1. Home
2. Middle East
3. Saudi Arabia’s Voodoo Diplomacy Is Sabotaging Middle East Peace

While Iran has strangled Kuwait and Qatar’s ability to export energy and fund repairs for costly damage inflicted by Iranian attacks, Saudi Arabia has done nothing to challenge Tehran. Instead, Riyadh—the self-anointed leader of the Gulf—prioritized denouncing the opening of a Somaliland embassy in Jerusalem.

Saudi foreign policy is simply unfathomable, more voodoo than statecraft. In December 2025, as South Yemen made a bid to re-establish an independent state, Riyadh carried out airstrikes against Emirati supply ships en-route to the separatists. Saudi Arabia declared itself the region’s anchor, rejecting any interference in its sphere of influence. Yet when Iran began pummeling the kingdom with missiles and drones, Riyadh refused to sever ties with Tehran, let alone deploy its air force in self-defense.

Saudi Arabia continued to insist on diplomatic solutions to the regional war. U.S. President Donald Trump held a call with Middle East leaders earlier this week to discuss a possible agreement with Iran. But when he proposed expanding the Abraham Accords and urged Riyadh to normalize ties with Israel, the line went silent.

The next day, Saudi media went into a frenzy trying to explain the kingdom’s contradictory stance on peace with Jerusalem. According to Saudi pundits, the kingdom has no objection to normalization provided Israel first grants the Palestinians a state or at least an “irreversible pathway” toward one.

No one quite knows what an “irreversible pathway” means. It is classic Saudi flowery language and voodoo diplomacy. A Palestinian state is a clearer demand. Yet since 2000, two Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, were rebuffed by Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas when they offered an independent Palestinian state. What stopped the Palestinians from seizing the opportunity? Their unwillingness to relinquish the so-called “right of return” or to rein in terror groups such as Hamas.

Rather than using its influence to press the Palestinians to accept a Zionist state alongside a Palestinian one, Saudi Arabia conveniently blames Israel. In doing so, it has tied its own normalization with the Jewish state to an improbable Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Saudi Arabia does not stop there. It has also conditioned Lebanon’s peace with Israel on resolving the same intractable Palestinian issue.

All of Saudi Arabia’s rhetoric about “solutions through dialogue” in dealing with Iran suddenly vanishes when Washington asks Riyadh to engage with Jerusalem. When it comes to Israel, Saudi Arabia does not view dialogue as a means of resolving differences. Instead, the kingdom adopts a “take it or leave it” policy, demanding that Israel first meet Riyadh’s conditions before any talks can begin.

For more than half a century, Saudi Arabia played a vital role in containing firebrand tyrants such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The kingdom cracked down on radical Islamist groups, from Al-Qaeda to Hezbollah and Hamas. Riyadh consistently aligned itself with the U.S. and quietly coordinated with Israel.

When Mohammed bin Salman became Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler after 2017, many hoped the young prince would modernize both the kingdom and the region through bold, Western-oriented policies, including normalization with Israel.

Then something shifted. Since last fall, Saudi Arabia has begun reversing a decade of progress as the region’s modernizing and moderate force. Riyadh has since re-engaged with regional Islamist powers, including Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and Pakistan, in the misguided belief that its populist foreign policy will safeguard the kingdom’s interests.

The Saudi Arabia that severed ties with Iran in 2016 after its embassy was torched in Tehran is not the same kingdom that now cowers as Iranian missiles rain down on its territory and responds with little more than diplomatic protests.

Much of Washington and many other Western capitals still have not grasped this fundamental shift in Saudi policy. They continue to speak of the Gulf as a monolithic bloc, even as it fractures into competing factions pursuing their own national interests.

It is time the world recognized that Saudi Arabia is now steering a course destructive to normalization between Lebanon and Israel and to regional peace more broadly. Saudi Arabia’s appeasement of Iran will not deliver peace.