudi Arabian Emergency Force, of some 35,000 men, which is under the control of yet another separate body.

In theory, there is nothing to prevent a combined offensive of all these different forces against the Houthis. For all the competing lineages of their chiefs, they are all Sunni Muslims of the vehemently anti-Shi’a Wahhabi creed. The Houthis, for their part, are not the much-loathed Twelver Shi’a of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, but the distinctly more heterodox “Fivers”.

In practice, however, the careful differentiation of Saudi Arabia’s military and security forces that is meant to prevent them from ganging up to overthrow their rulers — the Royal family as a whole — has deprived them of an overall sense of cohesion, the most important of all attributes in facing enemies in combat. Military strength is total force multiplied by cohesion: if there is no cohesion, there is no strength.

Within the different armed forces there is a further impediment to cohesion because some of their officers are Royal family “inheritors”. This means they receive a stipend automatically as well as their salaries. Others, however, only have their salaries, which can be much lower than the royal family stipends, yet they are all supposed to serve and fight to protect their country.

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The Saudi fear is that if they ever order some of their F-15s into action to bomb the Houthis, or indeed any other enemy, non-inheritor pilots might choose to attack one of the kingdom’s princely palaces instead as a prelude to an all-out military revolt. It would be an aerial version of the military insurrections that destroyed the Egyptian and Iraqi monarchies.

Because of this not illogical fear, the Saudis have long relied on the Americans to protect them, supplemented at times by the British and French. In recent years, they have even called on the Turks and Pakistanis, who have so far refused to send any troops to fight the Houthis, the most urgent threat faced by Saudi Arabia. That refusal suggests that they are even less likely to send forces to confront Iran’s much larger threat.

The Saudis’ Emirati neighbours have not given up on the Americans either, even if they have enlisted Israeli weapons to defend them — some of them operated by Israeli troops, at least initially. The Saudis might do something similar in the low-key manner of an industrial investment, to obtain anti-missile capabilities they can learn to operate for themselves. Ultimately, though, the inheritors must learn to share Saudi Arabia’s vast flow of oil revenues with everybody else, or else risk losing more than just their wealth.

Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refueling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refueling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.

Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defense industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defense export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air-defense systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defenses. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.

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The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.

The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.

Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.

Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”.

The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.

Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defense. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.

Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilize a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.

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Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognized camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.

In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refueling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations center, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”

Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.

Indeed, the more you learn about the Houthis, the less surprising it becomes that the group should have embarrassed the US Navy in 2024 and 2025 (in a foretaste of the second Iran war, Washington simply gave up firing its expensive missiles at Houthi forces), and fought a large Sunni-Arab coalition to a standstill between 2015 and 2019. Despite intense bombardments, and serious battlefield defeats, the Houthis have retained Sana’a, Yemen’s capital which they conquered in 2014. Only the Israelis, who briefly got into a missile exchange with the Houthis in 2025, have managed to deter them: they went after the Houthis’ oil supplies, energy infrastructure, ports, airports, and, perhaps most important, senior personnel. Sure enough, the Houthis stopped firing at Israel. But either way, it’s little wonder that the Houthis are now back, seizing land along the Red Sea littoral and the islands of Perim and Greater and Lesser Hanish, thereby putting into jeopardy Saudi Arabia’s capacity to export oil via its east-west pipeline.

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Without outside support, Sunni Yemenis would have had no chance on the battlefield against their Shi’ite countrymen. The Houthis have received some support from Hezbollah and Iran — but not nearly on the level that Sunnis have received from foreigners since the Sixties. Islamic history has occasionally seen fervent, martial highland peoples descend into conflict with more numerous lowland believers — and usually get the better of them. The Houthis are in this line: mountain Shi’ites who have managed to gain the upper hand over the cosmopolitan and fractious Sunnis.

During the North Yemen Civil War (1962–1970), the Zaydi royalists of the old Imamate survived a massive assault by the republican forces that had overthrown them. The Republicans included predominantly Sunni Yemenis, but also Zaydi Arab nationalists, and were backed by around 70,000 Egyptian troops equipped with Soviet tanks and aircraft. The Zaydi royalists, meanwhile, adopted highly effective guerrilla tactics. Again and again, they descended from their mountain strongholds, absorbing heavy losses. They were not able to capture Sana’a — but they were repeatedly able to regroup and return to the fight.

The war today is vastly more sectarian. Few Zaydis now fight alongside Sunnis, giving the more cohesive, dogged, and fit Houthi forces the advantage.

Still, since the Nineties, support from Shi’ites in the wider region has been crucial in shaping Houthi objectives. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have actively sought to convert Zaydis, who follow a different creed and jurisprudence. These efforts have met some success: perhaps as many as 10% of Zaydis have accepted Iran’s “Twelver” branch of Shi’ism. These conversions are, however, just icing on the cake. Before the Lebanese and Iranians came calling, Zaydism as a faith had considerable revolutionary potential. Historically, Yemen’s Shi’ites have had activist imams: religious leaders who could also command troops. Where the Twelver Shi’ites of Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon could — before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 — sometimes look askance at clerics assuming political power, the Zaydis had no such reservations. Zaydi imams ruled as kings, more or less continuously, from 897 to 1962, when nationalist forces toppled the imamate. The main interruptions came during two periods of Ottoman rule, from 1538 to 1635 and from 1872 to 1918. Even then, the imams did not simply disappear: they retreated into the mountains, where they continued to exercise religious authority and, at times, lead armed resistance to the Ottomans.

Today, a spiritual alignment has unquestionably taken place — and a significant slice of the Zaydi community is now inside the Iranian orbit. The Houthis’ anthem — “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam” — would have seemed bizarre to most Zaydis before the radical revivalist movement of al-Houthi. Cursing distant America, or Jews as if they were a global menace, or even Israel as a part of a defining, individual creed would have been too modern.

More or less at war with the “official”, internationally-recognized government of Yemen since 2004, the country’s Shi’ites are on a winning streak. Indeed, since the Saudis, Emiratis, and a coalition of other Arab states tried to humble them from 2015 to 2018, the Houthis’ regional ambitions have grown. They have created their own supply and sanctions-resistant support networks in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, sometimes piggybacking on the Iranians, sometimes moving independently. With Iranian assistance, they figured out how to defy a Saudi naval blockade and US satellite reconnaissance. Indeed, the Houthis have been able to incorporate Iranian strategic planning into their own ambitions as well as any Iranian proxy. They have proven sharp adopters of Iranian-supplied drones and missiles, learning quickly how to build projectiles from either clandestinely delivered parts or from scratch — indeed, they have proved enthusiastic adopters of AI. 

It’s also a foregone conclusion that if Iran can gain control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge tolls, the Houthis will attempt to do the same through dominating the Bab al-Mandab, the chokepoint for all trade moving through the Suez Canal — as well as for Saudi oil via its pipeline. Even if Iran fails to dominate the Persian Gulf, indeed, the odds are that the Houthis will still try to curtail Saudi shipping. If successful, the Houthi’s ambitions – and greed — may direct them towards other commercial shipping.

Yemen is a very poor country, and the Zaydi mountain heartland now offers little of the trade that once made the Zaydi elite relatively rich within it. Enormous anger towards Saudis is common. When I was traveling among Yemeni Shi’ites before 9/11 and I needed a conversation starter, aspersing Saudis always worked. So targeting Saudi shipping is a given for the Houthis; and preying on others could become an irresistible financial temptation if they control the Bab al-Mandab. Raiding British and Indian trade in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in the 18th century was very good business for pirates of the Arabian Peninsula until the Royal Navy and Marines convinced them otherwise.

The US maintains Camp Lemonnier, its only permanent military base in Africa and the operational hub of US Africa Command, just across the Bab al-Mandab in Djibouti. President Trump wasn’t persuaded of the merits of using it to deny the Houthis a partial victory against his Navy in 2025. It’s a good bet that Trump will default the responsibility for stopping Houthi extortion onto European navies, especially the French, who also have a naval base at Djibouti. Trump is perennially capricious — but also firm in his conviction that Europeans are freeloaders.

Nonetheless, the problem that the West has with the Houthis is also a microcosm of the problem that the United States has with Iran: there is no clever, low-cost way to neutralize the enemy’s power. When, in 2015, he was the Saudi defense minister, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman clearly understood the long-term threat that the Houthis posed to his kingdom. The prince’s execution of the subsequent war may have been abysmal, but his analysis wasn’t. Neither the Saudis, nor the Emiratis, nor the Egyptians, nor the Jordanians, nor the Americans, nor the Europeans have been willing to put a lot of boots on the ground long enough to neutralise the Houthi war machine. Cairo’s unpleasant experience in Yemen in the Sixties — “Egypt’s Vietnam” — remains in the DNA of Middle Eastern military men. The combined Arab assault on the Houthis from 2015 onwards revealed a wariness of replicating the approach the Egyptians had used — trying to take the Houthis on in their heartland.

The Houthis know this. So do the Iranians, who have seen the most independent of their proxies become their most consequential ally. The strategic potential of Yemen’s Shi’ites now dwarfs the contribution of the Levantine Hezbollah to Iran’s remarkably consistent goal of weakening the West and their allied Arab governments in the Middle East. The Houthis aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the Levantine Shi’ites, who rival the Iranians in their formative contribution to the development of radical Shi’ism, and have proved rather better than the Iranians in maintaining the crucial interpersonal relations between Arab militants.

Yet the Houthis, who not long ago were mostly farmers and shepherds, have thrived in a primitive environment. Their relations with Somalia’s Al-Shabaab — a Salafist jihadist outfit, which in 2012 pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and has often shown a savagery that rivals Islamic State’s — clearly show the Houthis have, like the Iranians, an ecumenical disposition toward anti-Shi’ite but anti-Western Sunni Muslim radicals. If left alone, the Houthis might well develop further, becoming emissaries of Iranian mischief far beyond the Gulf of Aden. Some Islamic militants — the Taliban in Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza — keep their violence local. They don’t become members of the “global jihad” even though they may host or associate with Muslim radicals who do. But the Houthis’ creed certainly suggests an aspiration that could take them into a larger holy cause, especially if under the tutelage of more worldly Iranians and Levantines.

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Regardless, the Houthis have offered Tehran the best bang for the buck of all its proxies. We don’t have reliable figures on what the Saudis and Emiratis spent on their multi-year war against Yemen’s Shi’ites, nor what the Iranian subventions were to their co-religionists, but Tehran’s costs were unquestionably a small fraction of those on the other side. The Islamic Republic is now in a deep financial crisis, but supporting low-maintenance, enterprising Yemenis may still be practicable. Strategically, it remains a steal.

If the United States, the Europeans, and most importantly the Arabs who border and depend on the Red Sea, are serious about thwarting the Houthis, then they should revisit the history of the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula. They checked the rebellious Zaydi imams with the patient application of brute force. (Even if, as soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, a Zaydi Imamate came right back). That won’t happen again, however, unless the United States leads the way.

Today, there are so far no volunteers for this mission. The experience of the Egyptians in Yemen in the Sixties, like the more recent sojourns led by the Saudis and the Emiratis, all were bitter failures. The treasure expended didn’t match the gains. The Middle East excels at forcing cost calculations. The Houthis and the Iranians are banking that the years since 9/11 have worn down their enemies. They know that in a contest of wills, they have the unassailable high ground.

This, then, is Middle Eastern London, part of an influx of wealth that has transformed the West End and cities right across Britain. It is all generated by the Middle East’s energy exports, which have created the fortunes of Gulf State sovereign wealth funds and the private wealth of ruling dynasties whose family offices expand their property empires. Yet it might not last forever. With the US-Iran war persisting unabated, and the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the Gulf’s black gold is no longer such a safe bet. And, as my walk round Mayfair hints, a red line on an accountant’s laptop in Doha can have profound consequences here at home. That’s true in the cars on the streets and the restaurants and the clubs — but also in the influence that foreign money can buy.

Middle Eastern London has been decades in the making. After the 1973 oil crisis, Gulf money made inroads into London’s property scene, with Saudi Arabian and Lebanese investors buying up the Dorchester Hotel two years later. These days, the scale of Gulf oil money in Britain is truly bewildering. Alrayan, a Sharia-compliant bank, estimates that $112.45 million landed on London real estate between March 2024 and March 2025 alone, a significant increase on the previous year. Spears magazine used data compiled by estate agent Frank Knight to suggest that private Gulf investors last year deposited £245 million into UK commercial real estate.

These estimates aren’t particularly reliable considering how much money is routinely hidden offshore. But they nonetheless hint at the scope of Gulf wealth and also imply a striking resilience. Of course, the rise and rise of private wealth is global. But the fact that Gulf assets are currently battered by war — yet still continue their march from the Middle East — neatly evokes the affluence of oil royalty.

This is clearest in the London property market. Qatari Diar, the country’s eponymous property development business, is behind a string of prestigious London hotels, including the Ritz and Claridge’s. Luxury stores like Harrods, the iconic Shard building, and the Canary Wharf Group that operates London’s Docklands — all these are part of Qatar Diar’s portfolio too. So too are some of the most prestigious residential properties in the city, including the spectacularly redeveloped Chelsea Barracks.

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It’s striking, too, that the footprint of Qatari investment now extends far beyond London. Qatari Diar is behind multi-billion pound urban developments in Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds. When it comes to private individuals, meanwhile, the Guardian discovered that Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family hold more than 4,000 land titles throughout Britain: from luxury mansions and hotels to industrial estates and ordinary terraced houses. Other Gulf monarchies have similarly vast holdings, with the Saudi royal family owning a portfolio of West End properties which dwarfs that relative pauper, the Duke of Westminster.

Not that you need Companies House to understand the Arab impact on London. For that you can just walk the streets of somewhere like Knightsbridge. With Harrods as its commercial center, the area is notorious for its “dark” streets and partly empty blocks, giving the neighborhood a ghostly under-occupied feel. Knightsbridge is part of the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has the highest concentration of vacant, underused and second homes in the UK. Many of these apartments are used by their Middle Eastern owners for only a few weeks a year, when the weather in the Gulf is at its hottest. These dead streets are not a London asset. On the contrary, they look a bit abandoned.

Or else there are the luxury hotels, shops and art galleries, where displays of wealth and entitlement play out on a daily basis. Especially during the annual summer migration, young men fly their luxury cars to London from Riyadh or Muscat, speeding about in noisy displays of wealth. This too can cause problems: late-night races keep residents up, while eye-watering insurance bills result when crashes inevitably occur. There are also questions of accountability when foreign nationals are involved in accidents; Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Britain.

Not that these screw-ups are really a problem: there just are so many incentives for foreign plutocrats to park their cash in Britain. Last year, Alrayan Bank reported that Gulf investors told them that they like the diversity of UK property, from modern blocks with concierges to period mansions like the Saudi embassy. They also like the favorable terms of purchase and the well-developed infrastructure in banking, accounting and legal services that supports international investment. The UK’s political stability, legal structures and relative financial transparency make it a good place to store their money.

None of this really helps the Treasury, as visitors and foreign investors add little to the UK’s tax take or collective prosperity. And what’s bad for Knightsbridge ear drums can also cause more profound tensions. The Qatari-funded redevelopment of Elephant and Castle resulted in the demolition of social housing, with residents relocated to more distant parts of London and beyond. Gulf money in Britain has other second-order consequences too. Housing shortages keep property prices and rental yields high, benefiting Gulf investors who can’t grow their money as effectively at home. None of this helps hard-up British professionals forced to commute to central London from Zone 5.

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What, though, might change in London and other British cities if the Hormuz crisis continues — and the financial and symbolic power of the Gulf States erodes? What if investments slow, stop, or are withdrawn altogether? In the first place, it’s likely that a drop in Gulf money would shrink displays of conspicuous consumption in places like Knightsbridge. Considering the various downsides, that might not be such a bad thing, allowing these West End neighborhoods to open up to more than property speculation and the super-rich.

In a sense, we don’t have to speculate what this might look like. All wars are different, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, the symbolic, political and financial authority of Russian oligarchs living in London quickly ebbed away. Roman Abramovich, Oleg Derpaska, Igor Sechin and their compatriots left the city — once dubbed “Moscow-on-Thames” — as government sanctions froze their assets and imposed travel bans. Today, their mansions are empty and their yachts motionless. Evgeny Lebedev, Boris Johnson’s friend, media baron and member of the House of Lords, may still live in London’s Regent’s Park. But his celebrity parties are no longer high-profile society events.

Of course, wealthy Middle Eastern investors aren’t the only international plutocrats in cities like London — though, like the Chinese, they are significant contributors in making the city what it is. All the same, might a decline in Middle Eastern clout lead to a rethink of the importance placed on international investment and wealthy foreigners in making these places special? Alongside iconic skyscrapers, Middle Eastern contributions to British cities are often seen as signs of vitality, a way of creating exciting city life, and a pathway to underscoring a certain global panache.

But allowing overseas investors to dump money in Britain also makes life painfully expensive for the rest of us. Nor does it have to be like this. After all, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand are just three of several countries that ban international investors from buying property. The UK, though, lets anyone with money to buy whatever they like. To that extent, the Iran war might be a good moment in which to pause and reconsider the impact of the oil money parked on British streets. In the end, does this wealth embellish people’s everyday lives? Or does it just make spots like Berkeley Square unlivable?

***

A previous version of this piece incorrectly named the President of the UAE. We apologise for the error.

And why did the two powers strike in broad daylight on Saturday 28 February? Was it because Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, or the CIA tipped them off that Khamenei and his entourage would be above ground in their compound rather than in their night-time bunkers? Did the Israelis in effect “bounce” the Americans into attacking Iran on that day?

Historians will no doubt debate these questions if, as seems likely, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump fail to unseat the authoritative institutions of the Islamic Republic. Given the lack of a coherent opposition in Iran, there is a real possibility that forces loyal to the regime — the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militias — will simply unite under a new Supreme Leader and maintain the momentum that saw thousands slaughtered after the street protests in January, meanwhile unleashing the kind of bloody “forever war” that Trump has pledged to avoid.

But the uncertainties raised by this war also lead to a more immediate question. Given the chaos triggered by the attack — canceled flights through three of the world’s largest airport hubs; thousands of tourists stranded in Dubai; the closing of the Hormuz Straits; punishing hikes in oil and gas prices — what can the Gulf states have been thinking?

Before the February attack, the conventional wisdom held that the petrodollar monarchies — including Saudi Arabia — were urging restraint on Washington and (more distantly) Tel Aviv. What they feared were precisely the consequences that have now come to pass: Iran — the wounded animal — launching missile and drone attacks against targets across the Gulf that host US forces. Strikes or attempted strikes have hit the United Arab Emirates (including the Al Dhafra air base and sites in Dubai), Bahrain (near the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama), Kuwait (Ali Al-Salem air base and Shuaiba port), Qatar (areas around Doha and US facilities), and Saudi Arabia (notably the Ras Tanura oil hub). Civilian infrastructure has also been affected, including Dubai airport, hotels, and port facilities, largely as a result of missile impacts or debris from interceptions.

The pattern suggests that Iran’s strategy is to target US military infrastructure and energy nodes across the Gulf while signaling that the region’s economic lifelines are exposed in the event of escalation. The Gulf energy infrastructure remains vulnerable — as was dramatically demonstrated in September 2019, when drones and cruise missiles struck the Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia. The attack temporarily knocked out roughly 5.7 million barrels per day of production — about half of Saudi output and nearly 5% of global supply — making it the largest sudden disruption in oil market history. Although Iran’s allies, the Yemeni Houthis, claimed responsibility, Western intelligence agencies concluded that the weapons and planning bore the Islamic Republic’s hallmarks. Production was restored within weeks, but the strike exposed the extraordinary fragility of Gulf energy infrastructure and the global economy’s continuing dependence on it.

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Given the damage predicted — and already inflicted — on Gulf oil production, not to mention the tourism industry, the voices urging caution sounded eminently reasonable. It was therefore surprising to learn from the Washington Post and other sources that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) played a behind-the-scenes role in encouraging Trump to attack Iran.

According to several officials familiar with the discussions, the crown prince held multiple private phone conversations with Trump in the weeks preceding the US-Israeli strikes. In these calls, he reportedly urged Washington to act quickly, warning that Iran would become “stronger and more dangerous” if decisive action were delayed. There may have been other links as well. As I reported in my book Unholy Kingdom, MBS formed a personal bond with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew with close links to the Netanyahu family. During Trump’s first term, when the scandal over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was in the headlines, MBS and Kushner were reported to have been in contact via WhatsApp, with Kushner acting as the crown prince’s most important defender in the White House. As the late Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel and a leading Middle East expert, told The New York Times at the time; “the relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman constitutes the foundation of the Trump policy not just toward Saudi Arabia but toward the region”. There has been no suggestion since Trump’s return to power that the “WhatsApp bromance” has been fractured.

The Post reported that MBS’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contrasts sharply with Saudi Arabia’s public emphasis on dialog with Tehran. Saudi officials have repeatedly stated that they do not want a regional war and would not allow Saudi territory or airspace to be used for an attack. Privately, however, the crown prince and other Saudi officials, including his brother, the defense minister Khaled bin Salman, reportedly argued that the moment was strategically favorable for confronting Iran and degrading its missile and military infrastructure.

These communications occurred amid a broader effort by regional allies to influence Washington’s decision. Kushner’s friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long advocated US strikes on Iran, with Israeli officials also pressing the White House to act. The Post reported that the combined pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia helped shape Trump’s final decision to authorize large-scale attacks despite US intelligence assessments that Iran did not pose an imminent direct threat to them.

One of the most destabilizing developments in contemporary Middle Eastern politics has been the sectarianization of geopolitical rivalry; this is what happens when strategic competition between states becomes reframed as a religious confrontation between communities. The current war risks accelerating that process dramatically. What began as a campaign to neutralize a nuclear program could easily be interpreted across the Muslim world as a coalition of Israel, the United States, and Sunni monarchies against a Shi’a sovereign state. If that perception spreads, the conflict may mobilize actors far beyond Iran’s borders: militias, religious movements, and sectarian networks whose motivations extend beyond conventional state interests. Once political conflicts acquire sacred meaning, they become far harder to resolve.

Supporters of the strike argue that decisive action will destabilize Iran’s regime and perhaps open the way for a more pragmatic leadership. Intelligence analysts have reportedly even considered scenarios in which factions within the Revolutionary Guard might assume power and pursue accommodation with the West.

History suggests caution. Regimes built around revolutionary ideologies rarely moderate under external pressure. Stalin’s regime, for example, was strengthened by Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union; its collapse in 1990–91 came only after a prolonged period of declining Cold War tensions. More often than not, external conflict — especially aerial bombardment — serves to radicalize. If this conflict becomes widely interpreted as a struggle between rival religious visions of history, it could ignite precisely the kind of sectarian confrontation that has repeatedly destabilized the region over the past two decades, when Sunni leaders such as Jordan’s King Abdullah saw themselves facing a “Shi’a crescent” following the fall of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. At that point the arc of Shi’a influence stretching from Iran via revitalized Shi’as in Iraq and Alawite-dominated Syria to the Mediterranean.

The departure of the Assad regime from Damascus, the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now, the attacks on Iran, might suggest to Sunni rulers that Shi’ism is on the retreat globally. However, revolutionary activism inspired by Khamenei’s “martyrdom” among Shi’a populations in Bahrain or the oil-bearing  province of Saudi Arabia may present a more menacing challenge. The Saudi kingdom’s clerical establishment are quiescent but not “defanged” as MBS pursues his program of social modernization and they could remobilize if a Shi’ite revolutionary menace was perceived as emerging from within the confines of the state. Then, short of the kind of quick, decisive strike that Trump might have envisaged after his actions in Venezuela, we are into something far more intractable: a contest of sacred narratives among the three great Abrahamic traditions.

