Riyadh Is Reopening the Door It Once Slammed Shut
How “flexible diplomacy” is becoming an old and losing bet on political Islam
In the Middle East, mistakes never die. They simply wait for a new generation of decision-makers who did not pay for them the first time.
Over the years I have spent following Islamist movements, from Cairo to Peshawar and from Sanaa to Istanbul, one rule has never failed me: a state that believes it can tame political Islam and use it as a tool always discovers, too late, that the tool was using it.
Saudi Arabia now appears poised to learn that lesson for a second time.
A scene that looks like diplomacy
At first glance, Riyadh looks to be at the peak of its regional activism. Houthi delegations sit across the table from Saudi officials, most recently in Amman in April, in an effort to revive a stalled “roadmap”. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Ankara only a few years ago was putting the kingdom on trial before world opinion over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, was received in February with every courtesy, and the Saudi cabinet hailed the visit as proof of robust ties. In Yemen, commanders associated with the Islah party, the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, are back at the heart of Saudi calculations, after Riyadh mobilised units under their command against southern forces earlier this year.
All of this is being marketed as mature pragmatism, a policy of zero problems, the flexibility of a confident state.
Read the scene with a cold eye, however, and something quite different emerges: a state knocking on every door at once, not because it has a plan, but because it has lost faith in the one it had.
Short memory, long bill
What is striking is not that Riyadh is opening up to political Islam. It is that it is doing so as though it had never tried it before.
In the 1960s the kingdom opened its doors to Brotherhood leaders fleeing Nasser’s repression. It handed them pulpits, universities and school curricula, and saw in them an ideological weapon against Arab nationalism and the advancing left. It looked like a good bargain: the state provided refuge, the movement provided religious legitimacy in the Arab cold war.
But the guests did not remain guests. Over two decades their ideas seeped into the kingdom’s educational and religious establishment, and from that union was born the Sahwa, the “Awakening” movement, which soon turned on the state itself and challenged its legitimacy at its most vulnerable moment, after the 1991 Gulf War.
In 2002 the then interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, said what no Saudi official had dared say before: that the Brotherhood lay at the root of most of the Arab world’s problems, and that the kingdom had paid a price for sheltering it. Twelve years later, in 2014, Riyadh designated the group a terrorist organisation.
Half a century of experience, an official admission of error, a strict legal ban. And then, a return to square one.
The law of the devoured host
Saudi Arabia is no exception. The region’s modern history is a crowded graveyard of states that believed they were cleverer than the movements they sheltered.
Anwar Sadat freed the Islamists in the 1970s to counterbalance the Nasserist left; they assassinated him on a military parade stand in 1981. Pakistan nurtured the Taliban as an instrument of strategic depth in Afghanistan, only to find itself fighting a Pakistani version of the movement on its own soil. Erdogan himself allied with the Gülen movement to dismantle the old secular state, and was rewarded with a bloody coup attempt in 2016.
The pattern never changes. The state thinks it is buying loyalty, when in truth it is only renting time. Ideological movements do not sell their loyalty; they postpone their disagreement until the balance of power shifts.
Why the trick will fail again
The problem with Riyadh’s current bet is not moral. It is arithmetic.
The Houthis are not negotiating because they have been converted to peace, but because talks give them what war could not: implicit recognition as the party that matters, the sidelining of Yemen’s internationally recognised government, and financial demands dressed up as rights. Whenever talks stall, their escalatory rhetoric returns within days. Their bond with Tehran is not a tactical alliance; it is part of their strategic identity.
Ankara has a regional project of its own, stretching from Syria to the Horn of Africa, and it has never abandoned its patronage of political Islam’s networks across the region. For Turkey, rapprochement with Riyadh is an investment in Saudi money and the kingdom’s symbolic weight, not a concession of its own vision.
Islah is the most telling case of all. This is a party that has already tested dialogue with the Houthis when its survival required it, and which treats Saudi support as a phase rather than an alliance. At a time when Washington is reportedly reviewing whether to designate it a terrorist organisation, Riyadh is busy empowering it, in stark contradiction with its closest partners.
What the three share is simple. Each has commitments to Tehran, or to a transnational ideological project, that run deeper and last longer than any understanding with a state facing mounting fiscal pressure, rescheduling its flagship projects, and quarrelling with its traditional allies in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
The counter-argument, and why it does not hold
Defenders of Saudi policy will say this is not ideological accommodation of the Brotherhood at all, but realistic management of a war that has drained the kingdom for a decade, and that reducing the number of enemies in a region on fire is wisdom, not confusion. Rapprochement with Turkey, they will add, is driven by defence and economic deals, not doctrine.
It is an argument that deserves respect, and it is partly true. But it ignores a fundamental point: pragmatism requires knowing precisely what you are buying and what you will pay for it later. What Saudi moves reveal is not a coherent strategy for reducing adversaries, but a series of parallel bets on contradictory actors, all placed at once, with no clear answer to the question that matters most: what happens when their loyalties collide with Riyadh’s interests?
History has answered that question before. The answer has always been expensive.
A lesson unlearned
States, like people, are rarely defeated by their enemies. They are defeated when they forget what they learned the hard way.
Saudi Arabia has paid once for embracing political Islam. It admitted as much in public, and it closed the door by official decree. What it is doing today is not a new diplomacy. It is a return to that very same door, with the confidence of someone who believes the story will end differently this time.
It will not.