Standing with the state: Saudi Arabia and the Sudan test

John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago’s political scientist known for his blunt assessments, has long argued that geography is among the most decisive forces in international relations.

His observation about the US is instructive: shielded by two vast oceans and bordered by two non-threatening neighbors, America has enjoyed a degree of strategic insulation that no other great power in history has possessed.

That insulation did not merely protect the US, it positioned it.

A nation that need not spend its energy defending its borders can direct that energy outward, toward shaping the world beyond them.

Strategic advantage, in other words, is an invitation to lead.

Saudi Arabia’s invitation arrives from a different source, but it is no less real, and in some respects considerably older.

The Kingdom’s position at the intersection of three continents, its role as custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, and its deep roots in Arab culture together create a set of obligations that geography and history have jointly imposed.

For nearly 2 billion Muslims worldwide, Makkah and Madinah are the spiritual center of a civilization.

The nation that oversees them cannot remain indifferent to that civilization’s fate.

To appreciate the full weight of that inheritance, one must look beyond the Kingdom’s modern founding.

The historian Abdulmajeed Al-Mudarra offers a useful frame: “Saudi Arabia is built on Islam and Arab culture, the same twin pillars on which the Umayyad state was built.

“The Umayyad state had Islam and the Arabs as its backbone. What followed, the Abbasid state, preserved Islam, but severed it from the Arabs, who are the very foundation of Islam.

“The Arabs have not stood as a civilizational force except through the Umayyad state in Andalusia, and the Saudi state.”

Al-Mudarra's point is not merely historical; it speaks directly to the present. Saudi Arabia is not a new state reaching for ancient prestige.

It is, in a meaningful sense, a resumption: the return of a political form that once united the sacred geography of the Two Holy Mosques with the cultural roots from which the wider Arab world draws its identity.

That inheritance carries an implicit demand: to support functioning institutions over armed factions, and to offer the Arab world a model of governance it can recognize and respect.

That is a purpose that runs through the Kingdom’s foundations.

It is worth noting, moreover, that this purpose is not merely moral in nature.

It is also strategic in the most straightforward sense. A prosperous Arab world, from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic shores of Morocco, is, plainly, a better neighborhood for Saudi Arabia to inhabit.

The Kingdom’s own economic transformation, its ambitious diversification agenda, its growing network of investment and trade ties reaching westward across North Africa: all of it depends, at some fundamental level, on a regional environment that functions rather than fragments.

Riyadh has every incentive to see its neighbors stable and its region integrated.

Disorder, wherever it takes hold, whether in the Levant, the Horn of Africa, or the Maghreb, carries costs that eventually reach the Kingdom’s doorstep.

Saudi Arabia’s interest in Arab prosperity is structural rather than merely rhetorical.

That structural interest has expressed itself in a consistent pattern of behavior across the region.

The principle at its core is straightforward: when state institutions come under threat from armed forces seeking to displace or dissolve them, Saudi Arabia stands with the state.

Disorder, wherever it takes hold, whether in the Levant, the Horn of Africa, or the Maghreb, carries costs that eventually reach the Kingdom’s doorstep.

Nasser bin Hamed Al-Ahmad

Two cases beyond Sudan illustrate this with particular clarity.

In Bahrain, when the unrest of 2011 threatened to destabilize the island kingdom and undermine the foundations of its governing institutions, Saudi Arabia did not hesitate.

As part of a Peninsula Shield Force deployment, Riyadh moved to shore up a neighboring state at genuine risk of collapse; not to impose an outcome, but to prevent a vacuum.

The distinction matters. What Saudi Arabia consistently opposes is not change itself, but the particular and dangerous path of change that runs through institutional breakdown and armed disorder.

In Yemen, the logic was the same, the stakes considerably higher.

When the Houthi movement, backed by external actors with interests antithetical to regional stability, swept across the country and drove the internationally recognized government from the capital, Saudi Arabia organized and led a coalition to restore legitimate authority.

The intervention has been costly and its resolution remains incomplete. But its underlying principle has never wavered: that a Yemen governed by recognized institutions, however imperfect, is infinitely preferable to a Yemen governed by no one, or by a militia answerable to a foreign patron.

That principle preceded the Yemen crisis, and it has since outlasted it.

Nowhere, however, is that principle more urgently tested today than in Sudan.

What is unfolding there is not a conventional civil conflict. It is the systematic dismantling of a state at one of the Arab world’s most strategically sensitive junctions, where the Red Sea meets the Horn of Africa and the Sahel.

A fragmented Sudan does not simply suffer internally; it generates spillover effects, displacement, arms flows, and ungoverned territory, that radiate outward across an already unstable region.

For a country whose interests are structurally bound up with regional stability, a collapsing Sudan is not a peripheral concern. It is a direct challenge to the kind of Arab world Riyadh is working to build.

Saudi Arabia’s response has accordingly been consistent. Riyadh has organized its approach around a single clear commitment: supporting legitimate state institutions over militia forces.

While some regional actors have calculated that a fragmented Sudan advances their strategic interests, going so far as to arm non-state forces and deepen the conflict, Saudi Arabia has maintained its support for Sudan’s sovereign institutions and the legitimate government led by Gen. Al-Burhan.

The contrast is not incidental. It reflects a genuine divergence in vision: between those who see a weakened Arab state as an opportunity and those who see it as a problem to be contained.

The external dimensions of the conflict have not gone unnoticed in Washington. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in congressional testimony on June 4, described the situation in Sudan as a proxy war, an acknowledgment that outside actors are deliberately fueling the violence.

That characterization is accurate as far as it goes. Where it falls short, however, is in the distinctions it leaves undrawn.

Not all outside involvement is equivalent. There is a meaningful difference between those who have chosen to arm militias as instruments of fracture and a country like Saudi Arabia, which has worked steadily toward the opposite outcome.

Riyadh is among the few regional actors that has consistently worked to contain regional chaos.

The broader significance of Saudi Arabia’s position extends well beyond any single conflict.

America’s geographic advantages made it a natural architect of the postwar global order, not because it sought the role, but because its position made it nearly inevitable.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia’s civilizational inheritance, rooted not in decades but in 14 centuries of Arab-Islamic history, has placed the Kingdom at the center of a region searching not only for security, but for a workable model of what Arab statehood can be.

From Bahrain to Yemen to Sudan, the Kingdom has offered a consistent answer to that question: that sovereignty is worth defending, that institutions are worth preserving, and that the alternative, the armed faction, the militia, the proxy force, leads nowhere a serious nation should wish to go.

But Sudan is one chapter, not the whole story. What Saudi Arabia is ultimately working toward is a Middle East stable enough to be taken seriously as a constructive force in the world, a region no longer defined primarily by its conflicts, but by its capacity to resolve them.

Whether the Kingdom fully rises to that challenge remains to be seen. The Arab world, from the Gulf to the Atlantic, is watching. And, increasingly, so is the rest of the world.

• Nasser bin Hamed Al-Ahmad is a political researcher and writer with more than eight years’ experience in political media. He specializes in analyzing political trends in the MENA region and the US. X: @nasseralahmad3