When a conflict becomes framed through religious narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice, defeats can easily be transformed into moral victories. Geopolitical calculations and theological narratives have converged. Netanyahu’s need for political triumph, Saudi Arabia’s strategic rivalry with Iran, American evangelical support for Israel, and Iranian revolutionary theology have all contributed to the atmosphere in which war has broken out. When strategic rivalry between states becomes entangled with domestic political incentives, ideological movements and religious expectations, volatility increases.

The centrality of martyrdom to Shi’a political theology only exacerbates that risk. The death of Imam Husayn at Karbala in 680AD has long provided the Islamic Republic with a powerful symbolic language through which suffering can be transformed into moral vindication. The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader risks reinforcing precisely this narrative, helping the regime to present itself as the victim of unjust aggression, with the anti-government protesters dismissed as treacherous agents inspired by Mossad and victims of Western manipulation.

At the same time, Israeli politics has been undergoing a profound ideological shift. The coalition sustaining Netanyahu’s government includes figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Their outlook is shaped by currents of religious Zionism that see the modern state of Israel as part of a redemptive historical process. Within this worldview, the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the biblical lands is not simply a political development but a step in the unfolding of sacred history. Conflict with Israel’s enemies therefore acquires a metaphysical significance.

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America itself appears to be increasingly under the sway of extreme religious ideology, with a parallel narrative existing between American evangelical Christianity and Jewish messianism. (The denouements of these end-times scenarios may differ radically, with Jews expecting redemption while their evangelical supporters expecting Jewish conversions to Christianity, but this doesn’t affect contemporary theo-political forces). Millions of evangelical voters interpret Middle Eastern politics through a dispensationalist reading of biblical prophecy in which the modern state of Israel plays a central role in an unfolding divine plan. The US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee frames Israel’s conflicts not merely as geopolitical struggles but as episodes within a larger biblical drama. Within the MAGA political coalition, this constituency carries enormous influence, reinforcing support for Israel not only through strategic calculations but also through theological conviction.

It bears repeating: when wars acquire eschatological meaning, they rarely end quickly — or predictably.

There is, however, another possible perspective. One geopolitical objective of Washington’s confrontation with Iran may be to weaken a state that has become an important partner for both Russia and China. Yet the Chinese leadership has previously demonstrated that diplomacy in the region need not follow the logic of confrontation. In 2023, President Xi Jinping’s government brokered the unexpected rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, reopening diplomatic relations after years of hostility.

That episode suggests that even in a region long defined by rivalry and proxy conflict, political imagination can sometimes achieve what military force cannot. Whether the current crisis will leave room for such diplomacy remains the unanswered question.

The Saudis, backed by President Donald Trump, have of course denied that the murder was officially sanctioned, claiming that a rogue outfit was responsible after an argument got out of hand. However, the killing and dismemberment by the infamous bone saw were recorded in brutal detail by Turkish intelligence; and credible authorities, including senior intelligence officials such as Agnès Callamard, former UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, have been unequivocal in their verdicts. Callamard’s report into the “execution” is damning: “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances… Every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr Khashoggi, was being launched.” Just in case Prince William is in need of some small talk.

Of course, a visit by a senior member of the Royal Family is never just ceremonial. It is an act of diplomacy, and symbolism too. The moral endorsement of the British crown will be cherished by the Saudi regime, which likes to think of itself as “royal” in the grand tradition of the Western monarchies, despite its parvenu origins. But Prince William’s visit raises uncomfortable questions — not only about Middle Eastern realpolitik in an era of shifting alliances, but about the values that the United Kingdom claims to uphold.

These questions have become especially acute in the wake of a recent High Court judgment against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It concerned Ghanem al-Masarir, a Saudi dissident living in Britain since 2003. Through his popular YouTube channel, The Ghanem Show, recorded in Wembley, al-Masarir uses satire to expose corruption and human rights abuses within Saudi Arabia. His reach is vast, amassing over 300 million views, primarily from audiences inside Saudi Arabia who seek alternatives to state-controlled narratives and pro-regime bots.

But the authorities are aware of him too. Al-Masarir has been under constant harassment since 2004. He claims that a large check was forged in an effort to break him financially; that his phones were infiltrated with Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware; that he was followed and assaulted in broad daylight; and that he received explicit death threats from individuals linked to the Saudi royal court. The most violent incident, al-Masarir says, occurred in August 2018 he was followed from a cafe and assaulted by two men near the Brompton Road entrance of Harrods. Al-Masarir alleged that during the beating, the attackers repeatedly shouted: “Who are you to talk about the family of al-Saud?” and “How dare you curse Prince Salman, we won’t allow it!” They called him a “slave of Qatar” and threatened to “teach him a lesson”. When an English friend who was with al-Masarir told them they were protected by the Queen and British police, the attackers retorted: “Fuck London — their queen is our slave and their police are our dogs.”

In 2010, al-Masarir was befriended by an individual claiming to be a Master’s student in the UK who repeatedly attempted to persuade him to travel to Italy or Egypt. He later discovered this man’s true identity: Rajeh al-Baqmi, the head of Saudi intelligence at the Saudi embassy in London. He also encountered Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer at the embassy, who made an explicit warning that he should never leave the UK. This might have been a back-handed threat with a hint of protection, suggesting that unlike their Russian counterparts who were prepared to murder co-nationals in London or Salisbury, Saudi mafiosi are more comfortable conducting their nefarious operations outside the UK, in countries such as Turkey.

Mutreb is clearly not to be messed with. A brigadier general commanding the Saudi hit squad or “Rapid Intervention Force”, it was he who led the team charged with killing and dismembering Khashoggi, assisted by Dr Salah al-Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist who is thought to have wielded the bone saw. In the audio recordings revealed by Turkish intelligence — the Saudis had failed to sweep the consulate for bugs — it is Mutreb’s voice that dominates. “Keep pushing, don’t remove your hand!”, followed by: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,” with the sounds of plastic sheets and the whine of an electric saw. While there is no audio directly linking the Crown Prince to the Khashoggi murder, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. In a separate audio, leaked by the CIA, the phrase “tell your boss” occurs in a conversation between Mutreb and the Crown Prince’s de facto chief of staff, Saud al-Qahtani. As Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, told The New York Times: “A phone call like that… is as close to a smoking gun as you’re going to get.”

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The disclosures implicating MBS in the murder will certainly be ignored in the current White House — whose incumbents include the Crown Prince’s close friend, Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. But is it really always necessary for the UK to toe the US line? At the very least, the High Court ruling in the Ghanem al-Masarir case should give the Palace — and the Foreign Office — pause for thought. Saudi Arabia initially attempted to claim immunity under the 1978 State Immunity Act. However, the court ruled in 2022 that the Kingdom was not immune to these claims. After the Saudi state failed to pay court costs and its appeal was struck out, the final judgment was delivered on 26 January. Judge Pushpinder Saini found that on the balance of probabilities the Kingdom had been responsible for the physical attack on al-Masarir and for hacking his phone: “The KSA had a clear interest and motivation to shut down the claimant’s public criticism of the Saudi government.”

In its ruling, the court awarded al-Masarir more than £3 million in compensation for the psychiatric harm caused by hacking his phone as well as the physical assault. This marks a significant benchmark in the defense of human rights — though, given its refusal to take part in the legal proceedings, there is no certainty that the Saudi government will actually pay.

Nevertheless, any concerns that the British state has about criminality are outweighed by realpolitik. As David Hearst, an astute Middle East observer, has argued, a profound realignment is underway in the Arab world. It is not driven by palace intrigues, tribal rivalries, or the usual contests between regional proxies. Nor is it about Iran or political Islam — the two habitual anxieties of Sunni Arab rulers. And unlike the Arab Spring, it has not emerged from popular uprisings or mass protests. Yet its consequences could be just as far-reaching.

What has changed, according to Hearst, is that the region’s most populous Arab states — above all Saudi Arabia and Algeria, and potentially Egypt — have begun to recognize the threat of a shared project of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to reshape the Middle East. Their fear is that Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi intend to fragment Arab-majority or Arab-leaning states. This would enable the Israelis and Emiratis to control key maritime chokepoints, such as the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, and entrench military and economic dominance across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and beyond.

This strategy is already explicit in Israel’s actions: in its efforts to create de facto enclaves in Syria protecting the Druzes and Kurds; in its recognition of Somaliland, which gives it a foothold in the Horn of Africa; and in its general efforts to weaken Arab polities where national unity tends to be problematic. For the UAE, fragmentation has been a long-running method of power projection. It’s visible in Libya, where the UAE has provided military support to General Khalifa Haftar against the UN-supported government in Tripoli; in Sudan, where the UAE backs the genocidal Rapid Support Forces against the central government; and in southern Yemen, where the UAE armed and empowered the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in pursuit of a separatist state aligned with Emirati interests and open to ties with Israel.

Indeed, Yemen is the decisive fault line in the plan for regional fragmentation. What began as a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Islah movement evolved into a broader attempt to carve out an Emirati client state in the south, centered on the port of Aden and extending east into the Hadhramaut valley. The separatists’ attempt to take over the port of al Mukalla in the Hadhramaut region at the end of last year proved a turning point. Saudi Arabia, now encircled on its southern frontier, felt that Emirati ambitions were now threatening its security — and duly responded with force. Backing official Yemeni government troops, it bombed STC positions in Mukalla, reversing much of Abu Dhabi’s decade-long project in a matter of days. Almost simultaneously, Israel’s recognition of the separatist government of Somaliland (it is the only UN state to formally do so) confirmed Saudi fears that these were not isolated moves but elements of a coordinated strategy across both sides of the Bab el-Mandeb.

The rift between Mohammed bin Salman and his former mentor, the Emirati president Mohammed bin Zayed, was now gaping. The pair were once close partners in resisting the Muslim Brotherhood and allied movements. Now, Riyadh has not only confronted Emirati proxies militarily but also publicly reframed Abu Dhabi as a destabilizing actor. The Saudi media attacks on Mohammed bin Zayed have been blistering, depicting the UAE’s president as a disruptive force rather than the trusted ally of yore.

And the break reflects a deeper recalculation. Saudi Arabia understands that its strategic weight — in terms of population, territory, and oil power — far exceeds that of the UAE. Once you remove the expat community living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there are barely one million Emirati citizens. Abu Dhabi may specialize in covert action and proxy warfare, but it cannot prevail against Riyadh when vital Saudi interests are at stake.

Meanwhile, Washington under Donald Trump has intensified Saudi unease by treating global energy resources as prizes to be seized and threatening to depress oil prices, undermining the kingdom’s fiscal stability. Riyadh has concluded that US military power does not equate to responsible governance, and that American adventurism routinely generates chaos it cannot manage.

So the Saudi turn is not moral but strategic. By resisting Emirati-Israeli plans for regional fragmentation, Riyadh is positioning itself as an autonomous Arab power, potentially aligning more closely with Turkey, Egypt, Algeria — and perhaps, even long-term, with Iran. What it favors is a regional security order independent of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Given the emerging regional configurations, the British government — and the Palace — would be right in thinking that Britain’s interests align more closely with the Saudi Kingdom which, like it or not, is emerging as a leading player in the region and a potential source of stability rather than with the disruptive UAE. But does all this mean that the heir to the throne must cosy up to his murderous Saudi counterpart?

Prince William has cultivated an image as a thoughtful, socially conscious public figure — engaged with environmental issues, interfaith dialogue, and the responsibilities of leadership. It does not befit that persona for him to associate himself too closely with a regime implicated in surveillance, murderous violence, and repression. If William proceeds with the visit, he will need to find ways of expressing a certain distance from his hosts. He should certainly decline any invitations to inspect MBS’s yacht, Serena. According to the anonymous Saudi activist who goes by the name Mujtahid, Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers are kept on board as a trophy.

Ismail’s palace lies in ruins now, its once-ornate filigree wrecked by desert winds and a 1755 earthquake. The remains of the sultan’s royal house have been incorporated into a residential neighborhood. Moroccan life, at the edge of the Sahara Desert, goes on. But the world still contains kings with the vision and resources to imagine defeating the sand and the wind. Today the most ambitious of these is Neom, a series of trillion-dollar “gigaprojects” launched in 2017 by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, with the aim of transitioning his country’s economy away from petrodollars toward a more “sustainable” future. 

The original vision included a “ski village”, an artificial marina, a floating port city on the Red Sea, and “The Line”, a planned city 500 meters high, 200 meters wide, and stretching over 100 miles from one coast of Saudi Arabia to the other. Only now Neom is in flux, reflecting a wider world in which visions of the future are being hurriedly rewritten.

As initially envisioned, it was ambitious on a scale that dwarfs even Ismail’s vision — especially The Line. What some might politely call “a bold vision” others would simply describe as “bonkers”; this vertical city, with its mirrored exterior walls, was to house millions of people, have its own airport, be self-sufficient in food, and run on renewable energy. The original vision included a “hidden marina” accessed through a gate in the mirrored city wall, in the apex of which a “chandelier” building was to hang in mid-air. On the levels above this arch, there was to be a football stadium. 

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According to one estimate, building the first 12 sections by 2030 would have meant buying up most of the world’s supply of steel and cement, and bringing in a 40-ft container of materials every eight seconds, 24-hours a day. The early stages of construction involved digging out 100 million cubic meters of soil for the marina, flattening a mountain for an airport runway, and evicting desert tribes (these were dispersed, arrested, and in at least one case killed). 

The cost was staggering; trillions have already been spent. You can see the groundworks from space. Only now it looks like it might never be completed. Over the weekend, the management group admitted that Neom will be downscaled and reimagined, reflecting the Saudi monarchy’s shifting priorities. 

Is this all just a monument to the hollowness of monarchic ambition? Should we perhaps draw out a homily applicable to the proposed new White House ballroom? The FT reports that some of the pilings are already being covered by sand, and yes, it’s tempting to recall Shelley’s meditation on the fleeting quality of even the grandest ruler:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

But this isn’t just about hubris. Rather, the reworked Neom is testimony, in its abandoned groundworks and re-imagined architecture, to the replacement of one vision for the world’s post-industrial future by another. The updated vision is perhaps better suited to absolute monarchs such as Mohammed bin Salman than what it replaces, but also — for the rest of us — far less utopian. 

It’s difficult to find much in the way of visual reporting online, depicting what’s actually there. What you find instead is lavishly visualized CGI renditions of what it will look like: glossy marketing websites, architects’ models, futuristic videos and a ton of “partner content” product-placement material.

Setting aside for a moment how much of this has been realized, or ever will be, in terms of aesthetic and concept, Neom is the Platonic form of an architectural style and overall social order I think of as “Airport Hyperreal”. “Hyperreal”, because the best buildings in this style employ modern construction techniques to play with form, making solid surfaces seem airy and building materials seem less solid than expressions of pure idea. And “Airport” because it’s a style often employed for airports, but also because airports as such are central to the post-industrial, post-national information economy that tends to flourish amid this architectural style. 

Britain has a share of this placeless meta-civilization, but it’s not our strong suit. Peak Britain was the previous age, back when Shelley wrote Ozymandias in 1817. With the 1755 earthquake that wrecked Moulay Ismail’s palace still within living memory, Britain was in her industrial, imperial pomp — an era characterized by frenzied construction of houses, factories, and infrastructure alike. Today, those days are over: it’s now so difficult to get large-scale works agreed in Britain, let alone built, that the 359,866 sheets of consultation paperwork for the proposed Lower Thames Crossing tunnel would, if laid end-to-end, reach almost the whole way from the proposed tunnel site to Calais. As for the “fish disco” at Hinkley Point, and £100m “bat tunnel” of HS2, the less said the better. 

What we have, instead of renewed and working infrastructure, is patches of concentrated overgrowth in the Airport Hyperreal style, perched atop the ruins of imperial Britain. Perhaps the most mind-bending version of this is the City of London, some of whose walls date back to Rome but whose lower-rise buildings are mostly Georgian and Victorian — now dwarfed by extravagant, sinuous glass skyscrapers that seem almost to float in mid-air. The same quality of architectural palimpsest has recently become visible in contemporary photos of rapidly developing Manchester as well, where mid-rise, industrial-era brick huddles before brand-new steel and glass monoliths.

Beyond the scale and choice of materials, what separates Airport Hyperreal from its industrial precursor is its attitude to public space. Where industrialists built open-access parks, museums, galleries and libraries, Airport Hyperreal tends to focus resources on exclusive, gate-kept ones. The paradigmatic example is the airport lounge, where higher status travelers can escape the chaos and anomie of the main concourse for a better-resourced and more genteel atmosphere. The same built-in exclusivity can also be seen in the acrylic swimming pool suspended between two skyscrapers at Embassy Gardens in Vauxhall. This is pure Airport Hyperreal, both in gleefully flouting every common-sense stricture of building design, and also in its flamboyant exclusivity: a leisure resource that ordinary passers-by cannot access, made into an eye-catching design feature.

Neom was clearly envisioned for this kind of society. Not, that is, a completely “open” one of un-gated public space, but something at most semi-exclusive. We might call it airport-lounge urbanism: a country-wide program of building projects, designed for a semi-exclusive, upscale society where manufacturing happens elsewhere, and people divide their time between knowledge work and consumer leisure. A port city; resorts and hotels; a high-density, “sustainable” city with plenty of office space but no factories; a “ski village” comprising real and artificial slopes; a sports stadium half a kilometer into the air; a harbor for cruise ships. 

So how should we understand the fact that Neom has been scaled back? The foremost reason, it has been reported, has been unanticipated budget constraints, due to the softening price of oil. In other words: a development whose stated aim was transitioning the world’s foremost petrostate into the post-oil era has ironically been stymied by its reliance on oil profits. But still more significant is the proposed pivot. Instead of creating a sprawling complex centered around a presumed population of millions of knowledge workers, Neom may be re-imagined as “a hub for data centers”, as part of “Prince Mohammed’s aggressive push for the kingdom to become a leading AI player”. 

Anyone who makes a living from, within, or predicated on the kind of knowledge work that happens in Airport Hyperreal architecture should see this for what it is: a dread omen. It is, to date, the largest-scale physical expression of a general trend, among the world’s movers and shakers, that we might call the “Greater Reset”. 

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The “Great Reset”, a program proposed during Covid by the World Economic Foundation, came swiftly to be decried as a conspiracy theory. But on a more charitable reading, it was intended benevolently: as a means of shifting the post-industrial world toward universal, “sustainable”, tech-optimist utopias. It wasn’t popular with the general public, not least because people accurately intuited how much soft authoritarianism and social engineering would be needed for its realization.

But however hubristic its vision, and however disingenuously it was designed to exclude the riff-raff, the “Great Reset” vision expressed architecturally in Airport Hyperreal did at least try to imagine utopias for many humans. By contrast, the Neom rethink shows the contours of the Greater Reset: a future where humans are largely obsolete, except to tend vast datacenters, as ever-greater swathes of knowledge work becomes automated. This future is showing signs of having arrived in Britain: our brief overgrowth of Airport Hyperreal architecture is already threatened by the Greater Replacement, with national net job losses of more than 8% over the past year, due to AI. Meanwhile, even private individuals are embracing AI agents such as “Clawdbot” for tasks that a secretary, administrator, or services employee might once have done, such as booking restaurants or even managing finances.

And yet perhaps Britain has less to worry about than some places. Even if the Greater Reset is grim in the short term, London has been there a long time. The still-visible traces of Roman stonework attest to the city’s ability to endure even tremendous upheaval, with or without skyscrapers and spreadsheets. By contrast, the desert monarch Prince Mohammed bin Salman has evidently decided the international laptop class is no longer a sufficiently promising bet to warrant trillions of infrastructure investment. 

So now Neom is still about housing, of a kind. It’s still futuristic. But it’s not primarily for humans — at least, not very many of them. We might ask the architects: what will become of the people thus replaced? You might as well ask Moulay Ismail to care about the death of a single slave in the building works at Meknes. 

Sims fans are not what laymen would expect gamers to be. The shouty young men who crack rape jokes in Call of Duty lobbies are nowhere to be found in Pleasantview. The fandom, unusually for gaming, skews about 80% female; the gameplay is less about gunning down insurgents than building homes and families, nurturing relationships and customizing interior decor. The game gives players godlike control over their creations, allowing legions of highly skilled “modders” to tinker with bespoke elements. Its limitless customization has attracted a sizable and vocal LGBT constituency; some exclusively program lesbians; others make almost all their Sims parents polygamous. Physicality and clothing is entirely unisex, fitting neatly into transgender philosophy; same-sex marriage was introduced to the game in 2009, six years before it was legalized in the US where the game was created.

The Sims is a Californian export, a strange flower from the hothouse of Silicon Valley in the Nineties. The game’s conceptual power was that it reflected the radical entrepreneurialism of that time, allowing players to pull up the roots of known institutions — the family, the town, life and death itself — and redesign everything to the whims of the individual. The Sims is one big lab experiment for different social and sexual dynamics, and even in marketing EA was careful to court progressive favor with Pride campaigns and tactical brand partnerships. Although the spectrum of gameplay is as varied as that of players themselves — some choose, as above, to simply rehearse traditional family roles by putting a mother through three hours of tedious housework before sunrise — both the format of the game and its ideological foundations are inherently liberal.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario more heartrending than grubby realpolitik clashing with this sunlit cyberworld. Unfortunately for Sims players, that’s exactly what happened: EA, the game’s Californian publisher, founded in 1982 by a former Apple employee called Trip Hawkins, has been acquired for a cool $55 billion by a consortium including none other than the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (run by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the US not too long ago determined had personally ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and Affinity Partners — the Floridian investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an architect of the Gaza peace plan. A Gulf petrostate where homosexuality is punishable with decapitation, and a son of the Trump dynasty; you could not possibly cook up a less desirable cast of buyers for perhaps the most liberal gaming franchise in history.

Predictably, the players are rattled; a boycott is underway. “It’s always disheartening as a queer woman and a disabled person seeing the places [where] I once found comfort and safety online shrink to a significantly smaller degree,” writes one. Many fret that LGBT content will be phased out of the game, distasteful to the Saudi stakeholders or plain old American conservatives in the Trump orbit. “Even if the Sims stays the same, I don’t want my money to go to those people,” writes another. “The series is very much dead to me after this.”

For some players, this is less about the selling-out of a favorite game than the loss of a better world. One put-out Prometheus, watching the gods snatch back fire, writes: “It’s not just a video game to so many of us; I’ve rebuilt Paris, New York, Barcelona… I can’t just abandon ship and start over, [after] 10 years of world building. I can’t support Saudis or Kushner. I guess I bought my last pack.”

It is difficult to think of a cultural product, game or otherwise, which so precisely captures the spirit of Western hyperprogressivism. The naive political philosophy of Millennials is perfectly mirrored in the dynamics of the simulated world: it is an exclusively digital, infinitely customizable reality which comes into being simply because I say it does. The basic facts of life — one’s intelligence, talents, physicality, even biological sex — are all mercifully tweakable within the game’s cyber utopia. Grinding moral forces like shame and disgust are reduced to minuscule “moodlets” which waft away in a few in-game hours. As in the ethos of Millennial liberalism there is no solid credo, just a shifting and conditional system of values geared towards gratification and experiment. Beyond the arbitrary goals of accruing wealth and building impressive houses each player ruthlessly pursues their own idea of satisfaction, sometimes through outrageous acts of sadism: the classic Sims experience is to put a character who displeases you into a swimming pool before deleting the ladder (I may be speaking from experience). Gamers often alternate between creating “good” and “evil” Sims, where the latter are simply agents of chaos sent to torment and exploit the other residents. The moral bent of gameplay tends to be black and white; it’s a world that suits players who see reality as such too.  The system even shields players from mortality itself if they so choose. “When my first cat died, I brought her back to life”, writes one, who has since chosen to turn off the aging feature altogether.

