Since the mid-1960s, the Middle East has been a growing contest among its inhabitants. It was a system in which Arab and Persian states competed, openly and ruthlessly, for primacy, legitimacy, and the authority to define the regional political agenda.

Israel played a role in this competition, but only a secondary role, as the issue was mediated by, subordinated to, and often an effect of this primary intra-Islamic rivalry.

Israel functioned as a source of symbolic capital and strategic leverage in contests among Nasserists, Ba’athists, monarchies, and revolutionary republics, according to a commentary by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, an Arab world scholar.

However, following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the rise and institutionalisation of transnational Islamist movements, and the entrenchment of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the international dialogue on the Middle East, this Arab rivalry was crowded out by the newer themes, says Mansour.

“Over time, two frames crowded out most others and came to dominate regional analysis. The first was the strategic and sectarian contest between Iran and the Arab states, which reframed regional politics as a struggle between competing security architectures and rival claims to ideological leadership,” Mansour says.

“The second was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which hardened into a durable moral and diplomatic axis around which international opinion, domestic mobilisation, and alliance politics repeatedly revolved. Against these two gravitational fields, inter-Arab rivalry came to fade into the background.”

Beneath the surface, the renewed dynamic of competition for hierarchy continues to drive the regional politics.

For the last decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have functioned as the central axis of what was called moderate Arab politics. They have coordinated on Yemen, joined forces to confront Qatar, and presented themselves to Washington as the region’s most reliable Arab partners.

However, more recently, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has changed tack as the long-standing rivalries reassert themselves and is making a bid for primacy in the Middle East.

New contest

In a sweeping strategic shift, Saudi Arabia is moving away from its decades-long role as a conservative anchor of the US-led regional order and positioning itself instead as a revisionist power willing to reshape the very foundations of Middle Eastern politics, according to Mansour, who argues that Riyadh’s recent actions mark a deliberate recalibration of strategy in a rapidly transforming post-liberal global environment.

“The American-led conditions that made Gulf alignment rational are thinning,” Mansour wrote, adding that “Saudi Arabia intends to lead the region in whatever post-liberal world comes next.”

He describes Riyadh’s current posture not as ideological regression but as strategic adaptation—one driven by the collapse of American arbitration and the systematic degradation of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance.

At the core of the Saudi pivot is an emerging competition with the United Arab Emirates, triggered most recently by clashes in Yemen.

“The military clash was quickly accompanied by an information war,” Mansour notes, with Saudi-aligned media accusing the UAE of secessionism and collaboration with Israeli interests. The rift is the first visible expression of a deeper transformation: from managed alignment to open contestation among status-seeking middle powers operating within a permissive, and increasingly multipolar order.

The Kingdom has been especially active in this role, as a discrete BRICS+ member that has gone out of its way to improve relations with both Moscow and New Delhi, as well as trips to see US President Donald Trump in Washington last year, as MbS moves onto the global stage.

Mansour sees the region’s strategic environment as one of fluid positional manoeuvring rather than fixed blocs.

“Returns are generated through position rather than participation,” he writes, highlighting how control over logistics, energy, narrative platforms, and conflict portfolios now outweighs formal status within international institutions. This emerging system, he contends, rewards states capable of accumulating veto power and agenda-setting authority.

The rivalry between KSA and the UAE illustrates the logic. Riyadh’s assets—its financial weight, demographic scale, and religious custodianship—allow it to convert symbolic capital into narrative dominance.

“Narrative mobilisation is therefore not ancillary to Saudi strategy but integral to it,” Mansour explains, with Palestine serving as a particularly potent instrument. In contrast, the UAE’s influence is rooted in elite connectivity, logistics infrastructure, and financial networks—making it vulnerable to symbolic challenges that shift competition onto the terrain of mass legitimacy.

While the Saudi–UAE split is the most visible rupture, Mansour places it within a broader configuration of differentiated portfolios. Qatar, Turkey, Israel, and Iran each pursue distinct models of influence—from narrative brokerage to military denial—producing a competitive landscape that is unlikely to coalesce into stable alliances. “Each actor accumulates power through different channels, with different time horizons and vulnerabilities,” Mansour says.

The post-liberal regional environment is one in which fragmentation becomes a tool of strategy, not a failure of statehood. “Fragmentation is not an ethical category,” Mansour writes, “but an equilibrium outcome in arenas where no coalition can impose a preferred settlement.”

He concludes that Palestine now serves as Saudi Arabia’s most efficient means of consolidating influence and countering Emirati-Israeli alignment. “It is the one arena where Saudi Arabia’s unique comparative advantages can be converted into agenda control at scale,” Mansour asserts, noting that the symbolic power of anti-Zionism allows Riyadh to reassert regional primacy without reversing its domestic liberalisation agenda.