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The Sims is a tabula rasa for building second, third, fourth lives or recreating reality as you believe it should be. Many players recreate family members; some recreate exes and torture them or simply keep them around for company, fabricating a resolved timeline of their own lives devoid of loss or rejection. The Sims is such a compelling and successful game because it fully actualizes the desire to retreat into a dreamworld — but rather than the magical medieval land of Zelda or the pastoral cuteness of Stardew Valley, this dreamworld is of your own, almost limitless, making.

How strange, then, for this symbol of untethered idealism to come into contact with disturbing political realities. It is not just the idealism of fans thrown into disarray; The Sims is being thrown into confusion along with the American progressive optimism which created it as tech philosophy, and the country more broadly, lurches to the Right.

Like other experiments in tech utopianism, The Sims is still reliant on real-world capital and anchored to decidedly un-rad bad actors. I can sympathize with fans’ misery upon being rudely reminded that their paradise was a shadowplay all along; it must be quite a jolt suddenly to see the puppetmaster’s haggard face, his dirty fingernails. In a game centered around ultimate control, wresting power from the gamer god because of something as earthly as a business buyout exposes the illusion. EA has turned the big lights on.

That said, recognition by Britain and France, which last week announced a similar if unconditional plan, means more than recognition by Brazil or even China. Come September’s UN General Assembly, and assuming that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t execute an implausible U-turn and embrace the two-state solution that he has rejected for years, two G7 members, among them the US’s closest ally, will have shoved Israel further towards pariah status. America is the only outside party able to influence Israeli policy in any meaningful way, and of US pressure there is little sign.

If Britain’s faltering journey towards recognition seems unlikely to alleviate the agony of Gaza’s civilians, Starmer’s announcement at least acknowledges the deeper, broader forces that have been unleashed by Israel’s actions since the October 7 attacks. Indeed, the agony of Gaza today may one day seem trivial compared to the slower but incomparably more destructive disorder that threatens the Middle East in years to come.

Few scholars have greater awareness of these forces than Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the LSE and a renowned expert on the Middle East. The Lebanese-American is usually a jovial, ebullient person but when we met shortly before the British announcement his smile was full of pain.

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“I can see no obvious way out of the disaster that is heading for the Middle East,” he told me. “Egypt is waiting to implode and Jordan faces severe challenges.” The reason is the wave of popular hatred that has built up against Israel and threatens to overwhelm Arab regimes that are linked to the Jewish state through peace treaties or, in the case of Jordan, because they harbor millions of displaced Palestinians. “Of course, the ultimate casualty will be Israel itself,” Gerges concluded. “Living by the sword, Israel has turned itself into a fortress and history tells us that fortresses fall.”

Gerges isn’t alone. I also spoke to a senior Saudi official and confidant of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and effective ruler. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia had been expected to join the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020. The prospect of Saudi adherence is distant now.

“Middle Eastern stability depends on the Gulf economies,” the official told me, “and we cannot prosper without peace. Sure, we can cope with a war in Yemen and a not-so-stable Iraq, but if Jordan and Egypt explode, the danger for us will be acute. Different groups will vie for control of our holy places, Mecca and Medina. And it won’t be like the Mamluk Empire in medieval times, with a single regime exercising hegemony over the whole region, but chaos and a free-for-all.”

A doomsday scenario may be sketched out as follows: recognition of a Palestinian state being dead on arrival, the Palestinians continue to be persecuted not only in Gaza but also the West Bank and Israel proper, while Israel engorges itself on militarism and nationalism that drive out the last vestiges of compassion and good sense. The Arab states, for their part, captured by groups that apply themselves to Israel’s destruction, in cahoots with a rejuvenated Islamic Republic of Iran and cheered on by antisemites in the West, are unable to provide basic services to their people. More and more brown people come out of the region and into the lands of white people who don’t want them. Pretty, isn’t it?

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Nor does any part of this scenario require the various parties to do anything but continue down the path they are already on. Earlier this year, for instance, Donald Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and “resettle” its population of some two million people in neighboring Arab countries. According to a recent poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, 82% of Israelis support the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56% favor expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. (Back in 2003 the figures were 45% and 31% respectively.) On Tuesday, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, referred to Gaza as “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel”, also predicting that the West Bank, currently partly governed by the Palestinian Authority, would come under Israeli sovereignty.

The problem for Israeli supremacists is that the Palestinians won’t disappear. They are too numerous to exterminate, and their Arab neighbors have said they won’t take them in, ostensibly for reasons of solidarity but in reality for fear of destabilizing their own fragile societies. The last thing Egypt’s current strongman, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, wants is an influx of Gazans clamoring for jobs, houses and a political voice — Jordan, whose indigenous population complains of being swamped by their Palestinian guests, being the example to avoid. Finally, the Palestinians possess a keen appreciation of the deadly intentions of their adversary and something approaching a relish for the fight to thwart them.

This is crucial; as a historian I have come across numerous communities that have lacked such attributes and disappeared as a result. The Jews of Lisbon, for instance, having converted to Catholicism, in most cases expediently, suffered a hideous massacre in 1506 before being driven into exile by the Inquisition. Or take the Armenians of what is now eastern Turkey, denigrated as fifth columnists by the Ottoman government during the First World War. In their villages of mud and straw in the valleys of the Anatolian plateau, they waited docilely to be sent on death marches that killed over a million. And, of course, there is the Holocaust itself, that supreme example of a nation unprepared for the fate in store for it — and for which unpreparedness Israel is the living, breathing refutation.

To cite a contemporary case, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which took up arms against the mighty Turkish state in 1984, avoided extirpation for all of 41 years in part by refusing to lay them down again. The PKK’s recent pledge to disarm, in return for integration into Turkish political life, would put the destiny of the Kurds in the hands of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He is one of the world’s least trustworthy politicians and the PKK’s decision may prove unwise.

A movement of national liberation, rather than the bunch of jihadis Netanyahu depicts it as, Hamas has said that it will disarm once Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders — which, given the political impossibility of that happening, means never. Besides, why would Hamas give up the main weapon it has against a much more powerful enemy: the ability to strike asymmetrically, causing maximum horror and distress?

Hamas has lost support among ordinary Gazans: not because of popular revulsion at the October 7 attacks, widely regarded as nothing less than the Zionists deserved, but because of its callousness towards its own people’s suffering and its intransigence in negotiations with Israel. Yet, Hamas is wildly popular in the West Bank, and indeed elsewhere in the Arab world. Israel itself believes that terrorist networks are replacing dead Hamas fighters at a rate of five to one. “60% of Hamas fighters are the sons of martyrs,” I was told by Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford and a prominent Israeli critic of his homeland. “The easiest thing for Hamas is to recruit more fighters to replace the ones it has lost.”

As the saying goes, victory is survival for a guerrilla army. Anyone with a smartphone can watch films showing plucky Hamas warriors clambering onto Israeli armored vehicles and taking them out using explosive devices recycled from captured ordinance and finessed on the kitchen table, before, presumably, the inevitable retaliatory execution by an Israeli drone. You don’t need to kill many Israeli soldiers to show your staying power, or to convince Israeli reservists of the advisability of dodging the draft — not that Netanyahu’s government is releasing figures on those who fail to present themselves.

No wonder the other Arab nations are so jittery. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, trounced pro-government parties in elections last September. In Egypt, the authorities announced earlier this month that they had thwarted terrorist attacks targeting prominent figures, apparently planned by the armed wing of the Brotherhood. Recall, too, that it was a Brotherhood government that al-Sisi toppled to seize power in 2013, and whose former cadres smolder in the prison cells of Egypt’s police state. Not that the effects of Gaza will be confined to the Middle East or the Muslim world. According to a British security source, quoted by Reuters, the Gaza war is “likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since [the Iraq invasion of] 2003”.

In the words of the Saudi official I spoke to, the Trump administration needs to take a long view that considers the law of cause and effect. Trump’s promise to settle the Gazans “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” proclaims his ignorance of this law. The want of long-term, morally coherent thinking among the political class is marginally less glaring in Britain than it is in Israel and the US. And, if the belated and conditional recognition of Palestine remains strategically open to doubt, Starmer’s government has at least won Trump’s trust. It must now team up with the Arab nations and focus America’s attention on preventing today’s Gazan catastrophe from becoming something worse.

In embarking on open conflict with Iran, Israel has effectively aligned itself with the Sunni monarchies of the Arabian Gulf, foremost among them Saudi Arabia. These are countries that have long been engaged in schismatic conflict with both republican and revolutionary Iran, for the fear among the Sunnis has been that Shia Iran would spread its revolutionary creed to the oil-rich and Shia-dominated Arab littoral of the Arabian Gulf.

Thus the 20th-century cycle of wars between Jewish and Arab nationalism has finally been replaced by the 21st-century conflict between an increasingly religiously-infused Zionism on the one side and Shia Islamism on the other. In this conflict Israel is de facto allied with conservative Sunni Muslim states. Over all these convolutions of regional geopolitics looms a larger strategic question: whether Netanyahu has also succeeded in torpedoing Trump’s foreign policy doctrine of “America First”.

The America First doctrine posed a more significant strategic challenge to Israel’s geopolitical position than did any military effort from bungling Islamist militias, decayed Arab nationalist regimes or Iranian clerics. For as long as the US was committed to globalist doctrines of policing international order and defending human rights everywhere, Israel could exercise a powerful grip on US foreign policy on both the ideological and strategic levels.

To put this in ideological terms: as long as the US was committed to defending the victims of human rights abuses against genocide, it had to commit to defending Israel as the state founded by the survivors of genocide. Ever since it held the trial of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Israel has based its political legitimacy on the claim that its national existence is Jews’ self-defense against existential threat. This claim is buttressed by the ultimate human rights crime of the past century, the Holocaust. On the strategic level, as long as the US was committed to global policing, Israel could also act as a loyal regional deputy. In this role, Israel punishes terrorists and rogue states on behalf of Washington, thereby ensuring itself a steady supply of US arms and diplomatic support against its regional rivals.

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The US has tired of fighting the forever wars, an outcome that is the natural consequence of policing global order. Both the Israeli roles, that of victim-state and regional deputy, are now of less importance to the White House. One of the few consistent themes of Trumpian politics has been its efforts to extricate the US from the Middle East in order to focus on the confrontation with the much greater geopolitical rival of China. But Israel needed the so-called US bunker-busters to reach the deeply-buried Iranian nuclear site at Fordow, and Netanyahu therefore succeeded in luring Trump back into the Middle East with the promise of a quick military raid that would not risk ground troops.

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of return to the Middle East provoked consternation in the ranks of the MAGA coalition. Since the declaration of the US-Iranian cease-fire, Trump has sternly warned Israel — with full caps and profanity in a post on his Truth media platform — not to retaliate against alleged Iranian violation of the cease-fire. Given how much blood and treasure the US has squandered in the Middle East over the last thirty years — to say nothing of the terrifying costs of the forever wars to the peoples of the region itself — it is clear that embroiling itself in another regime-change operation in Iran would be terrible for the US. Less obvious but no less true is the fact that such an outcome would expose Netanyahu’s weakness.

All this effort to keep the US embroiled in the Middle East begs the question of why Israel, with its spectacular feats of arms and almost unbroken string of military victories, needs US protection at all. The Fordow situation was an unusual one. Israel, in general, holds the regional aces. It is widely believed to already possess the ultimate guarantee of security — a nuclear second-strike capability — meaning that the country could threaten any enemy with total destruction were its survival actually in question. In a world of nuclear weapons, there is no greater guarantee of political independence than second-strike capability — the capacity to mount a second nuclear strike against an enemy, even if that enemy were to launch a successful surprise attack against you first. Nuclear deterrence held the peace between the Soviet Communists and capitalist Americans during the first Cold War, and now between mortal strategic enemies India and Pakistan as well as between capitalist China and capitalist America. Why should it now be an insufficient guarantor of Israeli security in the face of an Iranian nuclear bomb?

One might argue that the ayatollahs that rule Iran are too irrational to be successfully deterred by the threat of nuclear annihilation, so consumed are they with their religious fanaticism and millenarian anti-imperialism. Similar arguments were made about Russian and Chinese communists, also assumed, by dint of the ideological contortions of Marxism, to be beyond reason. Are the ayatollahs less rational, less interested in preserving their own power, than are Maoists and Stalinists? Nor are the theocrats all-powerful. The Iranian state also encompasses its bureaucracy and security apparatus. If the wider Iranian state could not be entrusted to restrain the use of nuclear weapons by mad clerics, what hope is there for nation-building in Iran once the clerics are gone? In any case Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is yet further proof of the necessity of having nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding Tehran’s alliance with Russia, Iranians will have noted that any country without nuclear weapons cannot ultimately guarantee its independence or defend itself against rolling air attacks.

It is for that reason that the Iranian emperor Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979, was himself keen on securing nuclear weapons. We can be confident that even if a secular regime were to emerge from the rubble of the Islamic Republic it, too, would see its ultimate security guarantee in having nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, then, Israel’s campaign to supposedly destroy the risk of an Iranian bomb will hasten the spread of nuclear weapons — both in the region and further afield. We can be assured that nuclear proliferation will be one outcome of this new war. This means in turn that all of us, including the Israelis, must learn to live with nuclear deterrence across a variety of states and political regimes.

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The greatest paradox of all this is that, in seeking to draw the US back into the region, Israel is undercutting the rationale for its own existence. Before the Holocaust became central to Israel’s political identity, the original purpose of Zionism, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was to secure self-determination and security for the Jews. Netanyahu’s forever wars are clearly failing to create that security: one war simply runs into another. The effort to break up Trump’s America First doctrine suggests that Netanyahu is also fumbling the cause of Jewish self-determination. For if Israel cannot find security in nuclear deterrence and overwhelming military might — the means that suffice for other states — but only in being permanently protected by the US, what hope is there for Jewish independence and self-determination? Israel’s effort to recreate its strategic dependence on the US suggests a state that cannot stand alone — the opposite of the original aspirations of Zionism.

Israel must now confront a new geopolitical reality in which it will ultimately matter less to the US. If the country cannot carve out a new political role independent of the US, then no amount of crushing military victories and spectacular bombing raids will ever be enough to guarantee its independence.

Whether people will actually turn up to watch almost feels like a minor concern alongside the potential ramifications for football and its place in politics. Since 1960, the South American club champions have been playing their European counterparts for a de facto world title. Since 2000, Fifa, the global governing body, recognizing the hold Uefa, the European confederation, has over the elite level of the club game, has been trying to expand that. Cue the Club World Cup: an annual seven-team competition in which a single European side played a maximum of two games. It was done in 10 days, and nobody in Europe paid much attention. So why the massive expansion? The only reason is Fifa’s attempt, in its eternal struggle with Uefa, to increase its influence over the club game and access some of the revenues it generates.

On the face of it, the Club World Cup might seem like a great idea: the globe coming together in sporting celebration. Except we already have such a thing: the World Cup, a tournament for national sides, and which works because there is a rough equality. Since nations have to use the talent allotted to them by geography, rather buying up the best talent from around the world, Senegal can beat England whereas a Senegalese club side would have next to no chance against a Premier League titan. A Club World Cup might have made sense half a century ago, but now the gulf between rich and poor is so vast that mismatches are inevitable.

It’s not just the fans who are unconvinced. Only six months ago, the tournament didn’t have a broadcast partner. Then in February, DAZN, Len Blavatnik’s media company, which has posted losses of at least $1.3 billion every year since 2019, summoned $1 billion to buy the global rights. Given Fox had offered only $10 million for the US rights, that seemed a vast sum. Coincidentally, a few days later, Surj, a company owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), announced a $1 billion investment in DAZN. Two months earlier, after a bidding process widely regarded as flawed, Saudi Arabia was confirmed by Fifa as the host of the 2034 World Cup. Last week, the Saudi PIF and Qatar Airways were confirmed as Club World Cup partners. It’s fair to say it’s highly unusual for major sponsorship deals like that to be agreed less than two weeks before the start of a competition. After all, these are entities owned by the governments of Qatar (World Cup hosts in 2022) and Saudi Arabia (World Cup hosts in 2034), underwriting a Fifa project whose commercial viability has become increasingly doubtful.

Players are already protesting about how many games they are expected to play, but Fifa is determined to press on, for the political gain and the revenues that may in future accrue. The only gap in the football calendar today — at least from a European point of view, and Europe is where the bulk of football’s money is — is in odd-numbered summers, when there is no men’s World Cup or Euros (the Copa América, the South American championship, runs concurrently with its European equivalent). The fact that players and fans (and journalists) find those odd-numbered summers a useful rest-period, perhaps even necessary, clearly means little to football’s administrators.

And in any case, it’s not actually a free summer. Already, Liam Delap, an emerging star of last season’s Premier League campaign, has been forced to withdraw from the England squad for the Under-21 Euros to play for Chelsea in the Club World Cup, while the tournament can’t but deflect attention from the Women’s Euros.

There is then an issue of qualification, which has edged towards the gimmicky even before the tournament has begun. The World Cup has an established process that goes on for a couple of years before the tournament. But qualification for the Club World Cup is by performance in various other competitions. Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea, for instance, are there as the last three winners of the Uefa Champions League. Al-Ain, Urawa Red Diamonds and Al-Hilal are there as winners of the Asian equivalent.

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But at this point, Fifa runs into a problem. You can’t have a team win a league in May and then join a tournament two weeks later. So Fifa is about to kick off a Club World Cup, a competition that at least on some level is about determining the best team in the world, without the reigning champions of England, Spain or Italy, who, arguably, are already at the top of the global game.

Yet once again, it’s hard to avoid the sense that finance trumps integrity. Consider the situation in the US. Here, the season follows a league format followed by playoffs to determine the champion. As Club World Cup hosts, the US gets one additional qualifying slot. It had been assumed that it would go to the overall champion, but Fifa had left enough ambiguity in the protocols that when Messi’s Inter Miami finished top of the table, they were confirmed as qualifiers. For marketing reasons, Fifa had to ensure the presence of Messi, still a great box-office draw. It was just as well that they did, given Inter Miami promptly lost in the playoffs to unfancied Atlanta United.

Messi, though, wasn’t enough. The organizers wanted more. An additional transfer window has been introduced to allow clubs to sign players for the start of the competition. That has two benefits when it comes to marketing the tournament. There is always a glimmer of intrigue, as in pre-season games, in seeing a new signing at his new club, assessing how he fits in: what will Trent Alexander-Arnold be like at Real Madrid?

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But the new window also created the possibility of short-term loans. In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo, now 40 and playing in the Saudi league for Al-Nassr but still a huge celebrity, will not be at the tournament, but there were talks about finding him a club, trailed by the Fifa president Gianni Infantino in an interview with the influencer iShowSpeed.

But there’s something even more concerning going on here: the prize money. The $1 billion pot (coincidentally the exact amount of the Saudi PIF’s investment in DAZN, and the exact amount DAZN paid for broadcasting rights) will have a major distorting effect on local leagues, a significant amount particularly when clubs are scrambling to meet the thresholds for Profit and Sustainability Rules. But that is nothing compared to the impact in, say, Argentina, where Boca Juniors and River Plate will each make a minimum of £11.25 million in geographically weighted appearance money; each of the two league champions in Argentina each season receives just £370,000 in prize money. Boca and River are being handed a mammoth advantage for the next few years — which should secure future qualification for the Club World Cup, a permanent seat on the carousel of cash. Auckland City, meanwhile, play in the Dettol Northern League for clubs in the north of New Zealand’s North Island, where player expenses are capped at £70 a week. They will receive £2.56 million even if they lose every game.

So Fifa is staging a tournament that could effectively ruin domestic leagues as functioning competitions. The Club World Cup could finally release Europe’s stranglehold on the club game and lead to a cadre of superclubs too big for their domestic leagues. And if that cadre decided their future lay not in domestic competition but in a global superleague, that would suit Fifa rather well. But is that good for football? Why would anybody care about that?

Some $36 trillion in debt underscores the wide gap between America’s expansive international objectives and its limited capacity to attain them — a condition famously described by the New Deal journalist Walter Lippmann as foreign-policy “insolvency.” Continuing the hubristic course we have followed since the Nineties would be disastrous.

Trump gets all this. Which is why he is aiming to lower the temperature across various international theaters, counterbalance the power of rival states, and reset America’s global engagement. His own shorthand, Reagan-borrowed description of the strategy — peace through strength — is apt. His ability to deliver on this vision is still an open question, however. To a large degree, it depends on the people he taps to carry it out.

Richard Nixon faced a somewhat similar situation at the start of his presidency. America was overextended abroad in an unwinnable Vietnam War that bore little connection to the nation’s vital security interests. An increasingly confident Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Czechoslovakia and Egypt and threatening to race past parity into superiority over the US nuclear arsenal. Economically, an overvalued dollar was crippling exports and rendering the United States highly vulnerable to a foreign-induced financial crisis. At home, the country was riven by violent clashes over Vietnam and racial injustice.

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Nixon’s signature foreign-policy actions — making peace in Vietnam, pursuing détente and arms control with the Kremlin, opening diplomatic talks with China, stabilizing the Arab-Israeli conflict, and ending the gold standard — were aimed at aligning America’s goals and means abroad. At home, Nixon sought a breathing spell in which the United States could heal its internal wounds. By and large, it worked.

Although the particulars differ, Trump appears to be pursuing a similar vision of settling regional conflicts, stabilizing great-power relations, rebalancing American foreign trade, and buying time to mend internal rifts. He clearly recognizes that the so-called unipolar moment — the period when US power so greatly outmatched that of any other nation that the world had little choice but to bend to Washington’s will — has long been over.

As his secretary of state and interim national-security adviser, Marco Rubio, has concisely put it, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world. You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest.”

Trump drove these points home last week in a seminal speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia. “We were the only power in the world,” he said, “and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

The proponents of this model, he continued, “wrecked far more nations than they built and the [interventionists] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” The contrast with President George W. Bush, Trump’s most recent GOP predecessor, couldn’t be more stark. In his Second Inaugural Address, remember, Bush called on Washington to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Can Trump realize his more realistic vision?

The early signals from abroad give reason for hope. The interim tariff-reduction arrangement struck by US and Chinese negotiators last week is a sign that a compromise trade deal is realistic. Iran has cautiously indicated an openness to a pragmatic nuclear deal, while key Arab states are increasingly attracted to Trump’s vision of a modernized Middle East no longer riven by conflict and dependent on oil and gas exports.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s initial skepticism over Trump’s intentions has given way to growing optimism that he seeks not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but genuine rapprochement. Europe, too, is beginning to adjust to the reality that it can no longer simply outsource its security to the American hegemon, albeit with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Team Trump’s success last week in defusing a looming nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrated impressive diplomatic skill.

Success requires much more than winning over foreign leaders, however. To implement deals, his administration must also engage effectively with the many moving parts at lower levels in foreign governments and manage those broader relationships. For this, Trump must bring Washington into line — and here, the early signs are more sobering.

Part of his challenge is institutional: the US government spent much of the past three decades building policy bureaucracies devoted to transforming foreign societies, and these groups have a clear self-interest in resisting Trump’s vision. The period of unipolarity also encouraged bad habits in the parts of the government supposedly designed to conduct and support diplomacy, because America’s coercive capabilities made the traditional arts of balancing the power and interests of foreign competitors seem unnecessary.

Part of the challenge is personal and political. There is a good deal of truth in the old Washington adage that personnel is policy. Finding staff that has the requisite combination of talent, experience, and loyalty is no simple matter, particularly when large parts of the GOP, and nearly all mainstream media, remain convinced that diplomatic engagement with adversaries constitutes appeasement and is therefore counterproductive.

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Trump’s painful first-term experiences with opposition within his own administration have made him unusually sensitive to this problem. Still, there is no easy solution. Few of the officials who have been overseeing America’s long string of fruitless wars and failed democratization campaigns favor a new approach. And many of those calling for change lack the diplomatic polish and administrative dexterity born of experience. The large number of unfilled foreign-policy slots in the administration and the recent controversies over appointments at the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff underscore just how difficult solving this issue is proving to be.

So while there is cause for optimism, the reality is that the much-needed change Trump is seeking in American foreign policy will be agonizingly difficult to achieve. It will certainly not come quickly. For Nixon, finalizing a peace accord in Vietnam took years. Full diplomatic relations with China were not established until well into the Carter administration. If Trump achieves even half of what he envisions during the next four years, he will have made remarkable progress. But his legacy will be that much more enduring and important if he manages to select and build a new cadre of able experts that share his foreign-policy ideas and carry his work forward.

Correction: Due to an editorial oversight, an earlier version of this essay misstated the size of the US debt.

But the most significant part of Trump’s anti-interventionist speech, delivered on the first evening of a historic three-day trip to the Gulf, was not in its rhetoric but in policy. In a dramatic announcement, he stated that he would be ordering the “cessation of sanctions” against Syria. This, he said, would give the new government in Damascus “a chance at greatness”. From across the region, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.

Among the most punitive in the world, the sanctions on Syria were introduced during the long reign of the Assad family, starting in the Seventies. But the most debilitating sanctions were imposed in the last years of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, who was ousted in December by Islamist rebels led by the country’s new de facto president Ahmed al-Sharaa. Leaders with a stake in regional stability, including many assembled in Riyadh, had worried that absent sanctions relief, Syria could soon become a failed state — one that could potentially descend into full-scale sectarian civil war and even dissolution, sending more refugees towards Turkey and Europe.

In Syria, where some people haven’t received salaries for months, sanctions have strangled the economy, inhibited foreign investment, hampered the provision of humanitarian aid, and surely placed increased strain on existing fissures within society. As a result, the news boosted Syria’s beleaguered currency, with the pound strengthening against the dollar for the first time in years.

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Sanctions relief, coupled with Trump’s brief meeting with Sharaa yesterday — the first such meeting between a Syrian and American leader in 25 years — mean relations between the two countries have been suddenly transformed. This is due in part to Al-Sharaa’s wise choice to invest heavily in Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia, and aggressive diplomatic outreach that began immediately after his forces seized power. Indeed, convincing the region and the West to trust him despite his history as a leader of militant Islamist groups has been central to his government’s charm offensive. During the US occupation of Iraq, the new president spent years as an inmate in an American prison infamous for nurturing jihadists. Upon his release, he returned to Syria to fight, first with ISIS and then al-Qaeda, eventually severing ties with both to form his own ostensibly more moderate outfit, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Since his ousting of Assad, Sharaa has embraced the language of inclusivity, meeting many minority leaders and securing cautious support from many corners of the EU. Even so, spasms of sectarian violence have tempered the initial optimism that accompanied Assad’s fall.

In Syria, there has been widespread jubilation at the news of sanction relief. But removing US sanctions will not be as simple or as straightforward as many might wish. As Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow at Defense Priorities, explains, Syria has “multiple sanctions regimes in place” — making their revocation complicated. Some, such as Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) sanctions and Executive Order (EO) sanctions, can be lifted unilaterally by the president or his team. More difficult to remove will be the so-called Caesar sanctions, which require Congressional approval. The president can only waive these for up to 180 days, and even that requires him certifying to various congressional committees that this is in America’s national security interest.

One alternative might be simply to ignore the law once those six months are up — something the administration has proven more than happy to do elsewhere. Yet as Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, says, not everyone in Washington will be eager to help the new Syrian government. “There are elements in Washington that are very skeptical towards this idea that Sharaa has moved past his extremist past,” Cafiero says. They would want the sanctions to remain in place for longer.

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Beyond the excitement that accompanied Trump’s sanctions announcement, though, there was another, quieter message that received less attention: removing sanctions on Syria would give the United States an exit strategy. Behind all his praise of the Gulf’s leadership for the region’s achievements, and denigration of failed Western nation-building projects, was an unspoken declaration of his administration’s plans for the Middle East: a policy that would swap Western dependence for regional self-reliance and a reduction if not total withdrawal of the US troops on the ground in northeast Syria.

The US military presence supports local forces in countering ISIS, but the specter of withdrawal has been in the air since Trump won the November election. Assad’s fall a few weeks later forced a reassessment in an altered security environment. But before this week, the Trump administration appeared to have no coherent policy on Syria. Certainly, the rest of the administration’s messaging on Sharaa has been skeptical at best. Sebastian Gorka, Director of Counterterrorism at the US National Security Council, expressed reservations in February: “He was a jihadist for a long time,” he said. “Has he reformed himself? Is he a better man now? Does he believe in a representative (democratic) government?… In my 24 years of studying jihadist movements, I have never seen a successful jihadist leader evolve into a democrat or embrace representative government.”

What’s more, during her confirmation hearing earlier this year, Trump’s current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, denounced Sharaa for “dancing in the streets on 9/11”. And while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not directed such pointed criticism at the Syrian president, there were other, subtler indications that he would not support the new Islamist leadership in Damascus: in March, new photos revealed that Hegseth had the word “kafir” — meaning “infidel” or “non-believer” — tattooed on his arm in Arabic. All this made this week’s developments particularly striking. After meeting President Sharaa, Trump had nothing but praise for him, calling him a “young, attractive guy, a tough guy with a strong past”.

Trump’s new Syria policy, then, seems to put him at odds with top members of his own team. It also suggests that there are other powerful figures who hold considerable sway over his decision-making. Trump has credited Sharaa’s two most ardent backers in the region, Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with convincing him to lift US sanctions on Syria. That they were able to do so suggests that both Riyadh and Ankara now play a preeminent role in shaping Washington’s thinking in the Middle East. It also implies that Trump is not taking all his cues from Israel. Earlier this year, it was reported that Israel had lobbied the US to keep its sanctions on Syria. And, just a few weeks ago, the IDF bombed an area next to the presidential palace in Damascus, only one of the many attacks it has launched against Syria since Assad’s fall. Now, in a dramatic turn of events, Trump is establishing friendly relations with the new Syrian president — on a trip to the Middle East with no scheduled stop in Israel.

Indeed, this week’s trip has exhibited Trump’s predilection for forming alliances with erstwhile foes. Trump emphasized that he was “willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be profound… I have never believed in having permanent enemies.” And in Trump’s world, new relationships are best solidified through dealmaking. This week’s deals have been of a historic size: on Tuesday, Trump secured a $600-million commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States. Sharaa has proven a quick study: though Syria lacks Saudi Arabia’s enormous financial resources, he reportedly offered Trump what he could: a Trump Tower in Damascus. During his meeting with Trump yesterday, Sharaa also invited the United States to invest in Syria’s oil and gas sector.

But, as Cafiero says, American investors will likely remain hesitant, at least initially. Instead, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will be Syria’s most important partners in making investments. The sanctions may soon vanish, but terrorism designations are just one reason why Western governments and companies may be reluctant to invest. With the US looking to reduce its military footprint in the region while strengthening its business partnerships, Trump’s friends in the Gulf appear poised to consolidate their influence in the new Syria.

The stock markets have currently put a high price on these tech companies. But AI is also commanding a high price from America’s foreign and security policy community: it will change the nature of warfare more profoundly than any other innovation we have experienced in our lifetimes. Ronald Reagan’s infamous Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars, failed because the old technology could not deliver the precision that was needed. But AI could make it a reality and America’s concern is that China might get there first.

But America also worries that they are leading the charge with AI-powered drones. We think of drones as modern, but those used in the Russia-Ukraine war still need an operator. Imagine, then, if one side had AI-powered drones at their disposal? The West and NATO may be comfortable in their current — swiftly dating — military capabilities. But AI warfare is a completely new game.

And China is already forging ahead in the two areas that will prove critical. The first is the supply of energy — which is vital to power large AI data centers. The West should be concerned by the sheer scale of the expansion of China’s energy capacity. China has a renewable capacity target of 2,461 gigawatts by 2030. The corresponding numbers for the EU and US are respectively 1,100 and 500 gigawatts. For the Chinese, the heavy lifting will come from renewable sources, such as the  world’s largest hydropower plant in Tibet, which will have an energy capacity roughly the size of Germany’s capacity today. Just from one single dam. This dam is not even included in China’s target number.

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AI is furiously energy-hungry. As the car industry has only recently found out, the electric car is not just an evolution — it is a different product. The same applies to anything reliant on AI. Germany’s Rheinmetall is a formidable producer of ammunition and tanks. They make the best tanks in the world. But they are old-school — the heavy-metal version of defense manufacturing. You don’t want to be in one of them when being attacked by a swarm of AI-powered drones.

And so, as China marches ahead, Europe’s absurd data protection regulations and AI regulation effectively criminalize the 21st century’s most important evolving business sector. The Financial Times reported that British soldiers were prevented from using signal jamming on the grounds that it violated GDPR. Europeans have, in general, no idea what damage they are inflicting upon themselves with their absurd data protection obsession. And no clue what it does to their security. In the gilded foreign policy salons of Europe’s capitals, you will not hear much about AI-drones, or satellite-based AI-missiles systems. It is as though AI has yet to be invented in the Western foreign policy universe.

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China, meanwhile, has more energy than we do, puts serious money into AI, and is not regulating itself to death. Take 5G. While we Europeans struggle with it, the Chinese are already developing 6G — the technology which is needed to handle the communications for next generation manufacturing.

This is the second critical area in which China is excelling: high-tech manufacturing. In the US and the UK, the prevailing view is that sophisticated countries should move into services and leave the shop-floor economy to upstarts like China. This is a story we have been telling ourselves for too long. And it is one that economists, in particular, don’t understand. They think it is more efficient to let China do all the manufacturing, for the US to specialize in high tech and finance, and to let Europe be a museum. They are simultaneously oblivious to those voters who want real jobs, to the nature of 21st-century manufacturing, and to security concerns.

The irony here is that the US understands the AI-service economy like no one else. And it still just about leads the world in research. But China has been able to catch up because all the new technology is open-source. As an anonymous employee at Google candidly admitted: “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI.” Nor does the US. This is not a world of secret algorithms, or of industrial patents. The costs of entry are low — all you need is a bunch of desktop computers with a good graphics card. Anyone can join in. In the old world, the technology leadership meant that the US was years ahead of the competition. No more.

But the threat from China is more sophisticated than just copying our homework. They are better at producing and deploying at scale. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said years ago that his company picked China for its manufacturing not because it was cheap, but because they were good at it. Similarly, Elon Musk built his main European car plant in Germany because they know a thing or two about manufacturing. But there are also downsides — which he has recently discovered — but he still respects the skills. And while Germany’s mid-tech manufacturing economic model is no longer working, there are still skills in Germany and other European countries that may be tapped for a US keen on reinventing manufacturing.

While the US is keen for manufacturing to return to its shores, we must be clear that this doesn’t mean the reanimation of those old blue-collar jobs that were lost in the Rust Belt. This industry will be run by robots, not men, and serviced by robots. This isn’t about jobs. This is about capability.

For the US to acquire these capabilities, it needs allies. The Biden administration did manage to lure Europeans into relocating to the US through the Inflation Reduction Act. And Trump is trying to do the same through his much cruder policy of tariffs. The means are different, but the goal is ultimately the same — to get European companies to invest in the US.

I doubt, though, that Trump’s tariffs will turn the US into an Industry 4.0 manufacturing powerhouse, capable of competing with China. It has taken Beijing 30 years to get from a position of a pre-industrial economy to where they are now. Energy and manufacturing are what matters in this 21st-century arms race. China is streets ahead on both. The only chance the US has in this race is to build a clever alliance. The Riyadh meetings are useful. I still have not heard a plausible plan that tells us where the manufacturing know-how will come from.

In a bid to wean his nation off its oil addiction, de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has approved the building of numerous such resorts to lure high-end tourists to the kingdom. The most egregious, and least plausible, is a ski resort planned for the arid mountain town of Trojena, which plans to pump out snow for three months a year for the merriment of international ski bums. This energy-guzzling resort forms part of Neom, MBS’s futuristic giga-project in north-west Saudi Arabia. If you look it up online, you will find a fantasy world of yachting marinas, soaring buildings, and elegant people in European attire exploring the rugged beauty of Arabia and its dazzling Red Sea coast.

For many Western architects hedged by planning laws at home, the lure of building in Saudi Arabia’s wild west is irresistible — despite the nation’s abysmal record on human rights and the environment. Even after the murder and dismemberment of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, at the hands of a team sent specially from Riyadh, the architectural bonanza continues apace. According to Architects’ Journal, dozens of UK architecture firms are understood to be involved in Vision 2030, the array of projects overseen by MBS, of which Neom forms a part.

One of these firms is Foster + Partners. Although English architect Norman Foster stepped back from the board overseeing Neom after Khashoggi’s murder, his practice has only deepened its engagement. It is currently designing a two-kilometer-high tower near Riyadh, set to be the world’s tallest; a six-runway “aerotropolis”; and what is described as “the world’s first fully immersive experiential marine life center” at the Amaala Red Sea resort on the Gulf. For his role in building Neom’s airport, Foster has been strongly reprimanded by the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), which stated that “based on Saudi Arabia’s reputation for human rights abuse, slavery, and deaths in construction, working on projects there which are not critical would be unethical” — and contrary to the Royal Institute of British Architects’ professional code of practice.

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Meanwhile, more than a dozen beautiful football stadiums are also being designed by global architects including Populous and Foster + Partners. These are under construction or renovation ahead of the 2034 World Cup, which was awarded by FIFA to Saudi Arabia last December amid controversies about changed voting procedures and the concerns of human rights organizations.

In accepting such fantastical commissions, Western architects are choosing to overlook not only the murder of Khashoggi, but also the fallout from MBS’s massive construction projects. The region where Neom is located is the heartland of the Huwaitat tribe — rivals to the Al Saudi. According to human rights group ALQST, Saudi authorities have illegally displaced local tribes to make way for Neom, and cracked down violently on tribe members who resisted eviction. Several have been sentenced to execution. Today, the Huwaitats’ goat-hair tents have been replaced by temporary trailer-parks, housing more than 100,000 bureaucrats and construction workers.

Since then, The Wall Street Journal has exposed malpractice and corruption at the highest level of Neom, with senior executives who were banned for corruption in Europe still practicing freely in Arabia. As the newspaper put it, MBS “allows what many consider bad behavior as long as an executive delivers on his vision”. Meanwhile, on the ground, workers on The Line are reportedly subjected to 16-hour days and poor working conditions. An ITV documentary aired last October, Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, estimated that 21,000 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh have died since 2016 while working on Saudi’s giga-projects.

If bad behavior won’t give MBS pause, perhaps the project’s finances will, as hoped-for foreign investors are deterred less by human rights abuses than Neom’s dubious economic prospects. According to the WSJ, a draft board audit last summer estimated the amount required to complete Neom by 2080 at $8.8 trillion — that’s 25 times more than the annual Saudi budget. The audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” of finances by “certain members of management”, aided by McKinsey & Co.

Yet it seems little will tear MBS from his futuristic vision. And so it is worth asking what Neom’s design reveals about its autocratic patron. The jewel in Neom’s crown is The Line, a steel and glass structure some 170 kilometers long with mirrors for walls and cascading terraces with plants and ponds. Nothing about its design seems “Islamic”. The original model was devised by veteran American architect Thom Mayne, who, unlike the late Tom Payette, designer of the impressive Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, has no experience of working in Muslim environments. Before designing the hospital, Payette, at his client’s request, visited numerous sites from Spain to Pakistan to study different styles of Islamic architecture. The idea was to learn how qualities of Muslim living as well as architecture could be incorporated into the hospital’s design. So far Mayne has made no such efforts.

It might not be too outlandish to describe Mayne’s linear vision as “Islamically illiterate” in terms of both its aesthetic as well as its social vision. While there may not be a consensus about what constitutes “Islamic architecture” globally, the rhythmic opposition of earth-bound domes and soaring minarets that characterize iconic masterpieces like the Taj Mahal in India or the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, are conspicuously absent. As Mayne himself explained to the Saudis, The Line’s rectilinear structure was inspired by deconstructing a map of New York.

In awarding the contract to Western designers oblivious of Muslim contexts, MBS and his apparatchiks demonstrated either an ignorance of the aesthetic and cultural traditions prevailing in the Muslim world, or, more probably, a disdain for them. Such contempt was on full display when the Al Saud clan destroyed the Ottoman fabric of Mecca, turning the holy city of Islam into a replica of Las Vegas.

In a recent plea to UK architects, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan, told the Architects’ Journal: “I’m proud that you are helping Saudi Arabia to develop, and this is what Jamal wanted, but please speak to them [Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal family] and remind them there is unfinished business here, which is Jamal.” It seems unlikely that in Saudi Arabia, a Disneyland for ambitious British architects, that Hanan’s plea will make the slightest headway. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, supposedly said when asked to explain the appeal of working on atomic weapons: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

As well as eight Premier Leagues and three FA Cups they also lifted the Champions League as part of a Treble in 2022-23. Under the Catalan manager Pep Guardiola they’ve also helped popularize a possession-based form of football at every level of the English game.

Now, though, an imminent judgment could transform their fortunes — and could have a potentially seismic impact on the English game as a whole.

The club faces 130 charges of breaching Financial Fair Play regulations between 2009-18 — that is, the first nine years after their acquisition by the UAE. Under the Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) introduced by the Premier League 10 years ago, clubs are permitted to lose no more than £105 million over a three-year period. The rules include various allowances for investment in, for example, stadium development, academies and women’s football.

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Last season, Everton were docked 10 points, reduced to six on appeal, for having lost £19.5 million more than the permissible amount. A further two points were then deducted for a loss of £16.6 million over the threshold in the following accounting window — a relatively low sanction, because the club had already been punished for two of the three years in question. Nottingham Forest were docked four points because their losses were £34.5 million over the threshold, which, in this case, since the club had spent two of the three seasons under consideration in the second tier, was £61 million.

Those can be considered benchmark figures. If City are found to be in breach — and it should be stressed that they deny all charges — it could be for hundreds of millions. In addition, Everton and Forest ultimately cooperated with the investigation into them. Of City’s charges, 35 relate to non-compliance. If they were found guilty, the punishment would almost certainly be severe. There has been talk of expulsion from the Premier League, but a hefty fine and huge points deduction is more likely — something that would make relegation all but certain.

That would circumvent the issue that if City were expelled, the Football League, which administers the Championship and Leagues One and Two, would be under no compulsion to accept them. It would also effectively lengthen the sanction to two years – one of being relegated and (at least) one in the Championship earning promotion. There would also be knock-on effects for future PSR calculations given City’s earning power would necessarily be reduced.

City are alleged to have manipulated their accounts in two ways. First, they’re accused of artificially inflating the value of sponsorship deals from companies linked to the club ownership. Second, it’s claimed they made third-party payments to players and coaches to top up their official salaries.

Der Spiegel, for instance, reported that when Roberto Mancini was appointed as manager in 2009, he signed not only a £1.45 million-a-year deal with City, but also a £1.75 million annual salary for four days a year of consultancy for the Abu Dhabi club Al Jazira, which happens to be owned by the City owner Sheikh Mansour.

The leaks that led to the Spiegel investigation also brought charges from Uefa, which initially banned City from the Champions League for two years, only for the Court of Arbitration for Sport to rule that many of the offences were time-barred, overturning the suspension.

There are broader questions here too. After all, some want to scrap the Financial Fair Play rule. They ask: would you interfere with the free market? Why stop owners from spending whatever they like on their clubs?

To which the answers are straightforward. First, it is not a free market if some of the parties involved are the investment arms of states; Saudi Arabia and the UAE are not free markets.

More to the point, sport is not a business like any other. It has a community role, but what is effectively being sold is not the excellence of a company’s product but the competition between clubs.

Two decades ago, I spoke to Zoran Avramović, the marketing manager of Red Star Belgrade, one of the two biggest clubs in Serbia. Nobody came to games any more, he said, because Red Star beat the smaller Serbian sides too easily, and then lost in Europe because their players never got used to having to defend and fight. “What should we do?” he asked plaintively. “Subsidize the little sides?” To which the response can only be: yes.

The Victorians understood this. The English league is the oldest in the world, founded in 1888. It was immediately realized that if a team won, that would attract more spectators. More spectators meant more money, which meant they could attract better players. And that meant they were more likely to win, a cycle leading to monopoly and tedium.

Initially, it was agreed that home teams should pay the away side $10, a levy that from 1918 became 20% of gate receipts, mitigating the advantage of having a bigger stadium. It was abolished only in 1983. In 1901, a maximum wage was introduced. Although the cap soon became seen as repressive, players battling it until it was eventually abolished in 1961, the initial intention was to reduce the capacity of wealthier sides to lure the best players to play for them.

A set of rules known as FFP (Financial Fair Play) was implemented by Uefa at the start of the 2011-12 season. Its initial aim was to prevent clubs overspending and getting into unmanageable debt. This is what happened at Leeds United under Peter Ridsdale, which ultimately threatened the club’s very existence. FFP also prevented owners acting as Roman Abramovich had after buying Chelsea in 2003, splurging cash and distorting the market.

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Nevertheless, City have consistently argued the regulations are unfair and protect the existing elite. They have taken a series of legal actions against the Premier League, challenging PSR under competition law.

City’s challenges reflect a paradox of football: that it is simultaneously a business and not a business, or at least not a conventional business.

This is a point the Crystal Palace owner Steve Parish made at the Financial Times Business of Football summit at the end of February. “We are constantly being told we are not a business but a sport,” he said, “and that we are part of the fabric of the community, and that we need to prioritize winning over everything. At the same time, we’re in court being treated to the Nth degree like a business.”

The Premier League itself operates effectively as a club; it has 20 members, each of whom have a vote. The regulations City keep challenging have all been voted for by the League, which requires a two-thirds majority for any change. And this is where the issue becomes potentially existential.

In an email published by Der Spiegel in 2018, a City lawyer claimed that the club chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, had said that he “would rather spend $30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years” than accept sanction from UEFA, which is football’s European governing body.

It’s safe to assume that if City are found guilty, they will appeal, and then potentially take legal action to overturn the verdict. They have much greater resources than the Premier League. The costs could therefore cripple the whole system, whatever the ultimate outcome.

But equally, if City are found not guilty, or if they are found guilty but other clubs feel the sanction is insufficient, these rivals could take their own legal action. The precedents of Everton and Forest are there.

There is plenty of fury about City and the way they have behaved, even leaving the specifics of the charges aside. It has even been mooted that a majority of clubs could quit the Premier League to rejoin the Football League, from which they split in 1992. That, frankly, seems unlikely, but it is a measure of the depth of feeling that it is being discussed at all.

And the consequences for City could be profound. Twice before, clubs have been found guilty of making significant illegal payments. The first were City themselves in 1906, the second Sunderland in 1957. Both ended up being relegated soon after. It took City 30 years to recover; Sunderland arguably never really have.

Then there’s the possibility of civil action. In March 2009, West Ham paid Sheffield United around $20 million to settle a claim that they had stayed up at Sheffield United’s expense by fielding Carlos Tévez when he was not properly registered.

If one club suing over relegation was worth $20 million then, what would multiple clubs suing over missed titles, missed qualification for Europe, missed prize money and relegation over multiple seasons look like now? The cost could be billions. Would Sheikh Mansour fund that? Would he retain his interest in the team at all? And if he and his funding went, what would City have left?

It had been 70 years since that FA Cup victory in 1955, 70 years in which a once-mighty club had swapped trophies for atrophy. It was a story all the more poignant for it mirroring the simultaneous industrial decline of the city and region. And now the story had a happy ending.

This is a city whose football club is its spiritual heart. Walk out of Central Station and you will see St James’ Park, a vertiginous and imposing old stadium, towering over you. In Newcastle, the club is at the center of civic life. As Wembley basked in the glow of regional pride, one could imagine Sir Bobby Charlton, his brother Jack, his uncle Jackie Milburn as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, English football legends all, looking down with pleasure. Nobody could have appreciated this victory more than Newcastle United fans. Only an extreme curmudgeon, or a Sunderland fan, would have remained unmoved.

We might never know whether the news of Newcastle’s win reached Malaz Prison, in Riyadh. Here, the fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi is serving 11 years, some of it in solitary confinement, for opposing male guardianship, campaigning against the hijab, and, according to her prosecutors, “going to the shops without wearing an abaya, photographing this, and publishing it on Snapchat”.

So much for the reforms promised by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. MBS. His close ally, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the chairman of Newcastle United. As al-Otaibi sat in jail, al-Rumayyan lifted the League Cup.

It is an uneasy contrast, and the imprisonment of al-Otaibi is only one example of the MBS regime behaving barbarically. Take the dismemberment, in 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an operation approved, according to the USA’s Director of National Intelligence, by MBS. Or the 2017 “Sheikh-down”, when the nation’s billionaires and captains of industry were corralled into Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Amid accusations of abuse and torture, they handed over their assets and paid fines to the state, now embodied by its Crown Prince, in return for their freedom.

Al-Rumayyan is the Crown Prince’s henchman in matters of sport, in which the Saudis are heavily invested. There is the LIV golf tour, viewed by critics as a hostile takeover of the sport, and there was the successful bid to host the 2034 Football World Cup. The kingdom has thrown money at the Saudi Pro League, signing expensive luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and has hosted numerous boxing world title fights and Formula 1 Grands Prix. One of MBS’ ambitions appears to be that young Saudi nationals — 60% of the population is under 30 — consume sport as a quasi-religion, it being a safer opiate than the extreme Islam that forged the nation’s most famous citizen, Osama bin Laden. Adherents of this kind of worldview might ask awkward questions about the legitimacy of the al-Saud dynasty.

Given that all this is taking place in a faraway land over which we have little influence, it is hard for football fans to know what to feel. Is the appropriate response revulsion at the sight of another British cultural institution being hawked to the highest bidder, regardless of human rights concerns, as the nation accepts its status as a post-imperial supplicant? Or should fans accept that they can’t change these circumstances and allow themselves to revel in a glorious sporting storyline?

Understandably, most Newcastle fans settle for the latter. A few, including the lifelong fan John Hird, have set up a campaign group called NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, which campaigns for al-Otaibi and the like. The group holds vigils outside St James’ Park – vigils that are often lonely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is playing a central role in current geo-political stakes. Last week, in the run-up to the final, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was meeting Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia was hosting talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukraine delegation. The Saudis, in short, were brokering peace between Russia and the West. In that context, the Carabao Cup seems a tiny footnote in the kingdom’s broader project.

In keeping with this central role for Saudi, President Trump directed his first phone call after his election victory to MBS. Trump’s first foreign trip, as it was in 2017, is likely to be to Riyadh. The world genuflects at the court of MBS, including the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, who visited in December, has said his “No 1 mission is for economic growth and for that we need Saudi Arabia”. Indeed we do, especially in a volatile world of Trumpian tariffs and a downgraded economic forecast from the OECD.

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Newcastle fans, though, have been burdened with the outsourced moral angst of a nation. Governments can sup with the Saudis with near-impunity, but football is held to a higher standard, castigated when it joins the gold rush to Riyadh. Naturally, Newcastle fans resent those questioning their joy. The country accepts Saudi money for its regeneration projects in the north of England, clean energy investments and stakes in Uber, Heathrow and Selfridges. Newcastle United happens to be the most visible target.

Newcastle City Council, controlled by Labour until a spate of resignations last November, recently met ALQST, a Saudi-focused human rights organization. But we shouldn’t expect the council to issue excoriations of the city’s new overlords. Aside from needing the votes of Newcastle United fans, the council is hoping that the Saudi state might emulate what Abu Dhabi did in east Manchester when the emirate bought Manchester City.  The area around the City of Manchester Stadium has been transformed: new housing, a health center, and sports facilities, as well as the Co-op Live Arena. The projected PIF takeover of Newcastle Airport may be the first local dividend outside of the football club.

Five years ago, when campaigners tore down the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, many cheered, not least those on the Left concerned with human rights. It is easy to be clear-sighted, 300 years later, about the awful contradiction of taking money from slavers to build wonderful churches, schools and civic amenities; it is harder to turn down Saudi money now. That money might improve the lives of ordinary people and regenerate the local economy – just as Colston’s money once did in the South-West.

Though Britain can seem a mere vassal state, the relationship isn’t quite as clear-cut as it appears. In his book States of Play, Miguel Delaney quotes the human rights activist Iyad el-Baghdadi on MBS. “He wants to be loved. And he wants his image [as a reformer] back.”  Another campaigner told me: “The Saudi authorities really don’t like it when you write about human rights issues. They want to be seen as reformers.”

Therein lies the contradiction. Saudi Arabia looks to Mecca in its prayers, but for investment assets and a degree of approval, it looks to London, New York and Paris. This approval is the only leverage that remains. Resisting the lure of Saudi money is like shouting at the moon: all well and good for purists, but ineffectual. Newcastle fans, being impotent, have little option other than to enjoy their moment. But our society should ask tougher questions of the Saudis, and we should not give in to the temptation to ignore the kingdom’s manifold human rights abuses. It is that Saudi longing for approval that provides the best hope of change.

In a sober moment, after the cup final hangovers have faded, perhaps we can remind ourselves that we have been here before. Not so long ago, we embraced an exciting geopolitical and trade partner. Its leaders’ henchmen were investing in soccer clubs and transforming London’s economy. That President Putin seemed such a nice guy.

Investing as the head of the Witkoff Group, he has been updating classic Manhattan office buildings like the Woolworth tower and creating luxury condominium high-rises like 111 Murray Street. Even today, his son Alex is rescuing One High Line — the pair of angular Bjarke Ingels-designed waterfront towers in West Chelsea — from an ignominious fate as the misbegotten condo development of a collapsed investing group.

Along the way, Witkoff has built a reputation for a high risk tolerance that suits Trump as the two of them seek to settle the ultimate real-estate dispute: namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The prize is unquestionably attractive. Yet given the stakes and the sensitivity of the region, Gotham-style real-estate wrangling could also prove disastrous.

Witkoff’s journey to the world of high diplomacy began, of course, in his friendship with fellow developer Trump. Indeed, so close are the two men that Witkoff was on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago last year when a second failed assassination attempt was made on Trump. According to a New York real-estate source, who declined to be identified because he didn’t want to get involved in Trumpian affairs, Witkoff’s grandson was named Donald after his grandfather’s friend, the president. And Trump attended Alex’s bar mitzvah reception, the person said.

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Trump rewarded Witkoff’s personal loyalty by naming the latter his envoy to the Middle East. When it comes to the bedeviling region, Trump has from the beginning thought outside the box. Witkoff’s position is roughly the same as that of Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, also a major figure in New York real estate — in the first term. Despite just about no previous experience as a mediator, Jared, son of real-estate mogul Charles Kushner, produced the Abraham Accords that opened diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Kushner sees the Middle East as a real-estate opportunity — albeit, one in which the main hazards aren’t so much New York regulators withholding construction permits as Islamist groups and states that periodically go boom. Kushner parlayed his position in the first Trump administration into the leadership of Miami-based Affinity Partners, an investment firm which he founded and which has been raising investment capital largely from Middle Eastern companies — $3.1 billion as of October, to be exact, according to a Wall Street Journal story.

Witkoff brings a similar mentality to the region. Although Witkoff, like Kushner, lacks previous diplomatic experience, he does have an international cast of friends and contacts, in the Middle East and around the world. A longtime associate in New York’s real-estate industry calls him an “excellent negotiator”.

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Despite nominally serving as the president’s ears and mouth in the Middle East, Witkoff was also dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the release of Marc Fogel, a teacher who had been held in prison for three years on marijuana charges. Witkoff is also part of the negotiating team seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war, over and against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s objections and others who warn that the Trumpians are ignoring Kyiv. Witkoff is unperturbed by such talk. In a news conference shortly after Fogel’s release, he described his role this way: “He [Trump] asks, and we say yes.”

Witkoff, in his light brown overcoat and perfectly starched collar, has become a fixture of television news as he represents the Trump administration globally. It’s a long way from the days in the early Nineties, when he used to personally collect rent, while carrying a gun, from his tenants in The Bronx, and where he got his start in the business.

Born in 1957 in The Bronx, he graduated from Hofstra Law School on Long Island in 1983. Afterwards, he landed a job with the real-estate law firm Dreyer & Traub, where one of his clients was none other than … Donald Trump. He then formed a partnership with the late Laurence Gluck that was known as Stellar Management (the “Ste” in Stellar stood for Steve, and the “Lar” part stood for Larry).

Although their business and political paths have long overlapped and even converged, Witkoff’s approach to real estate differs from Trump’s. While Trump built his brand around showy towers, resorts, and golf courses, Witkoff followed a more tried-and-true path through commercial and residential real estate, keeping a low profile and letting his bank accounts do the talking.

Even so, Witkoff would gain a measure of notoriety that few real-estate investors achieve. He moved fast in the business, blowing his way past the stodgy families headed by scions three or four generations removed from the enterprising paterfamilias. He was a scrappy hustler determined to build on his early successes. It helped that this was the Nineties, when commercial real estate had been beaten down by the savings-and-loan scandal, which led to the bankruptcy of several small banks that had a large number of failing new properties on their books. Those who bought low were richly rewarded. Witkoff was one of them.

He was fortunate, too, to have in his corner a financier named Andrew Stone of Credit Suisse First Boston. Stone — who viewed himself as the “Star Trek lender”, boldly lending where others on Wall Street wouldn’t — made bets on up-and-coming real-estate entrepreneurs who showed the ability to spot properties with the potential to bring in enough money to achieve well over their debt service. Besides Witkoff, Stone backed Trump, the developer Harry Macklowe, hotelier Ian Schrager, and the post-Soviet fertilizer king-turned-development mogul Tamir Sapir, among others.

What set Stone apart from most financiers in his position was his willingness to underwrite as much as 97% of a commercial real-estate purchase. That can be deadly if the property doesn’t lease up — if it fails to find enough tenants willing to pay a premium for the quality and location. But if it does lease up, the owner can amass untold riches. Hence, Witkoff’s reputation for high-risk, high-reward deals.

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Besides the famed Woolworth Building, designed by celebrated architect Cass Gilbert, Witkoff’s portfolio at one time included the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, which the tabloid long ago abandoned, and 33 Maiden Lane downtown.

“He can be tough when he needs to be tough, and he can be charming when he needs to be charming,” said Jonathan Mechanic, chairman of the real-estate department at the law firm Fried Frank and a key figure in New York commercial real estate. “Although I’m not sure I would have seen this coming 20 years ago. I have no doubt that he can feel comfortable talking to anybody at any time.”

Mechanic recalled joining Witkoff at a meeting with Goldman Sachs on the financing of the Daily News building. Witkoff “had been up in The Bronx, and he had his gun attached to his ankle. When he leaned forward, and the gun could be seen”. Aware of the impression he’d made, Witkoff vowed to “come a little lighter afoot” next time.

Whether this combination of gun-toting gumption and charm can bring peace to the Middle East’s warring factions is a different question. As it is, America’s Arab allies have been left unnerved by Trump’s brainstorm for removing Gaza’s population to develop the territory into a sort of Middle East riviera. At stake is nothing less than the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include what once was unthinkable: formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

High risk, high reward, indeed.

The message from Donald Trump’s peace talks on Tuesday is clear: Saudi Arabia is now the most influential Arab country. Far outranking Egypt, the kingdom is well placed to benefit from America’s freewheeling new foreign policy, especially given that MBS enjoys remarkably close relationships with figures at the very heart of Trumpworld. From making peace with Israel to securing nuclear weapons, the second Trump term could transform Saudi foreign policy.

From a Saudi perspective, arguably the most significant US presence at the talks in Riyadh was not Rubio, or even National Security Advisor Mike Walz, but rather Steve Witkoff. Trump’s Middle East envoy, and sometime golf buddy, was the President’s pick to meet Putin in Moscow last week. According to Trump, the encounter lasted “for a very extended period” — and that isn’t the only sign of his influence.

Witkoff, like Trump, is a billionaire real estate magnate who knows how to get things done. Even before his boss was formally inaugurated, and as the Biden administration faced blockages with the Gaza hostage deal, Witkoff defied convention (being Jewish himself) by conspicuously insisting that Benjamin Netanyahu break the Sabbath to meet him. Though not at that point officially in post, Witkoff then flew to Doha, where he spent time with Biden’s own Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, who for his part praised the meeting, telling the Washington Post of a “very close partnership” that even extended to friendship.

As Trump’s envoy to a notoriously unstable region, Witkoff will doubtless face formidable obstacles. But in a diplomatic landscape where personal fixers are increasingly replacing professionals from the State Department, he’s unlikely to be outflanked by officials who work by the book. And in MBS, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, he also finds a partner deeply familiar with the world of Washington-Riyadh diplomacy.

Trump himself has always set great store on his relationship with the Saudis. During his first presidency, in May 2017, Riyadh was the first foreign capital he visited. In part, this preoccupation can be understood strategically, with the country a huge market for American weaponry, and a key to shoring up Israel and US Gulf allies against pressure from Iran.

Yet he had friends there too. In his May 2017 visit, Trump was accompanied by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. The latter had formed a strong personal bond with MBS, at that point the kingdom’s deputy crown prince. Over the course of private conversations, and hinting too at Kushner’s friendship with the Netanyahus, the pair likely decided they could short-circuit the usual diplomatic process and forge a peace between Israelis and Palestinians — all while outflanking other regional actors. Never mind that Kushner had no knowledge of the region, beyond his family’s support for Israeli non-profits supporting Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank: his friendship with MBS made him influential.

Some American officials believed that the Saudis and their Emirati allies were treating Kushner as a “useful idiot” in their designs against the Islamic Republic. But Kushner and his friends in the White House could also see the advantage in having an ally in the Saudi court at a time of growing, if unacknowledged, alignment between Israel and the Gulf monarchies. As Martin Indyk, a former US diplomat, told the New York Times: “The relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman constitutes the foundation of the Trump policy not just toward Saudi Arabia but toward the region.”

After the shocking murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist killed at his country’s consulate in Istanbul, Kushner’s relationship with MBS came under growing public scrutiny. Revelations about their “bromance” took an especially sinister turn when it appeared that Kushner might be less interested in brokering Middle East peace than in having the Saudis rescue his own family’s finances in exchange for helping them acquire nuclear weapons.

Thanks to a disastrous investment in a New York property, complete with the apocalyptic address of 666 Fifth Avenue, the business Kushner shared with his father Charles was in dire straits. Kushner Jr looked to the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, but they turned him down. He was rescued instead by Brookfield Asset Management, a company that owns Westinghouse Electric, a nuclear services business hoping to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has always claimed it wanted the technology for civilian purposes, even as it insisted on producing its own nuclear fuel, rather than buying it more cheaply abroad.

Shortly after being rebuffed by the Qataris, and in his role as Trump’s senior foreign policy advisor, Kushner provided critical US support for a diplomatic assault on Qatar. After a long period of tension, with Qatar seen as much more friendly to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Iran, with which it shares the world’s largest field of natural gas, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ultimately blockaded the country. According to media reports at the time, Kushner was instrumental in undermining efforts by the then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — a seasoned oil man familiar with the region — to end the standoff. Soon enough, Tillerson himself was out, peremptorily dismissed by Trump in March 2018.

The Khashoggi scandal initially embarrassed the first Trump administration, not least because the victim was well known in Washington and had friends on Capitol Hill. The manner of Khashoggi’s death — he was first strangled, then brutally dismembered — hardly helped. Yet after talking on the phone to both Saudi’s king and its crown prince, Trump bought into the story that the killing had been the work of rogue actors. Here, Kushner’s role appears to have been pivotal. Though officials had tried to restrict his communications with MBS, in accordance with protocols that members of the National Security Council should participate in all calls with foreign leaders, the two men continued to talk and text on WhatsApp. With US intelligence agencies concluding that the killing may have been ordered by MBS himself, Kushner became the prince’s most important defender inside the White House, perhaps unsurprising when the duo are on first-name terms.

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MBS can now rest assured he has a powerful friend in the White House. Yet challenges remain, particularly since the horrors of the Hamas massacre and the annihilation of Gaza that followed. From a personal perspective, the crown prince has said he has no interest in the “Palestinian issue” — but must take account of the fact that his young population does. Before the Hamas attack, his aims were clear enough. In return for “normalizing” relations with Israel in line with the Abraham Accords, signed by the UAE and Bahrain, the Saudis would secure a comprehensive security deal with the United States. Notably, that included backing for its stop-start nuclear ambitions. The October 7 atrocity put paid to that project. As even Joe Biden acknowledged, one of the reasons Hamas attacked Israel was because the Saudis were about to “sit down with” their old rivals in Tel Aviv.

On this particular issue, Trump’s foreign policy could yet cause the Saudis problems. Think about it like this: can MBS really go along with Trump’s mad scheme to take over Gaza, and ethnically cleanse its Palestinian population, while also maintaining that there must be an irreversible “pathway” to Palestinian statehood — a scheme Netanyahu has devoted his whole career to wrecking. It would be ironic indeed if Kushner’s friendship with one Middle Eastern ruler scuppered his plans with another.

There may of course be some wiggle room here. On Fox News, Steve Witkoff suggested that Trump’s resettlement plan — rejected by Jordan and Egypt — was really his way of starting a new conversation: “Now you have the Egyptians saying we have a plan, the Jordanians are saying we have a plan, and people are really engaging in really important cogent discussions…We are actually engaged in a productive conversation around what is best for Gaza and how do we make peoples’ lives better.” At a summit in Cairo later this month, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan are expected to put forward the Arab plan for Gaza. Having dangled before Trump a $600 billion investment in the US and the promise of a reduction in oil prices, MBS won’t be without leverage.

***

Malise Ruthven’s latest book, Unholy Kingdom: Religion, Corruption and Violence in Saudi Arabia (Verso), is out on 25 February.

“We’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands and thousands of jobs,” he gushed while discussing Gaza’s potential to become the Middle East’s “Riviera”. This followed comments he made immediately after his inauguration about its “phenomenal location on the sea — best weather”.

The Palestinians who live in Gaza would, he continued, be taken in by Egypt and Jordan. Both countries, he was certain, would “open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done and people can live in harmony and peace”.

Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to him, was clearly taken by surprise, though clearly also not entirely unpleasantly. These words were, he said, “worth paying attention to”. Trump, he added, “sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism… I think it’s something that could change history”.

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In contrast, allies and adversaries across the world mainly reacted with the same horror that was written across White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ face as Trump outlined his vision. Hamas called the plan “racist” and vowed to prevent its implementation, while the Palestinian Authority described it — not incorrectly — as a severe breach of international law.

Jordan and Egypt were similarly outraged. Both receive huge amounts of US aid (third and fourth largest recipients respectively in 2023), which means that Washington does have considerable leverage. But when you consider what is being asked, and of whom, then even those colossal sums are likely to be inadequate.

Let’s start with Jordan. When it became an independent state, in 1946, it did so as a largely Palestinian one — led by a British-installed Hashemite monarchy. Today, one in five Jordanians is of Palestinian descent, while more than two million Palestinian refugees already live there. For Amman to absorb more would threaten its very viability as a Hashemite state.

There’s also a deeper anxiety here. Back in 1970, during the Black September conflict, Jordanian forces and Palestinian groups clashed after a failed assassination attempt on King Hussein and the hijacking of four planes by a Palestinian terror group. A massacre ensued, and only ended with the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. The Hashemite monarchy internalized a lesson: give the Palestinians any room in the country and they will try to take control. Import a million or so now, and the result might not be so favorable. King Abdullah may not want to go against Washington, but if it’s a choice between that or the end of his monarchy then there is no choice.

Egypt is, arguably, even more vulnerable if there were a Palestinian influx. The idea that President el-Sisi, who overthrew the Brotherhood in a coup, will now import its offshoot, Hamas, is hardly serious. Nor can he afford to be seen as complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Polling by the Washington Institute a year ago found that 97% of Egyptians agreed Arab states should “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel, in protest against its military action in Gaza”. El-Sisi has maintained relations with Israel. But imagine his people’s reaction if he helped Jerusalem empty Gaza.

An angry population is a destabilizing one. And Egypt is already an economic basket case, suffering from inflation, a nosediving currency and substantial debt. If it collapses, the region and the world will suffer the consequences. And if there is one state in the world that has a particular interest in Egypt holding together, it is Israel. To have 16 million desperate Egyptians on its border would probably be a threat greater than any it has yet faced.

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The anger at Trump’s Riviera has reverberated beyond Palestine’s immediate neighbors. Normalization with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been a longstanding goal of both the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, but after Trump’s words Riyadh was unequivocal that there would be no diplomatic relations with Israel without a Palestinian state. I know from multiple sources that the Saudis don’t actually care about the Palestinians; and that their crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is desperate for normalization with Jerusalem. But Trump’s real estate plan has left Riyadh with no alternative but to publicly support a two-state solution (which was not necessary for the signing of the Saudi-supported Abraham Accords). Since this is out of the question for Netanyahu, Trump has inadvertently pushed normalization further out of reach.

That the “plan” would be a gross violation of international law is probably irrelevant to Trump. But if he were to succeed in turning Gaza into a riviera, what does he think the millions of displaced Gazans would do? They would consider it a second Nakba. Gaza city would become a seafront paradise where residents sipped Negronis under rocket fire from Egypt and took cold plunges as Hamas terrorists emerged bellowing from tunnels across the border. US troops would be stuck there for decades. Surely a less-than-ideal scenario for a man who has repeatedly stated his desire to end US involvement in foreign wars.

Netanyahu understands all this. He is a sociopath with a messiah complex; he genuinely believes his destiny is to save Western civilization from the scourge of radical Islam. He is also the man who, before October 7, brought Israel to the brink of civil unrest. But he is also incredibly smart and probably the most able state leader in the world right now. His assessment that Trump’s proposal was “worth paying attention to” was pointedly mealy-mouthed — in contrast to his fascistic former coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir’s enthusiastic assessment that Trump’s plan represents “the only solution”.

But if this idea is dangerous, impetuous and unlikely to see the light of day, the impulse behind it (even though borne from instinct rather than design) — to think about a seemingly unsolvable problem in a new light, however crazed, is perhaps worthwhile. As policy, Trump’s Gaza plan is a disaster; as a thought experiment, it’s absurd. But such an unthinkable suggestion might actually kickstart the sort of unorthodox, disruptive thinking that has eluded more measured, knowledgeable and sharper minds for almost 60 years — and which has helped to keep peace so tortuously at bay for so long.

The unexpected collapse of Assad’s regime, propped up by Russia and Iran, was the result of years of meticulous planning by Hussain al-Shara’a, known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — an offshoot of al-Qaeda based in the Turkish-protected enclave of Idlib outside of Assad’s control. An astute operator who currently appears to prioritise governing Syria over messianic dreams of global jihad, Jolani timed his offensive to benefit from the US-sponsored ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, when the latter’s fighters had been withdrawn from Syria or neutralised. Meanwhile, Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine.

Assad’s fall is a major blow to Iran and a victory for Israel in its drawn-out contest with the Islamic Republic. But the biggest winner is probably Turkey, whose leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a “soft” supporter of Islamism. The power vacuum created by the fall of the Assad’s regime, with soldiers abandoning their units, leaves the country with a number of forces outside of Jolani’s control. These include the Syrian National Army —  a militia supported by Turkey — as well as Iran-linked Iraqi militias and Kurdish forces in the north-east. The southern border has its own cluster of militias, including some manned by the Druze minority.

Jolani has signalled inclusiveness, ordering his fighters not to “instil fear” into people of different sects. The Shi’ite minorities, such as Alawites and Ismailis, will be feeling especially vulnerable, given the extent to which they relied on Assad’s Alawite-dominated Baathist regime for protection. Yet there is no guarantee that Jolani will succeed in asserting his authority over the mosaic of Syria’s different faith or ethnic communities, which tend to arm themselves in times of civil strife. While a majority of Syrians are Sunni, its society contains a large diversity of ethnic and religious communities including Alawis, Armenians, Assyrians, Chechens, Druzes, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Ismailis and Turkomans. Before the civil war erupted, in 2011, polarising religious forces between Salafist-oriented groups supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Syria had an impressive record of permitting pluralist religious spaces, though not political dissent.

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Assad’s fall is sure to have unnerved Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), along with other wealthy Gulf rulers. While they may relish the Iranian setback — two of Iran’s “axis of resistance” allies, Assad and Hezbollah, have effectively been sent off the field — the deeper implications of Syrian regime change must seem threatening. After years of civil war, during which some half a million people were killed and 14 million displaced, and which saw cities such as Aleppo pulverised by Russian air power and Syrian air force barrel bombs, the situation appeared to have been stabilised. The mainly Sunni rebels were safely contained in the north-western enclave of Idlib. And in May 2023, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, a mark of “normalisation” supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Now, the region has fallen to chaos again. The kings and emirs of the Gulf have good reasons to fear that the recent scenes of jubilation in Damascus and other Syrian cities could become harbingers of a new Arab Spring. After all, popular feeling against repressive political structures often poses a threat to incumbent regimes, especially to dynastic rulers such as the Assads or Sauds. As the Israeli analyst Zvi Bar’el observes: “When militias take over a country, regardless of their ideology, it threatens traditional regimes that rely on authoritarian control. Such success as was seen in the Arab Spring, is contagious and encourages the revival of organisations and rebel movements.”

Saudi Arabia was relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring in 2011. A “Day of Rage” announced on Facebook aimed at imitating the massive street protests occurring in Cairo and other Arab capitals, but the movement fizzled out after would-be demonstrators received messages on their phones threatening fines or national expulsion. By contrast, in neighbouring Bahrain, where a Sunni dynasty presides over a restive Shi‘a majority, there were weeks of sit-ins and protests. The Saudis eventually sent troops across the causeway to assist the island’s government in restoring order.

The Assad regime may come to loom large in the annals of human torture and misery after a decade of civil war. But the Western-friendly Saudis, who are not currently facing the threat of internal conflict, can hardly be described as laggards in this area, with their high levels of political repression. Since MBS became the de facto ruler in 2015, around 1,400 people have been executed by the state, including minors.

The triumph of Jolani, and his Turkish backers, poses a dilemma for MBS. He and other Gulf rulers may be happy to see the anti-Western “axis of resistance” defanged, based as it is on a “Shi‘ite crescent” stretching from Iran to the Shi‘ite heartlands of southern Lebanon. The Saudi kingdom was founded on an alliance between the tribal power of the Al Saud family and the explicitly anti-Shi‘ite ideology of Wahhabism — and, for a long time, its strategy was to foster a disdain towards or even hatred of Shi’ism that persists to this day. When the Sunni minority in Iraq felt vulnerable after the US invasion that removed the (Sunni) Saddam Hussein, Saudi clerics spread fear of the Shi’ite danger, warning against the murder, torture and displacement of Sunni Iraqis. After the Arab Spring uprisings that lit the fuse of civil war in Syria, the Saudi government adopted a policy of “‘sectarianisation”. Madawi al-Rasheed, a historian and anthropologist, sees this as “a deliberate counter-revolutionary strategy…deployed to exaggerate religious differences and hatred and prevent the development of national non-sectarian politics”.

More than a decade ago, the emergence in Syria of a Sunni-dominated regime of neo-fundamentalist or “salafist” colouring would have suited the Saudi agenda perfectly. Over the years, the Saudi regime has spent billions of petrodollars promoting salafism (a neo-conservative type of religiosity, with emphasis on outward observance) throughout the Islamic world. According to several estimates, the sums spent by the Saudis on dawa (evangelism) prior to 2016 ranges from $70 billion to $100 billion. This dynamic dates back to the oil-boom years of King Faisal (r. 1964-75), who saw the Muslim Brotherhood and other salafist movements as necessary counterweights to the secular-oriented Arab nationalism promoted by Egypt’s charismatic leader Abd al-Nasser. Muslim Brotherhood exiles, such as Muhammad Qutb, brother of the movement’s leading intellectual Sayyid Qutb, were welcomed to teach in the Saudi kingdom, where Muhammad’s students included the young Osama bin Laden.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 and, more strongly, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 (with 15 of the 19 hijackers hailing from Saudi Arabia) led to an eventual volte-face in Saudi religious orientation. The change was epitomised by a state-sanctioned sermon delivered by Shaikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, hailing the vision of MBS as the “young, ambitious, and divinely-inspired” crown prince, comparable to the great Umar ibn-al-Khattab, second caliph of Islam or “deputy” to the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon, broadcast live on cable networks and social media, was delivered less than three weeks after the murder and physical dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A former champion of the Saudi regime, Khashoggi was like Erdoğan a “soft” supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood — a movement that includes not only hardened jihadists such as Jolani, but constitutionally minded politicians such as Rachid al-Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. The Brotherhood, once championed by King Faisal, is now anathematised in both the Gulf (with the exception of Qatar) and Washington as the primary threat to dynastic rule.

The Saudi volte-face was a necessary prerequisite to the Abraham Accords signed between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE in September 2020, (and later with Sudan and Morocco). It was negotiated in part by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a family friend and political supporter of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In September 2023, Saudi Arabia was on the point of “normalising” relations with Israel, with Riyadh allowing journalists to write op-eds in their favour, and MBS himself telling the US Fox News that “every day we get closer” to a deal. The October 7 attack by Hamas, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking several hundred hostages, put paid to these prospects, as Israel’s counter-attack on Gaza produced Dresden-like scenes of urban devastation and many thousands of civilian casualties. Last November, at a gathering of Islamic leaders in Riyadh, the Crown Prince even used the “G-word”, accusing Israel of carrying out “collective genocide” against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Although the Gaza war may be coming to an end, “normalisation” between the Saudi kingdom and Israel now seems a distant prospect — even if Kushner returns as his father-in-law’s Middle East adviser next year. The international outrage caused by the Gaza counter-attack, along with genocidal statements by some Israeli leaders and the evident failure of the Biden administration to restrain its Israeli ally, has put the lid on normalisation for the foreseeable future. While Saudi Arabia, unlike Qatar, lacks a free press, polls are sometimes permitted. A rare poll published in December 1993 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 90% of Saudis think that Arab countries should sever all ties with Israel “in protest against its military action in Gaza”.

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By Edward Luttwak

Thanks largely to the Gaza war, and to the failure of the Trump administration to retaliate in support of the Saudis after an Iranian attack on the oil refinery at Abqaiq in September 2019, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from US dependency. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023 was brokered, not by Kushner or the White House, but by President Xi Jinping of China. When the Chinese president visited Riyadh in December 2022, he was given fulsome honours. Not only was he greeted with a purple carpet, but Saudi jets escorted his plane streaming the green and white colours of the national flag. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to visit, MBS kept him waiting for some 12 hours before granting him an audience.

Saudi Arabia’s orientation away from the West and towards the global south is heralded by its upcoming membership of Brics. It will join the existing acronymic members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — alongside Iran, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia. Though faced with declining oil revenues, MBS may be heartened by the fact that he is now able to trade oil products in the Chinese currency, avoiding the sanctions imposed on Russia by US dollar leverage. And despite the cutbacks on his ambitious plans for Vision 2030, aimed at weaning his economy off oil, a future in a world market dominated by China and the global south could be rosy indeed. That is provided he is clever enough, or lucky enough, to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi — or, indeed, of Bashar al-Assad.

That is true both in terms of scale, which was vast and could have killed 20,000 Israelis, were it not for the advanced Arrow interceptors, and in its very meagre results. A Gazan Palestinian died in the West Bank, and debris from intercepted missiles caused widespread but only superficial damage to civilian houses and airforce bases. Certainly, Israel will not dispatch its pilots all the way to Iran without destroying targets that materially weaken the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities. 

Not that Israel can act alone in choosing its targets. For while the US fully accepts that Netanyahu must respond for the sake of deterrence, the Biden Administration is equally reluctant to give the IDF carte blanche. For one thing, the White House doesn’t want Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Even now, those officials who run Biden’s foreign policy cling to their dream of reconciliation with Tehran, believing that all would now be well if only Trump had stuck by the nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, their former boss. 

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Iran is weaker than we think

By Edward Luttwak

To persist in that fantasy, of course, they’re obliged to ignore what Iran did with all the oil money it gained after US sanctions were lifted: the great build-up of Hezbollah, the Houthis and the other Shi’a militias; the large-scale importation of missile components from North Korea and China; and the growth of the Revolutionary Guard.

It’s clear, then, that Iran’s rulers were never interested in making peace with Washington. Nor, indeed, could they do so without losing power to the secular opposition now bitterly hostile to the Ayatollah’s rule. Still, because of the persistence of the Obama delusion, Israel is forbidden from attacking the Natanz centrifuge complex, where Iran enriches its uranium to weapons-grade levels. The Isfahan uranium hexafluoride plant, whose destruction would release highly corrosive radioactive gases, is also out of bounds, as is the Fordow centrifuge hall — deep inside a mountain and safe from bombs, but which could nonetheless be wrecked by air-to-ground missiles.

If the nuclear installations cannot be attacked, there is still the Khark Island oil terminal that delivers most of Iran’s exported oil, and which provides the foreign currency that Iran uses to import missile parts and pay its Shi’a proxies. Hezbollah, which even under Israeli bombardment relies on Iranian paychecks, is the most obvious example. But there’s also the Iraqi Kataeb militia, as well as the Houthis in western Yemen. Quite apart from the threat they pose to Israel, that last group has successfully disrupted much of the Mediterranean’s trade with Asia, even as European navies have sat back and watched. 

Beyond immediately weakening the militias — if unpaid, their men must find work elsewhere — bombing the Khark terminal would also accelerate Iran’s catastrophic inflation. Right now, it takes 42,105 rials to buy one dollar, up from 70 rials when the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979. That, in turn, would further increase opposition to the regime. After all, millions of salaried employees in Tehran already cannot afford proper meals for two weeks of every month, as modest salary increases are immediately outpaced by bewildering jumps in prices.  

Yet whatever the tactical and strategic advantages of destroying the Khark terminal platform, Biden officials oppose that too. Why? In essence, because they’ve been spooked by Iran’s not-so-veiled threat to bomb Saudi Arabia’s gigantic terminal at Ras Tanura. Handling over 15% of the world’s total oil supply, any disruption here would disrupt the world economy at a stroke.

But Saudi Arabia is not Israel, nor is it Israel’s ally. There’s therefore no earthly justification for Iran’s threat, beyond an outrageous attempt at blackmail by a regime tripped up by its own boastful propaganda. Even now, Iranian radio and television channels claim that 90% of the ballistic and hypersonic missiles launched at the “Occupied Territories” (their dismissive term for Israel) successfully struck their targets. Among other things, the Revolutionary Guards claimed a direct hit on the Mossad headquarters just north of Tel Aviv, which they said were “completely destroyed”. That in itself shows the regime is rattled: its propaganda lies might be just about plausible to the people of Iran, but anyone who actually drove past Mossad’s building could see it’s perfectly intact.

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Israel should hit Iran where it hurts

By Edward Luttwak

Having sailed too close to the wind by attacking Israel with hundreds of missiles — notably the Fattah-1 variety, which reach hypersonic speeds and are devilishly hard to intercept — Iran’s rulers are now desperate to avoid the consequences of their actions. In so doing, they’re threatening their own Saudi neighbours, with whom they recently reconciled after years of tension. After years of indulgence, the Biden Administration must finally stand up for US and Western interests. It must make it perfectly plain that an Iranian attack on the Saudis, or indeed any other Arab oil terminal, will result in massive retaliation. Nor can this be an idle threat: each US Air Force’s B52, taking off from Diego Garcia, could drop some 70,000 pounds of bombs anywhere in Iran.

To issue such a threat would certainly be an abrupt reversal after years of appeasement, and would not be an easy pivot for an ageing president at the end of his term. But the alternative would be to surrender to Iran’s blackmail, a decision that would soon destroy American power across the Middle East. Israel, fighting for its basic security and under attack by Iranian proxies to its north, east and south, is bound to act decisively and will not be stopped. So it is Iran that must finally be deterred from further destabilising the region — and the global economy at large.         

Except that hasn’t happened — not, one might say, by a long shot. The game continues to grow. It has been estimated that around 500 million people follow snooker right across the globe. In China, it remains a boom sport, with fanbases rapidly expanding across Europe and the Middle East, especially among young people. In other words — in the midst of our ever more rushed, hyper-accelerated world — snooker is thriving.

How to explain this? Counterintuitively, I’d say it’s that glacial pace. Six-time world champion Steve Davis has defended the game’s “slow burner” spirit. According to Davis, any effort to make snooker fast actually pushes against what makes the game compelling. While initiatives like the Snooker Shoot-Out have their place, it is the long, multi-session matches that remain the sport’s pinnacle. “It’s a bit of a red herring,” Davis has said, “to think that you have to make snooker faster to be more entertaining. Snooker doesn’t work that way, actually it works the opposite way to a lot of sports — it doesn’t have to be fast to be entertaining… sometimes the tactics alone can create the enjoyment and the fascination”.

A quiet game, with a wild history — a working-class pursuit, with an aristocratic look — snooker is, in every sense, a game of contradictions. Its ancestor, billiards, was very much the preserve of the English and French nobility. King Louis XI owned the very first indoor billiard table; Mary Queen of Scots was an avid player, and even had a table in her prison cell. But as snooker out-muscled billiards in the early 20th century, it found new homes in the working men’s clubs of Britain’s industrial towns. And as the years went on, the nation’s billiard halls developed a particular kind of reputation — a less than salubrious one, for suspect characters and shady dealings.

Perhaps it was the location of the halls, often stuck in the rough part of town. Perhaps it was the fact they were so dark — places of shadow and secret things. Perhaps it was something about the game itself, something to do with how quiet it can be, quiet enough for mid-game talks around the tables. Whatever the truth, by the middle of the century, snooker halls had become a little bit dangerous. The Kray Twins bought the Regal Billiard Club in Mile End in 1954, and made it a base for their protection racket. It became one of Ronnie’s favourite places. “There were often evenings at the billiard hall,” wrote their biographer John Pearson, “when he’d just sit, brooding and menacing, sunk in silence”. But it was also a scene of violence. In a famous story, a rival Maltese gang turned up at the Regal and made the mistake of demanding some money. The Krays were unimpressed. Ronnie charged at them with a cutlass, and chased them out to the street.

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Snooker’s shadowy side has always coexisted with a decorous formality that remains unique in world sport. To this day — for most tournaments — players still don the black tie of the traditional English gentleman. Fashion-wise, watching a snooker match can feel like watching a face-off between a pair of Victorian aristocrats. And the audience, too, sits largely in silence — huddled intently, like the audience at a Shakespeare play. Anyone who does call out will be quickly silenced by the referee, or even removed from the arena for improper conduct: such things as noise are for other sports, not for the baize.

Part of the game’s fascination lies in this peculiar blend of wildness and restraint. It has always been a game with a dark edge — a haven of booze and drugs as much as quiet strategy, a volatile meeting-place of order and disorder. And snooker players, from the start, live a precarious life. From a very early age, the choice between completing secondary school and playing snooker is an either/or decision: there is not room for both. A poorly appreciated point arises — partly about class, partly about channels of educational opportunity. In stark contrast to games like cricket and rugby, the infrastructure is just not in place for snooker players to combine their education with the prospect of an elite level future. In order to be good enough — in order to succeed — you have to do nothing but play snooker.

And turning professional does not guarantee a good income. In the game’s lower reaches, players scrabble to earn a living. “It is either top 10 or top 20, or else don’t bother,” former World Champion Neil Robertson has said. “If you are a single guy, you can scrape by. But if you have got a family, snooker is not really a viable career choice.” The introduction of £20,000 guaranteed annual earnings, two years ago, for all players on the main tour was an effort to ease such financial pressures, at least by a little. Snooker, in short, is a tough road; brutal, poorly lit, and hard to follow. The need for young cueists to sacrifice their lives to it shows fissures in society — dramatic inequalities between the social profile of different sports, and the support structures they offer.

Snooker’s money struggles have led the game to a crossroads. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has risen as a leading tournament venue — bringing with it vast reserves of prize money. The inaugural Saudi Masters this summer — billed by the board as the game’s “4th major” — had a prize pot of £500,000 for the winner, the same sum as the World Championship itself. It looks more and more likely that the future of snooker will involve a big shift towards Saudi, and its seductive pots of cash. But it will come at a price which, for many, is too high.

As the site of the World Championship for nigh on 50 years, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield has been the spiritual home of snooker for so long now that any move away from the city has always seemed unthinkable. “In my lifetime, however long that may be, there will be no changes,” said Barry Hearn, snooker’s longstanding supremo, in 2022. “And after me, my son Edward will be here, with a little note in his dad’s will which says ‘Crucible. We’re staying’”. But earlier this year, Hearn abruptly changed his tune. “The Crucible is past its sell-by date,” he announced in May. “What we’re saying is, for the sport to be bigger, we’re going to be judged by prize money … In all sport it does come down to money, whether we like it or not.” After almost half a century, the mood music has dramatically shifted. Hearn is jangling the keys of the kingdom — and the Crucible’s time is running short.

Hearn’s all-about-the-money philosophy has angered many fans, who remain passionately attached to the poetry of snooker’s past. Some prominent players have also gone public with their concerns. “The Crucible is very special,” claimed former World Champion Ken Doherty. “It should be sacred, and you can’t buy sacred things.” Yes, the Crucible might be fantastically small — with a capacity of less than a thousand — but the intimacy provides a claustrophobic intensity that is unrivalled. What’s more, the Crucible is something more than just a venue; it is a cauldron of history, drama, and memory, the site of snooker’s most famous moments and its foremost iconography. This is where, in 1982, a triumphant Alex Higgins cried into his baby’s arms. It is where, in 1985, Dennis Taylor held his cue aloft after beating Steve Davis on the final black. It is where, in 1997, Ronnie O’Sullivan composed the game’s most perfect frame, in the form of the fastest maximum break that the world will ever see.

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The Crucible, in other words, is a fatherland, a spirit — located not just in Sheffield, but in the heart of every snooker fan. In considering its future, something far more important than money is at stake. “It is not just fans who are doe-eyed traditionalists,” journalist Phil Haigh has written. “Some players still see the value in sport outside of cold hard cash.”

A shift to an overseas locale would also be a sea change of a different kind. The national identity of snooker has always been complicated. On the one hand, its worldwide appeal continues to grow; on the other, its infrastructure remains very much based in Britain. An unshakeable feeling lingers that the game is tangled with the texture of Britishness, a deep-set bond that it would be dangerous to break. The qualities it brings — of slow-paced, cosy, televisual comfort — correspond with a jewel cabinet of much-cherished British rituals, the sacred consolations of tea and toast, living room, snug TV, raining outside, putting-the-kettle-on everydayness.

A brave new world for international snooker — with a World Championship in Saudi Arabia, or China, or a range of locations each year — could well be a good thing. After all, the idea of a football World Cup staged in England every single time would be both outrageous and daft. The use of the Crucible every year is, quite obviously, unfair on international players, who now make up nearly half of the tour.

Maybe, though, that is not quite the whole story. Maybe, in a small theatre in Sheffield city centre, the soul of snooker really does live and breathe — a soul that, torn away from the ghosts of its past, might not be able to survive. If so, it is a soul that — for the sake of cash — we toy with at our peril.

President Roosevelt told King Abdulaziz how the Jews of Europe had suffered indescribable horrors at the hands of the Nazis: eviction from their homes, destruction of their property, torture of their families, and mass murder. Could the king help with their resettlement?

The king replied that the Jews and their descendants should be given the best “lands, flocks and wells” of the Germans who had oppressed them. When the President said that the Jews did not trust the Germans and had no desire to stay in Germany, Abdulaziz replied that if the Allies did not think they could control the Germans, then why had they fought such a costly war? Certainly, he would never leave a defeated enemy in a position to strike back in the future.

When the President tried again, he received a similar reply: “Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander. What injury have the Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the Christian Germans who stole their homes and lives. Let the Germans pay.” Had Roosevelt not dropped the issue, the meeting might well have ended acrimoniously.

Today, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish people has once again come under scrutiny. A historic peace deal between Saudi and Israel has been put on hold since the outbreak of war in Gaza. And the week before last, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) called for an “immediate halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza”.

Yet Saudi leaders have always been pragmatists. Two years after the meeting on the USS Quincy, King Abdulaziz’s son, the future King Faisal, led the Saudi delegation to the United Nations, where he tried to prevent the partition of Palestine. He failed, and the United States successfully mobilised support for partition. But although King Abdulaziz was angry and disappointed by Washington’s recognition of Israel, he never threatened the American air base or oil concessions in Saudi Arabia. He placed too great a value on promoting regional stability and maintaining strong relations with the US to risk a diplomatic confrontation.

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For most of the last 75 years, Saudi Arabia has tried to stay out of Arab-Israeli wars and promote reconciliation. In 1948, the Saudis contributed two companies of infantry, which fought under Egyptian command. In the Six-Day War of 1967, a Saudi brigade moved slowly towards Jordan, arriving only when a ceasefire was about to be declared. And during the 1973 Arab-Israel War, Saudi Arabia sent one brigade to join the Arab Foreign Legion with strict instructions not to become involved in the fighting. By the time it reached Damascus, the hostilities were over.

King Abdulaziz (1875-1953) was always more worried about his Hashemite rivals in Jordan and Iraq than about Israel. His son, King Faisal (1906-1975), regarded Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, not the Jewish state, as the greatest threat to his kingdom. And today, Saudis are far more concerned with threats from Iran and it proxies in Yemen and Iraq than they are with Israel.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Arab leaders met in Khartoum, where they adopted their reflexive “Three Noes” with regard to Israel. “No recognition, No negotiation and No reconciliation.” With the exception of Egypt, this remained their unanimous, unwavering and unhelpful position for the next 15 years. Only in 1981 did the then Saudi Crown Prince Fahd (1921-2005) put forth a fresh proposal by which “all states in the region should be able to live in peace”. Fahd’s plan did not explicitly recognise Israel, but it implied that this was possible after the creation of a Palestinian state and a return to Israel’s 1967 borders.

That was a radical proposal 42 years ago. A watered-down version of Fahd’s plan was adopted in 1982 by Arab leaders meeting in Morocco. Known as the Fez Plan, it remains the Arab League’s policy to this day. President Ronald Reagan called it “the single largest step towards peace on which the Arab World has been able to agree”.

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In 2002, then Crown Prince Abdullah (1924-2015) repeated the Saudi offer to Israel to the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman: “full withdrawal from all the occupied territories, in accord with UN resolutions, including Jerusalem, for full normalisation of relations.” The following month Abdullah presented his plan to the Arab Summit in Beirut, where a modified version was unanimously adopted. The Beirut Plan differed from the Fez Plan in that it explicitly stated the conditions under which the Arabs would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over and sign a peace agreement with Israel”.

At both Fez and Beirut, the Saudi proposals were more forward-leaning than the eventual Arab consensus. In both instances, however, the Saudis led the effort by taking political risks and spending financial capital to convince other Arab leaders to go as far as they did. Neither proposal was fully acceptable to Israel or the United States. However, they remain the most constructive plans put forward by the Arabs to date. King Salman has reaffirmed them more than once.

On top of its own initiatives, Saudi Arabia has almost always supported American efforts to negotiate an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The only notable exception was its breaking off of diplomatic relations with Egypt in 1979 after President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel. Yet even when Riyadh followed the Arab consensus in severing ties with Cairo, the Saudis did not completely cut off financial aid to Egypt, or expel thousands of Egyptian guest workers from their country.

In 2020, the Trump Administration orchestrated the Abraham Accords, through which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco all normalised relations with Israel. Riyadh implicitly supported the deal by allowing Saudi journalists to write op-eds praising it. It is unlikely it would have materialised had the Saudis strongly objected and Riyadh implicitly supported the settlement by allowing Saudi journalists to praise it.

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In recent years, the benefits for Saudi of making peace with Israel have significantly increased, while the costs have appeared to decline. The latter were largely political: older Saudis who grew up with Nasser’s Arab Nationalism continue to regard unwavering support for Palestine as an essential part of their Arab identity. As the guardians of Mecca, the Saudis cannot ignore widespread sympathy for Palestine in the Muslim world. Nor can they remain indifferent to the status of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

Yet peace with Israel would be a massive boost to Saudi Arabia’s national security. It would improve Saudi Arabia’s relations with its most important security partner, the United States — and reduce opposition to those relations among the Saudi public. What’s more, peace would strengthen Saudi Arabia’s hand against Iran, which since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has challenged Saudi leadership in the Muslim World and sought to extend its influence in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Despite the recent Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, Saudi and Israeli leaders still share many reasons to resist Iran’s pursuit of regional hegemony and nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have another goal in common: suppressing radical Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda, Isis, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the Shi’a revolutionary government in Tehran, many radical Sunni Islamist groups seek to destroy both Israel and the Arab monarchies. Having suffered from numerous al-Qaeda attacks themselves, the Saudis understand the threat of jihadist militants. They have a long-strained relationship with Iranian-backed Hamas, as well as its junior partner, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Saudi authorities have arrested or deported Hamas supporters in Saudi Arabia and would quietly welcome the organisation’s demise. This gives Saudi Arabia and Israel further grounds for cooperation.

The two nations also have economic interests in common. MBS has staked his political future on the success of Vision 2030, an ambitious development programme that aims to diversify his economy away from oil. But his reforms won’t succeed if the Middle East is consumed by a major war, and therefore it is in his interests to promote lasting peace with Israel.

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Furthermore, to succeed, Vision 2030 will require foreign direct investment, technology transfer, increased non-oil trade, and even more tourists — all of which Israel has in abundance. Another goal of Vision 2030 is the creation of a local defence industry. Saudi Arabia has a defence budget larger than Britain or Germany, but today nearly all its weapons and military equipment are imported. The new General Authority for Military Industries wants to change that — and Israel, with its sophisticated defence industry, is well-placed to help.

Ironically, the terrorist attacks of October 7 have made a Saudi-Israeli peace deal both more desirable — and even more difficult. Those who thought that regional peace could be established without addressing the plight of the Palestinians have been proven wrong. Instead, pro-Palestinian sympathies have been reignited across the Muslim world. It is now unthinkable for any Saudi leader to embrace peace with Israel before meaningful progress is made towards establishing a Palestinian state.

With the terrorist attacks of October 7, Hamas has managed to derail efforts to establish Saudi-Israeli peace. And yet, Saudi Arabia and Israel remain united in their desire to avoid a larger regional conflict, eliminate terrorism, and reinvigorate that peace process.  The case for rapprochement remains compelling and their leaders remain interested in it. But in an increasingly multipolar world, it will require a determined, coordinated, multinational effort to comfort the injured, reassure the fearful, calm the angry and remove the remaining political obstacles to peace.

On the ground, with the ceasefire extended for another two days, relations between Israel and Hamas seem to be progressing. The temporary truce, however, is just a plaster on a gangrenous wound. If Hamas releases all of its hostages, then its leverage evaporates and it has nothing to deter Israel from its assault. If Israel ceases military operations now, then its promise that Hamas will never again be able to launch another attack is just empty rhetoric. Neither its traumatised population nor its desperate Prime Minister will allow that.

So, the war continues, with Israel completing its operation in northern Gaza and turning to the south. And along with its horrific cost, the chances of broader escalation will increase.

But the war with Hamas has already expanded. Hezbollah are firing from the north, Syrian groups from the northeast, the Houthis from Yemen in the south — and behind them all, Iran. Israel is now fighting a war on five fronts. But it’s in the north that the greatest threat lies.

“What we’ve been experiencing on the northern border are a few kinds of Hezbollah approaches,” says a source in the IDF’s Northern Command. “Number one: infiltration attempts on the border itself. Two: using anti-tank missiles to target Israeli soldiers, outposts, tanks and armoured vehicles. Three: using aerial vehicles [drones]. This did not really exist in [the Lebanon war of] 2006. The investment in aerial vehicles began in 2009.” Hezbollah, they tell me, is targeting a narrow strip just a few kilometres from the border, rather than cities further south such as Haifa. “From that we assess that the current decision of Hezbollah is not to escalate.”

But Hezbollah also needs to manage its optics. It cannot spend decades railing against the “Zionist Oppressor” and then do nothing when it is at war with the group’s supposed brethren in Hamas. “Hezbollah has activated a few Palestinians from the refugee camps in Lebanon,” I am told. “There is cooperation when interests converge when their interests converge, and Hezbollah is using Palestinians to fire anti-tank missiles at us.” Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, seemingly confirmed these assessments when he congratulated Hamas on its attack last month, while stressing he had no idea it was coming. The signal was clear: we had nothing to do with this; beyond saving face, we don’t want to get involved.

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But while 1914 is an overwrought analogy, here, with so many moving parts, escalation cannot be discounted. And beyond the trauma of October 7, many Israelis want action. The northern city of Qiryat Shemona is a mile from the Lebanese border. Today, after local authorities ordered civilians to leave in the face of daily rocket attacks, it is almost deserted. One man who hasn’t left is Moshe Peretz, 63, who owns a garage. He works with the IDF and local farmers and is, he tells me, an essential service provider. “I’ve been here 58 years and I’m used to this sort of stuff — sometimes Hezbollah would fire over 100 Katyusha rockets in one day. Back then we had to cram into small shelters.”

He continues, “if we pass this problem onto our children, then we haven’t achieved anything. We will have suffered 60 years for nothing. We can end it now – and we must.”

We drive up into the mountains, towards the border, through forest where IDF soldiers and tanks line the roads. At the summit, stands a thick metal barrier. It has been erected to protect us from fire from Lebanon. I cannot film it: it’s a new type of armour, I’m told. If I publish photos, the enemy will be able to analyse its thickness and adjust its fire accordingly.

The Hezbollah threat is incredibly potent. In 2019, US intelligence estimated the group had 150,000 projectiles in its arsenal, which includes Iranian Fateh-110 and Syrian M-600 satellite-guided missiles with a range of up to 186 miles, putting Tel Aviv in reach. Added to this are its anti-ship missiles, particularly the Iranian Noor and Russian Yakhont, as well as the 100,000 fighters Nasrallah claimed to have in 2021 — a figure which, while almost certainly inflated, is not entirely divorced from reality.

That said, Lebanon is also suffering its worst financial crisis in modern history. The last thing it needs is another war with Israel, especially since the one in 2006 brought such destruction to the country. And internally, Hezbollah is powerful right now — why throw it all away?

Meanwhile, the Houthis have launched several drone and missile attacks against Israel: a show of solidarity with the Palestinians and a display of strength to its domestic audience. Though not as powerful as Hezbollah, the group has Iranian Quds-351 cruise missiles, which it has used against Saudi oil fields and which have a reported range of 1,650km. It also has the Iranian Toufan ballistic missile that has a range of up to 1,950km (though unlike the Iranian original it is not precision guided). Finally the Houthis have a drone capability, notably the Samad UAV.

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While their missiles are slow and inaccurate, they could theoretically overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome if launched in conjunction with Hamas and Hezbollah. Before October 7, the most missiles Israel had faced in a day was 470 in May 2021. On October 7, it faced 5,200 in 20 minutes. Throw drones into the equation, and the picture becomes disconcerting. That said, the Houthis main fight is with Saudi Arabia. If it were to use all its weapons against Israel, the Saudis might sense opportunity, and move in for the kill.

In the end, though, the state that matters most is the one that stands behind Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis: Iran. Tehran bases its regional strategy on a doctrine of “Forward Defence” that, loosely speaking, means using regional non-state terror groups to fight its opponents abroad and retain stability at home.

Right now, Iran’s proxies are well-positioned around the borders of its two main regional rivals, Israel and Saudi Arabia — including a joint operation room with Hezbollah in the Golan Heights — which give it a degree of regional security it seems unwise to risk. After Israel and the United States bombed its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) base in Syria in October, Iran has shifted many of its missile production facilities to Lebanon. Ultimately, these proxies deter direct attacks from Israel. If they are smashed, which will happen with escalation, the threat to Iran gets serious.

But Iran has other options. The IRGC has recently set up two new proxies in Syria: the Afghan Fatemiyoun and Pakistani Zainabiyoun groups whose stated goal is to destroy Israel. Iran can have them continue to attack the “Zionist Entity” at a limited level, while remaining largely unconcerned about retaliation as they are fundamentally expendable.

But in the end, while the Mullahs are happy for Hamas to hurt Israel, there is a limit to their support for it. Reuters reported that at a recent meeting in Tehran, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei complained to Hamas boss Ismail Haniyeh that his country was not warned of the October 7 attacks and that it would not enter the war on their behalf.

For their part, the Israelis are immovable on the eradication of Hamas but also wary of a broader war. The IDF was clear: the end of Hamas serves everyone. Anything short of a decisive defeat, they say, would embolden every terror group in the Middle East.

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This is partly why the UK and US have both deployed forces in the area. But, in truth, it is unintended escalation that is the greatest concern — especially when Hamas is still holding so many hostages. Standing in the mountains of northern Israel, I peer down at the roads below and imagine the domino effect a stray Katusha accidentally hitting an Israeli school bus would have.

One act begets another in a region where no one can back down in the face of their own, often oppressed populations. Dictatorships are better at sustaining wars — and casualties — than democracies, and worse at avoiding them. From al-Houthi to Nasrallah to Khamenei, they continue to fight because policy and rhetoric cannot allow otherwise.

On 3 August, 1914, as the United Kingdom entered World War I, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, remarked darkly that “the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. Today in the Middle East, a return to 1914 seems, if not yet imminent, then no longer beyond the realms of possibility either.

In the darkness, you can’t quite make out the titans of Wall Street, the Chinese billionaires, the European ministers and asset managers, or the Russian diplomats with their flag friendship pins. But you can feel them and the new world order that MBS is trying to build — centred around Saudi and him. The Kingdom, flush from the energy war between Russia and the West, has never had so much money to spend. Nor has it ever been such a hub of diplomacy as Russia, China and America court it for their superpower ends. As a result, you might catch sight of the New York billionaire Stephen Schwarzman in a suit and trainers, or a tired looking Jared Kushner; perhaps you’ll see the former French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian off to the booth of his Saudi project, or George Osborne could give you a long suspicious look across the room.

Launched in 2017 to promote the Kingdom to the world, the Financial Investment Initiative Summit, or FII, became infamous a year later after the murder of Jamal Khassogi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — the CIA says on the orders of the Crown Prince. In the fallout, scores of billionaires, tech companies, media giants, super corporations and Western officials pulled out. But “Davos in the Desert” is the perfect yardstick to see how little this murder really mattered for the West. Now it seems everyone is back at an event that is bigger than ever. In a tense air of unreality.

The Who’s Who of the speakers is a testament to the emptiness of Joe Biden’s pledge after Khassogi to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”. The power surge of money and influence towards the Kingdom had made Riyadh indispensable. Not only for US diplomats struggling with Gaza, Ukraine and a combative China. But for Western companies for whom the flush Gulf has become a critical source of capital. Even Net Zero is helping MBS — at first that is — as oil gets more expensive to extract the share of it being produced in the countries that can do it cheapest will soar. With this backdrop, the TED-style talk by Jacques Attali, a French socialist politico turned global rolodex consultant — “Is Democracy In Peril?” — felt a bit too on the nose.

FII is a showcase for the Saudi surge. But the first thing that strikes you about Riyadh when you arrive, is how little it looks like the global megapolis that MBS wants it to be. Instead, driving out of the desert, into this seven-million-strong city that feels in so many ways it shouldn’t be here — you see miles and miles of scruffy square houses, the colour of sand, crammed close together with tiny windows. A city dissected by eight-lane freeways lined with squat, unimpressive blocks. It looks nothing like Dubai. The professional expats compare it to Abu Dhabi 20 years ago. And if you arrived clueless and somebody told you this was by some metrics the capital of the most cash rich society that had ever existed, you would struggle to believe them.

You can spend a week here and still fail to find your bearings at night, in this low-rise world glowing orange from the street lamps. Then you notice the construction sites: miles and miles of hoardings, blocking off mega sites announcing giga projects about to transform it. There’s King Salman Park, which when it is finished will be seven times bigger than Hyde Park. Then there’s the Mukaab, the square shaped skyscraper, the height and width of 20 Empire State Buildings. Neither exists yet — apart from in the futurist dreams and commands of MBS. Both projects, along with Neom and the Line, the 110 km long linear city crossing the desert for nine million people, and the skyscrapers of New Muraaba all have their stalls at “Davos in the Desert”.

Everyone’s feeds are full of charred Israeli babies, exploding homes in Gaza or the tieless Iranian foreign minister threatening America with hell. But in the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center — which is like what AI might generate if you asked for Versailles but make it a little Arab — the panels are very much “don’t mention the war”. Things looked so different four days before Hamas attacked. Not only was an Israeli minister seen publicly in Riyadh for the first time ever, he also joined a Jewish prayer service with a new Torah scroll dedicated to the Saudi King. This was widely interpreted as a key step towards an almost inevitable normalisation between the two countries. A stunning development in and of itself for a country that until recently banned Judaism from being practised, and in 1973 led an Arab oil embargo on Israel’s Western allies to punish them for supporting the Jewish state.

But money isn’t security. You have to leave Riyadh to see how vulnerable it really is: the pipelines bringing desalinated water from the coast, which could so easily be knocked out, or the oil infrastructure, which was partially disabled by Iranian proxy drones in 2019. This is why behind the PowerPoints and the panels MBS has been telephoning everyone he can to try to stop the Israel-Hamas war from spreading into what could easily become a full-blown war between Iran and the United States fought right over the Gulf. You can keep the war out of the convention centre, but you can’t keep Saudi Arabia out of the Middle East. And nobody knows this better than MBS.

Saudi Arabia has always been an ideological state. Its very beginnings are in a pact between the Al Sauds and the puritanical Wahhabi movement, whose strict vision of Islam has for generations been what people associate with the Kingdom. But under MBS it has suddenly pivoted. Pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism are the old politics of failure for the Crown Prince. This, he thinks, has left Saudi 20 development years behind the Emirates. And this is why he is forcing his Kingdom into a phase of nationalism and neoliberalism. Those for MBS are the new politics of success. Not only the path to Saudi survival after oil — but into turning Riyadh into a super Dubai and the Kingdom into a Saudi superpower.

MBS wants a modern economy as quickly as possible. This is why he wanted normalisation with Israel and has normalised with Iran: because there is no chance of economic success in a Middle East mired in constant war. The plan is Vision 2030 and the FII summit, just over the road from the Ritz-Carlton where MBS imprisoned half the ruling class at the start of his rule, is what he wants it to look like. Music, previously banned, is softly playing. Women, previously segregated and forced to be fully covered are everywhere — working — with very few face veils and many without a headscarf at all. The light glints off glamorous designer sequinned abayas by the coffee. Princesses used to Knightsbridge are finally doing business at home. This is Saudi Arabia seven years after MBS castrated the morality police. But make no mistake: this is still a country where you can be beheaded for a tweet. The paradox is his Kingdom has never been more liberal or more dictatorial.

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To understand MBS, you need to understand his childhood. This is what unlocked a will to power that saw him, improbably, steer himself and then his father into the line of succession. Saudi rulers are not hereditary, they emerge from the clan, which makes his rise less like King Charles assuming power, and more like Cromwell seizing it.

Nothing much was expected of the seventh son of Salman, the 25th son of Ibn Saud. Obsessed by fast food and computer games, he was a typical lethargic princeling until he was handed a horrifying revelation at the age of 15: his father, despite being the governor of Riyadh, had not build a serious fortune and was perilously indebted to businessmen. Instead of making billions like their cousins, the family was living off a gigantic welfare check from the Saudi treasury — which often came too late — leaving the servants unpaid for months at a time.

Panicking at the implications of this — of drifting further and further from the centre of power and into princely poverty — he amassed cash, by selling gold coins he was given by King Fahd.  He then started trading, became obsessed with stocks and swiftly went broke. Only then did he work out that, with his name, he could simply phone up people and demand money before trying to build his own businesses. Staying in Saudi, unlike his Westernised cousins, he rose like this in Riyadh.

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This, writ large, is also the state of the Kingdom. MBS’s family has failed to invest the greatest fortune in human history. So, using Saudi Arabia’s giant sovereign wealth fund, which is behind FII, he is trying to do at enormous scale what he did with King Fahd’s coins: buying up, through stakes in foreign companies, the profits of the world and investing them in what he thinks is a new economy.

There is a saying in the Middle East: seize opportunities for they pass like clouds. And MBS knows as electric cars and batteries take off he is running out of time.

He is desperate for a new Kingdom. Social reforms, such as finally letting women drive or travel alone without a male guardian are real and, for millennials who make up the majority of his subjects, he is not only genuinely popular but has made their lives freer. One of the world’s great liberalisations is being led by one of its greatest autocrats.An impetuous 38-year-old determined to govern alone — with all the risks that entails.

This is the discussion you end up having, discreetly that is, over and over again in the Kingdom. Who is MBS? For the optimists, he is a Saudi Atatürk or Peter the Great, the latest Arabian incarnation of the Westernising dictator. For the pessimists, they see the smile of Saddam Hussein — pointing to the dismemberment of Jamal Khassogi and his strange facial tics. Few at FII seemed to believe that the linear city in Neom would ever actually exist. What the critics see is not a new economy — but building-crazed megalomania that will leave only ruins.

Billions and billions can silence these questions. Because being in Saudi Arabia feels like being on another planet, where the normal rules of politics are suspended by oil. A futuristic but also medieval world with no need for democracy. Even in Russia, or China, there is a system, a bureaucracy, and institutions, however frightful, that matters in politics. Here there really is a royal court, an absolute monarchy and one family — the richest ever to exist — that owns the country.

And what is happening now is the result of long running fights within that family over whether the Kingdom should choose Islamism or nationalism. Whether or not it should change or stay the same. And, fundamentally, should it be open or closed? The construction pits and the PowerPoints are the decisive victory of one side. The panic in the pace is that, as the world decarbonises, it has started too late: Saudi only has a few decades of oil wealth left until this planet is pulled back to earth. But will it crash or land safely? Will there be splendour or ruins in Riyadh? The answer now hangs on who MBS really is. Because he has ensured nobody else will have a say.

Hamas, after all, had stopped launching rockets against Israel, and appeared to be focused on containing the influence of Islamic Jihad — Hamas’s only remaining competitor after its suppression of the PLO, and one which is financed by Iran to propagate Shi’ism in Gaza. This obvious rivalry was skilfully exploited by Hamas to deceive the Israelis into thinking that it was no longer launching rockets because, as an emphatically Sunni organisation, it wanted to join the Sunni reconciliation with Israel that was already a fait accompli from Morocco to Bahrain.

Once again, as so many times before, Israel’s leaders were deluded into thinking that a Palestinian leadership had some concern for the welfare of its own people, as opposed to its ideological aim: “Palestine” for the nationalist PLO (which always included Christians), and Islamic supremacy for Hamas. The latter’s leaders have frequently explained that Islamic rule must be imposed not just on Israel but on the entire world, and that Palestinian nationalism is un-Islamic twice over — because it includes Christians, and because any nationalism intrinsically subverts Islamic unity.

With Hamas seemingly on a path to reconciliation, only the much smaller Islamic Jihad was still assembling and launching rockets. But most of those attempts were pre-empted by Israeli strikes, guided by precise intelligence supplied by a seemingly reliable agent network. Almost certainly, Hamas itself supplied the “actionable” information passed on by those agents. This efficiently blinded Israeli intelligence, which has plenty of expertise in detecting double agents peddling false information, but could hardly suspect agents who were supplying highly accurate information.

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This was the first Israeli failure: its intelligence analysts did not realise that the silence of Hamas was not due to inactivity, but to planning that they could not detect. Such silence was far from normal, and it should have inspired efforts to find out what was going on. But it did not.

On top of that, there was a separate failure which was purely military. Even if intelligence reported that all was well and that Gaza was on the path to peace, military planners should not have yielded to such optimism — for a very specific Israeli reason. Since the Israeli armed forces rely on reservists, who must be recalled to duty and kitted out before they can fight, as opposed to an enemy that can switch from peace to war instantaneously, military planners must be professional pessimists no matter what. They must always be mindful of the minutes needed to broadcast an alert, of the hours that even soldiers in situ need to prepare for action, and the full 24 hours required to mobilise the reservists.

On Saturday, this lack of prudence was so extreme that a single tank with four crew was caught guarding a key segment of the border previously held by a platoon of three tanks. Elsewhere, the 23 high-tech observation points around Gaza’s perimeter were each manned by a single soldier. All of them were female soldiers selected for being especially attentive, and they were all killed by the very first infiltrators. The same was to blame for the lack of security surrounding the “rave” within walking distance of the Gaza strip, which would cost the lives of more than 250 youngsters.

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True, it was a purely private initiative, but security is a police responsibility no matter what, and while the local police certainly told the organisers not to hold the event so close to Gaza, they did not call for the massive reinforcements that would have been needed to send everybody away. Moreover, the youngsters who drove from near and far to the music festival did not appear to be typical young Israelis, who are likely to have guns in their cars. So, when the Hamas killers arrived, there were only a few policemen in the crowd. Very conspicuous in their uniforms, they were promptly gunned down.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to forget how integral this optimistic bias is to the entire Israel project — pessimists would have stopped praying for Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Nor is this the first time that Israel’s military planners courted disaster by grossly underestimating the dangers of war. On October 6, 1973, when the Egyptian army suddenly flooded across the Suez Canal with an initial wave of thousands of men, fewer than 441 soldiers stood on the Israeli side, and were expected to hold a chain of 16 widely separated fortified outposts.

That time, Israel’s lack of prudence reflected the calculation that Egypt’s leader, Anwar Sadat, was an intelligent man who understood that Egypt would eventually be defeated no matter what, once the Israelis were fully mobilised. That was true enough: the war that started on October 6 ended on October 23 with Egypt’s army wrecked, tens of thousands of Egyptian troops surrounded, and Israeli troops just 101 kilometres from Cairo. But what Israeli intelligence failed to understand was that Sadat had no need of an actual military victory to achieve his aim, which was to activate US diplomacy to finally end the conflict with Israel.

As of this morning, the penetration of Israeli columns into Gaza has not yet started. They cannot hope to find Hamas leaders who have had years to prepare properly fitted-out, secret bunkers which may be known to Israeli agents, as well as their actual hideouts known only to themselves. Nor can they hope to find Israeli hostages who might be killed before their eyes if they come too close.

What they can do is destroy Hamas’s rocket factories, weapon depots and deep underground headquarters — indeed, the decision to go in at all depends on how many such targets have been identified, and not already effectively bombed. If the incursion does happen, the world will see new vehicles, weapons and techniques deployed for the first time that will reduce Israeli casualties to very small numbers. These include the world’s largest and best-protected armoured vehicle, the 65-ton Namer, which has active defences to intercept anti-armour missiles and rockets, in addition to both reactive and conventional armour.

Yet even with their use, there are no guarantees that any lasting result will be achieved. Hamas is an exceptionally brutal dictatorship not only against Jews — in 130 years of conflict, very few Jewish children have been deliberately killed by Palestinians until now — but also, and indeed mostly, against Gaza’s population. Having been elected into power long ago, Hamas has killed anyone in Gaza who has asked for new elections.

As for anyone who remains determined to be optimistic, they would do well to return to October 1973. One can imagine that, just as Sadat did, Hamas also had a feasible goal when it launched its attack. Inevitably, this time it would be to activate Saudi diplomacy, to add a solution for Gaza to its peace plan. After three years of watching impotently as Israel and Saudi Arabia were getting closer to formal diplomatic relations, Hamas decided to force its way into the Israeli-Saudi dialogue — and to get something for itself.

It is hard to make sense of the day’s events — because they are unprecedented. What should have been a quiet holiday-weekend Shabbat began with Hamas firing more than 2,200 rockets at Israel. The massive barrage seems to have been cover for an even bigger operation: infiltrating dozens of militants into Israel. Some went to Sderot, the biggest city near Gaza; others fanned out to the small kibbutzim that run the length of the border.

By evening the death toll stood at 150, with at least 1,100 Israelis wounded. Both numbers will almost certainly rise, and the Israeli army says it is still fighting in 22 locations. Hamas also claims to have abducted 35 Israelis and brought them to Gaza. While the exact number is unconfirmed, footage shared on social media suggests they do indeed have captives, both civilians and soldiers.

The most obvious question is what went wrong: this is Israel’s biggest intelligence failure in half a century, since the surprise Arab invasion on Yom Kippur in 1973. Its security services have a network of informants in Gaza. Every call from a mobile phone in the territory is routed through an Israeli network.

Hamas must have needed many months to plan such a complex operation — and Israel knew the group wanted to conduct one like this. During its 2014 war with Israel, Hamas smuggled commandos through a tunnel and landed a group of frogmen on an Israeli beach. The Israeli army has warned for years that the group would try more such infiltrations. Yet when it finally happened, the army seems to have been caught entirely unaware.

Nor was this just an intelligence failure. Israel has kept Gaza under a tight blockade for a decade and a half. Heavy restrictions on the flow of goods and people have crushed its economy: two-thirds of Gazans live below the poverty line, and three in five are unemployed. But the blockade has not unseated Hamas — nor, apparently, stopped it from planning sophisticated attacks.

The Israeli government has spent billions of shekels to build a barrier on its border with Gaza, a mix of concrete slabs and metal fencing studded with high-tech sensors. Yet the militants simply cut through it and zipped across on motorbikes, or flew over it in paragliders.

Once they crossed over, they enjoyed freedom of action for hours. All morning long, residents of border towns called Israeli journalists to ask where the army was. In recent months it has mostly been deployed on other fronts: the occupied West Bank, where tensions are at a boil, and the north, where it is worried about Hezbollah. The south seemed quiet — until it wasn’t.

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A full accounting will probably have to wait until the inevitable commission of inquiry finishes its work. For now, the focus will be on a response. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said Israel is “at war”; the defence ministry has approved a wide call-up of army reservists; the air force has already begun air strikes on Gaza, which will continue for days.

During the 2014 war, which dragged on for 50 days, some of Netanyahu’s Right-wing coalition partners pushed for a full ground invasion of Gaza. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister at the time, wanted Israel to reoccupy the territory (Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005). But the army feared that a ground offensive would lead to weeks of bloody urban combat. Netanyahu listened to the generals and ignored the politicians.

Such demands, however, will be harder to ignore this time. The cause for war is much bigger. And Netanyahu’s coalition is different: where in 2014 it was a broad mix of parties, from the centre-left to the Right, today it runs only from the Right to the far-Right.

The presence of Israeli hostages in Gaza — probably distributed across a number of far-flung hiding places — may make some officials reluctant to green-light a ground offensive, in case they are executed. But they are also worth more to Hamas alive than dead. The group would prefer to exchange them for prisoners held by Israel, as it did in 2011 with Gilad Shalit, a soldier swapped for 1,027 Palestinians.

So, how will Israel respond? This has been a turbulent year for the country, largely due to Netanyahu’s efforts to overhaul its judiciary. Yet after Hamas’s latest attack, political divisions have been temporarily set aside. Activists have suspended their weekly demonstrations against the government. They also urged reservists — some of whom vowed to boycott their mandatory service in protest over Netanyahu’s reforms — to report for duty if called. Israelis have a saying in times like this: “There is no coalition and no opposition.”

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When the fighting ends, though, the recriminations will start. The opposition will have a compelling argument: it will say that Netanyahu has been preoccupied, and that he has surrounded himself with a coterie of inexperienced ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hard-Right ideologue appointed to run the police. And they will have a point. Netanyahu’s pitch to voters has always rested on his handling of Israeli security. Yet “Mr Security” has a habit of falling out with his security chiefs. Ehud Barak, who served him as defence minister, later described his old boss as “reckless”; Meir Dagan, a storied Mossad director, called him “destructive”. True to form, he will try to pin blame for this weekend’s catastrophe on the army and security services.

While the intelligence failure resembled 1973, in other ways the closest analogue for the day’s events was Israel’s war of independence in 1948. During the 1973 war, after all, Egypt and Syria only advanced as far as the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. This time, Palestinian militants stormed Israel proper, raiding towns that are within its internationally recognised borders.

The resulting images — of gunmen on the streets and dead bodies piled at bus stops —will not soon be forgotten. The second intifada, the campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis between 2000 and 2005, was a death knell for the peace talks that followed the Oslo Accords in 1993. A generation of Israelis gave up on the prospect of a settlement with the Palestinians. Today’s attack, perhaps the worst in Israel’s history, will similarly harden public opinion.

But Israel will have to weigh the consequences of its response. Hezbollah, the Shia militant group-cum-political party in Lebanon, said it was “conducting a continuous assessment of events”, a verbose way of saying it plans to sit on the side-lines — at least for now. Mired in a four-year economic crisis, Lebanon is in no position to endure a war. But a harsh Israeli counterattack on Gaza may draw it in anyway, lest its leaders be seen as ignoring the Palestinian cause.

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Hamas will also use the attack to boost its popularity in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority, the nominal self-governing body, is widely loathed. Mahmoud Abbas, the president, is 87; Hamas no doubt has an eye on an eventual succession struggle.

Further afield, until this morning, diplomatic parlour talk in the Middle East was obsessed with the possibility that Saudi Arabia might normalize ties with Israel. The Biden administration has spent the year pushing for a three-way deal: America would offer a defence pact to the kingdom, which would offer full recognition to Israel.

What Israel might give was always unclear. The Americans and Saudis hoped to extract some concessions that would make the occupation marginally less painful for Palestinians. That idea was never realistic, given Netanyahu’s hard-Right coalition; now it is impossible. Nor will the Saudis be eager to recognise Israel against the backdrop of a war in Gaza.

After 15 years of almost-uninterrupted Netanyahu rule, many people inside Israel and out have internalised his view of the conflict: that the status quo is indefinitely sustainable. Today’s events should shake that view. Hamas is more capable and less quiescent than Israel thought; in the West Bank, meanwhile, the PA is rapidly losing control. Yet an Israel united in grief and anger will be in no mood for talks or concessions. The status quo has never looked so fragile — and what comes next will be bloody.

The reality, however, is much grimmer. What has landed us here is a combination of three of the Biden administration’s signature policies — its aggressive support for ESG, its proxy war against Russia, and its sabre-rattling approach to China. The result is that the US is now in an energy chokehold right when the country needs as many options as possible.

After nearly two years of biting inflation, developed nations are starting to believe that the beast of relentlessly rising prices has been tamed. But as oil prices again barrel towards $100 — with one industry CEO predicting it could reach a devastating $150 — that could be about to change. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia announced that it would extend a July production cut of one million barrels a day through the end of 2023. On its own, this news is bad enough. What makes it worse is that the Saudis are now apparently coordinating energy policy with America’s enemy number one, Russia, which has cut 300,000 barrels a day for the same period.

For Joe Biden, the timing couldn’t be worse. He is polling neck and neck with Donald Trump, and is facing an onslaught of challenges from House Republicans related to the business dealings of his son, Hunter. But from a policy point of view, the news is far more serious. The causes of surging oil prices trace back to structural changes Biden made to the economy, combined with now intractable foreign policy commitments, which, this late in the game, cannot be easily undone.

Those decisions go back to Biden’s very first day in office. On 20 January 2021, the new president signed an executive order revoking a permit required for the Keystone XL, an extension of an existing pipeline that would have transported an extra 830,000 barrels per day from Canadian oil fields to refineries in Texas. The move had its roots in Biden’s campaign strategy, which positioned Biden as a “climate change pioneer”. According to the text of Biden’s executive order: “The United States and the world face a climate crisis. That crisis must be met with action on a scale and at a speed commensurate with the need to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory.” The Keystone XL pipeline “disserves” American interests, Biden said.

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The media bolstered the decision, arguing that, with oil then trading at around $60 per barrel, the pipeline was not economically viable. But it would take just five months for oil to rise 50% to around $80, and a little more than a year for the price of oil to double to about $120 per barrel, pushing inflation up significantly. More importantly, Biden’s executive order and the decision by developers to abandon the pipeline signalled a shift in the policy winds on US energy and oil exploration. With the price of oil rising and the government taking an aggressive ESG-minded position on domestic exploration and development, oil producers went from investing in technologies such as new shale extraction methods to a new mode of profit-taking, where innovation is stopped in favour of extracting the profit from previous years’ investments.

When Biden signed the order, there was little or no inflation on the horizon. By the spring of that year, when inflation jumped to 4% and kept rising — with oil prices tracking it, resulting in a 50% jump in prices at the pump — the administration seemed to grow desperate. In November 2021, Biden began tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a reservoir of oil meant to weather the country through war. This began with an initial release of 50 million barrels (out of a total capacity of 714 million), in the hope that the move would lower fuel prices and curb inflation. It didn’t. Over the course of the subsequent year, Biden would release another 180 million barrels of oil from the SPR, leaving the SPR at its lowest level in four decades.

If the White House appeared desperate in the winter of 2021, the following spring would bring about a series of events that would make the most powerful government in the world look like a third-rate power. In March last year, hoping to secure a promise by Gulf producers to increase production, Biden reached out to Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, and the UAE’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan. Astonishingly, both men declined to take the call.

While Opec+ lives up to its role as the world’s most powerful oil cartel, there generally has been enough wiggle room for American presidents to influence Saudi production. This is partly because, for the past three decades, Saudi Arabia has been more of a reformed American ally than a leverage-pushing adversary. The Saudis lowered prices in response to a lobbying effort by President George W. Bush in 2004 — a success quickly spun by the anti-Bush media as a Saudi attempt to interfere in US elections and “buy” the president — and again in 2008. Most importantly, whether or not they complied, and in some cases they didn’t, they were willing to hear the American president out.

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The reasons for Biden’s fall from the Gulf’s graces can be traced back to his role in leading aspects of foreign policy in the Obama White House. Specifically, Obama relied on Biden to advance and pass the nuclear deal with Iran which, in exchange for the removal of US sanctions, would see Iran slowing development of its nuclear programme and open it to international inspections. The Saudis, along with other Gulf allies, considered the deal a betrayal that endangered their national security.

After Trump scuppered the deal, Biden campaigned on reinstating it. In the context of Biden’s other Gulf-related campaign pledge — to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah” — and the barrages of missiles falling on Saudi Arabia from Iran-backed rebels in Yemen (which Trump also permitted without any significant action), the move seemed to double down on Obama-era fecklessness, leading to Saudi Arabia and UAE’s decision to not only refuse to increase oil production but to not pick up the phone.

By last October, Biden’s administration had no choice but to U-turn as it came out calling for an increase in US oil production. “You should be using these record-breaking profits to increase production and refining,” Biden said at an October 2022 press conference. That, however, was no longer possible. The stock of cheap, easy-to-access shale had been pulled out of the ground, exhausting the country’s ability to continue ramping up production. And the Keystone pipeline extension that would have brought nearly one million barrels a day from Canada to Texas had been cancelled — by Biden.

While the administration was attempting to retrofit its energy policy, it was formulating the most aggressive economic response to a foreign war in memory. In April 2022, two months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the administration unleashed what it accurately characterised as “unprecedented sanctions” against Russia. Biden claimed that, already, the sanctions were achieving the administration’s intended effect of “devastating” Russia’s economy.

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Biden had resisted taking the most drastic economic step of banning Russian banks from Swift, a key component in the international banking system that allows banks in different countries to transact with each other. Biden cited oil prices as one reason, since without the ability to purchase Russian oil in dollars via Swift, Western allies would effectively be removing the country’s oil production from the global pool.

Yet while the US media reported on 25 February 2022 that Biden had rebuffed calls, including from some Democrats, for the Swift ban, the the very next day, the White House and its European allies announced that a number of Russian banks would indeed be blocked from it. A White House official told CNN that the move, which Biden had nixed just 48 hours earlier at a press conference, was an “unprecedented act of global sanctions coordination”.

Predictably, within days, the price of oil had risen by 25%. It would continue to rise, eventually hitting a decade-high at $120 per barrel. But beyond oil prices, the sanctions culminating in the Swift ban presented another risk, this one strategic. On a G7 call prior to the decision, some allies of the economic block voiced the fear that, as the Financial Times reported, “removing Russia from Swift would accelerate efforts by it and China to create rival payment systems that did not use the US dollar”.

It took only a few weeks for China to capitalise on exactly this vulnerability. In March, China and Saudi Arabia began talks concerning settling oil transactions between the two countries in renminbi. By the end of the year, China turned this into an international strategy as President Xi Jinping “opened the door to trading crude oil and natural gas” in renminbi, as S&P Global reported in a December market insight report.

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At the time, there was intense scepticism regarding whether China would be able to pull this off in a meaningful fashion — and for good reason. China’s capital controls, its fixed currency and a relatively shallow and illiquid capital market, relative to the dollar, have made investors wary of parking their capital in renminbi-denominated accounts.

But that was before the US leveraged the dollar as an economic weapon against a country it was not even at war with. Today, the picture is changing. In March, China completed its first liquefied natural gas trade in yuan, in this case with the UAE. The yuan is now the dominant currency for China’s own cross-border payments, a first in the country’s modern history. Brazil and Argentina announced this year they would allow renminbi payments in transactions with China. Perhaps most significantly of all, over the past year, China has paid for almost all its Russian oil in its own currency.

In case China did not have enough reason to attempt a restructuring of global trade, Biden, in the midst of Chinese efforts to shift international payments to the yuan, publicly stated that the US would respond with military force if China were to invade Taiwan. This was a break with decades of US policy, and while the administration walked back the claims the next day, it would not take a leap of imagination on the part of Chinese officials to wonder how the US would leverage the country’s role as the backbone of global trade to alter the balance of power.

This is not evidence of the kind of de-dollarisation that China and other nations have sought for decades. But it does signal a new approach to strategic relations between countries such as China and Russia — and one that has come at the severe cost of America’s ability to influence oil prices. China and Russia are now not just allies, but economically bound to each other. Russia is no longer isolated but at the centre of a new axis of power. Worst of all, even the most extreme sanctions and complete weaponisation of the dollar have proved, if not ineffectual, then at least unable to achieve their strategic aims.

And, of course, winter is coming. With oil prices soaring, the US unable to meaningfully increase production, and Ukraine mired in a faltering counter-offensive, it seems that Biden’s most virtue-signalling policies will have the effect of simultaneously limiting the country’s options on trade, energy and foreign policy. The smart move would be to tap out by walking back one (if not all) of these policies. But with the US careening into an election year and Democrats alarmed by a slate of recent polls, for Biden failure may be the only option.

And on that front, the gathering in Johannesburg succeeded. The organisation announced its first expansion since its founding in 2009: next year, the five original Brics members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — will be joined by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia and Argentina (provided the current government wins the upcoming elections, which seems unlikely). Even more significantly, the summit underscored the bloc’s inclination to use its increasing economic clout to challenge the Western-dominated global order. The combination of these two elements — growing economic muscle and political boldness — means that the bloc (to be renamed Brics Plus) has become a full-blooded geopolitical actor that can longer be ignored.

In demographic and economic terms, the power of the Brics, especially in light of its recent expansion, is all too evident. With its new members, the bloc will represent almost half of the global population. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), the most appropriate measure for comparing the relative economic size of countries, it already represented nearly one third of global GDP — more than the US-led G7’s economies, which account for 30%. The latest additions will bring its share up to 37%.

This gap with the West will only widen, considering that emerging and developing countries are predicted to grow at much higher rates in the coming years, and that more countries are likely to join. More than 40 countries have reportedly expressed interest in joining, and 22 of them have formally asked to be admitted. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population lives in countries that are either already in the Brics or aspire to be.

The importance of this becomes even more apparent if we look at what countries produce, rather than just how much they produce. Over the past decades, Western economies have become increasingly financialised and seen their industrial production stagnate, meaning that a large part of their GDP doesn’t represent the production of actual goods but rather of financial assets. If we look at actual production — manufacturing — the gap between the West and the Brics is even starker: the G7 countries as whole contribute to global manufacturing output roughly as much as China does on its own.

But the growing power of this new alliance is about much more than just GDP and the production of stuff; it’s also about resources. The integration of two of the world’s top oil producers — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — means that the Brics members will account for more than 40% of global oil production. The fact that two of America’s staunchest allies in the Persian Gulf have decided to join a China-led (and increasingly politicised) alliance exemplifies better than anything else the paradigm shift underway. US officials can downplay the significance of the event as much as they want, but its symbolic value is clear — especially if we consider that the two Gulf countries are joined by Iran, one of America’s most notorious arch-enemies.

For the US, however, the consequences are likely to be more than just symbolic. The move potentially represents a serious threat to the petrodollar system. During the Seventies, Saudi Arabia made a deal with the US in which it agreed to list its oil on the global market in dollars; the dollars received by Saudi Arabia for its oil sales — the so-called petrodollars — would then be recycled back into the US in the form of deposits and purchases of US Treasuries. This, combined with the fact that any country that wants to buy oil has to purchase dollars to do so, has allowed the US to run a massive trade deficit for decades without seeing the dollar depreciate. It has been one of the keystones of America’s post-war global hegemony, allowing Washington to sustain a regime of perpetual war, on top of exercising financial dominance over much of the world.

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In recent years, however, cracks have started to appear in the petrodollar system. Not long ago, Saudi Arabia announced that it was considering pricing its oil in other currencies — first and foremost the Chinese yuan — while the UAE has already sold oil to China using the yuan. Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s entry into the Brics is therefore likely to provide further momentum to this gradual shift away from the petrodollar system.

As a group, too, the Brics has leaned towards an explicitly pro-de-dollarisation stance. Last year, for instance, they announced plans to develop an international currency along the lines of the synthetic alternative proposed by Keynes 70 years ago, the bancor. At last week’s summit, Brazil’s President Lula reaffirmed it as a priority, though it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, the Brics’s plan is to encourage the use of local currencies in international trade, as well as increasing the percentage of the bloc’s loans financed in local currencies.

Equally symbolic, in political more than economic terms, is the admission of Ethiopia. Not only is Ethiopia Africa’s second most populous country, after Nigeria; it is also where the headquarters of the African Union are located, in the capital Addis Ababa. The move here should be read as a message to the entire continent that the Brics is open to any African country that may want to join, as well as an affirmation of the bloc’s commitment to helping developing countries — Ethiopia is also one of Africa’s poorest countries. In his speech (read by the Chinese commerce minister), Xi Jinping in particular insisted on the role of the Brics as a fundamental vehicle for the development and emancipation of the Global South — primarily Africa.

Not that these countries need much convincing. Many African nations have already asked to join the Brics, along with several more in the Middle East and Latin America. There are strictly economic reasons for this: the bloc’s approach to global affairs and development — based on the principles of inclusive multilateralism and sovereign equality, and opposition to economic coercion — is seen by many nations as a better alternative to the current Western model, and as an opportunity to break away from economic and financial Western control.

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As ever, there are deeper factors at play, too. For some, the Brics represents a “geopolitical umbrella” ostensibly offering a degree of protection in the face of the West’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, epitomised by the Biden administration’s “dual containment” strategy against China and Russia, and the expansion of Nato and Nato-like alliances around the world. For others, the motivation might be the opposite: they might, as Branko Milanovic suggests, view the Brics as “the only place where nations not interested in participating in the new Cold War, or even in a possible hot war between the superpowers, can ‘runaway’ in order not to have to choose sides”. For others still, the motivation is more ideological: it is about explicitly challenging and weakening the West’s 500-year-old grip on global affairs, in what may be likened to a new decolonisation movement. This is particularly evident in some African countries.

On this issue, however, not everyone in the bloc is on the same page. Russia and China, for obvious reasons, favour transforming the group into a full-blooded political organisation speaking up for the Global South, countering US and Western hegemony, and spearheading the creation of a more equitable multipolar world order. In his speech, Xi said that the US “has gone out of its way to cripple emerging markets and developing countries; whoever is developing fast becomes its target of containment; whoever is catching up becomes its target of obstruction”.

South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, meanwhile, drew a direct parallel between the Johannesburg summit and the Bandung Conference of 1955: “The Conference called for the recognition of the equality of all nations, large and small. We still share that common vision of a fair and just world.” Isaias Afwerki, the President of Eritrea, one of the many non-member countries invited to the summit, was even more scathing: “US exceptionalism — or pax americana — has unleashed malaises that have gravely impaired global progress for almost a century now. Illegal and unilateral sanctions; weaponisation of US dominated financial, economic and judicial institutions; as well as other punitive instruments in their toolbox are routinely invoked [by the US and its allies] to punish those who do not toe the line…”

Yet not all members agree with this confrontational approach. Modi’s India, in particular, which has very good relations with Washington and the West, including in the security field, is concerned about the Brics’s evolution into an explicitly anti-Western organisation led by China and Russia, and favours a more neutral approach — non-Western but not anti-Western. For the time being, however, it appears to be losing ground to the latter two, whose anti-hegemonic stance enjoys widespread support in the Global South.

Next year, then, will prove crucial for the future of the Brics — and of the world as a whole. Not only will membership of the new countries become effective, but Russia will also assume the annual presidency of the bloc. In other words, a country engaged in a de facto military confrontation with the West — assuming the war is still ongoing — will be representing an organisation encompassing half of humanity. If last week’s summit didn’t mark the start of a new world order, it will certainly start then.