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The War in Yemen Is Reopening Saudi Arabia’s Oldest Question

By Jaffa Levy on September 17, 2026

A century ago, British money, rifles, machine guns and aircraft helped Abdulaziz ibn Saud turn a desert principality into the kingdom that still bears his family’s name. Now a war from Yemen is testing the political order that victory created.

In the video released from Yemen this week, the wreckage is blackened and torn open. Fighters move around what is left of the aircraft. On one piece of tail, the green and white marking of Saudi Arabia is still visible.

Ansarallah, the Houthi movement that now controls much of Yemen, says it shot the F-15 down over Marib with a locally made surface-to-air missile. Saudi Arabia has not publicly confirmed how the aircraft was lost. But the wreckage itself is real enough. Jane’s identified it as an F-15SA, the advanced Saudi version of the American fighter. If the Houthi account of the engagement is correct, the symbolism is difficult to avoid: one of the richest states in the world has lost one of its most sophisticated aircraft over the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula.

The scene belongs to a thoroughly modern war of drones, ballistic missiles, air defences and satellite-guided weapons. Yet the struggle now spreading from Yemen also reaches backward, into the making of Saudi Arabia itself.

The Houthis have captured Mocha, advanced along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and reached islands around the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow passage through which Europe and Asia meet by sea. Saudi oil infrastructure has been struck. The kingdom’s East-West pipeline, designed to give Riyadh an escape route when the Strait of Hormuz is threatened, has been disrupted. Saudi Arabia has sought additional air-defence help from abroad while Washington, its principal security patron, has so far declined to open another direct front against the Houthis.

Seen from the oil market, this is an energy crisis. Seen from a military headquarters, it is a problem of missile stocks, intelligence and air defence. But there is another way to look at it. The war is testing whether the Saudi state, whose modern shape was forged by the defeat and incorporation of older Arabian powers, is as politically settled as its enormous wealth and imposing institutions have made it appear.

The kingdom Britain helped make

Saudi Arabia did not simply emerge from the desert.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Arabian Peninsula was a field of rival emirates, holy cities, merchant communities, tribal confederations and religious traditions. Abdulaziz ibn Saud was an unusually capable political and military leader. He recaptured Riyadh in 1902 and built his power outward from Najd. None of that was done for him.

But neither was his victory achieved in isolation.

When Britain went to war with the Ottoman Empire, Ibn Saud became part of London’s Arabian strategy. In December 1915, Sir Percy Cox concluded the Treaty of Darin with him. British archives record the subsidies, rifles and ammunition that followed. A surviving India Office file contains instructions for the supply of four machine guns and 1,000 rifles, with another 2,000 rifles under consideration, together with a monthly subsidy of £5,000. The payments continued after the First World War. In 1921 Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the £5,000 monthly subsidy was being paid in gold. The following year Parliament was told that Ibn Saud was the only Arab ruler still receiving the full subsidy allocated to him.

These were not trivial sums or ceremonial gifts. In the political economy of central Arabia, they were power.

Madawi al-Rasheed, one of the leading historians of Saudi Arabia, writes that Ibn Saud’s expansion was “only possible with British weapons and generous subsidies”. Her formulation is careful. She does not describe Saudi Arabia as a British invention. Ibn Saud had his own ambitions, constituencies and military strength. But she places the unification of Arabia under Saudi rule firmly inside the history of British intervention in the Middle East.

Alastair Crooke, the former British diplomat and intelligence officer who has written about the Saudi state for years, makes the argument more sharply. He has repeatedly returned to the figure of Harry St John Philby, the British official who became close to Ibn Saud and later the father of the Soviet spy Kim Philby. In Crooke’s account, Philby understood that Ibn Saud could turn the austere Wahhabi current of Najd into an instrument of political consolidation, provided he secured British support. In a 2017 essay, Crooke described Philby as urging Ibn Saud to seek Britain’s backing and to use the militant energy of the Ikhwan to become king. In his recent commentary on Yemen, Crooke compresses the argument further: Britain, he says, “gave him the weapons” and “gave him the means”.

The archives do not require the reader to accept every part of Crooke’s interpretation to see why he makes it.

The tribes that won the kingdom, and then rebelled

Ibn Saud’s most formidable early fighters were the Ikhwan, tribal warriors settled in agricultural colonies and mobilised around the severe religious doctrines associated with the Wahhabi revival of Najd. They were not the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also called the Ikhwan in Arabic. These were the fighting communities that helped carry Saudi power across central Arabia and into the Hijaz.

They helped take the kingdom. Then they became a danger to the king.

The problem was partly ideological and partly political. The Ikhwan wanted the campaign of expansion to continue. Ibn Saud increasingly needed borders, treaties and recognition. The raiding culture that had served conquest collided with the requirements of an internationally recognised state. His alliances abroad, particularly with Britain, demanded restraint where the Ikhwan demanded expansion.

By the late 1920s, leaders from the Mutair and Utaybah were in open rebellion. Faisal al-Duwaish, the powerful Mutair leader, became one of the central figures in the revolt. British records from the period are filled with anxiety over the movement of Mutair, Utaybah, Ajman and other tribal forces across the frontiers of Iraq, Kuwait and Najd.

The rebellion ended in modern firepower.

Crooke’s older account puts it brutally: Ibn Saud “machine-gunned them”. The British archival record supplies the machinery behind the phrase. The British Library’s Qatar Digital Library says Ibn Saud owed part of his victory over the rebel Ikhwan to British-provided armoured cars and machine guns, and to Royal Air Force aircraft that fought alongside his forces. British files record air attacks on Ikhwan raiding parties and later the delivery of aircraft and armaments to Ibn Saud.

At the Battle of Sabilla in 1929, the old military order of Arabia met the technologies of the new one. The Ikhwan rebellion fractured. Its leaders were killed, captured or driven into flight. Three years later, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed.

This is the part of the Saudi story that is often lost behind later images of oil wealth, royal palaces and American presidents. The state was not assembled around an uncontested national consensus. It emerged from a contest among political centres, ruling houses and tribal powers. The Shammar world of Ha’il had once sustained the Rashidi emirate, one of the Saudis’ principal rivals. Mutair, Utaybah, Ajman and other confederations were not merely picturesque remnants of nomadic life. They were political and military forces.

The Saudi victory did not abolish the tribes. It abolished their alternative sovereignty.

Oil made the settlement look permanent

Oil changed the relationship between Riyadh and the country it ruled.

Before oil, a ruler needed tribes for fighting men, local authority, mediation and tribute. After oil, the monarchy possessed a source of revenue independent of those relationships. Ministries, roads, police forces, schools, military bases and patronage networks reached outward from the centre. Tribal sheikhs survived, sometimes with prestige and sometimes with influence, but the balance had shifted decisively.

Saudi Arabia became not merely a state but a rich state, and then one of the central pillars of American power in the Middle East. British protection receded after the Second World War. The United States took its place. Oil, security and the monarchy’s custodianship of Mecca and Medina gave the kingdom a weight no tribal rival could match.

Crooke’s argument is that Western observers mistook this accumulation of power for something deeper and more permanent. They saw skyscrapers, weapons contracts, sovereign wealth and modern administration. They paid less attention to the older political geography underneath.

That idea has run through his work for years. In a 2014 essay on Wahhabism, he described a “duality” at the heart of the Saudi state: the revolutionary religious force used in the creation of the kingdom, and the conservative monarchy that later had to tame that same force in order to survive as a state. In his more recent commentary, he extends the argument beyond religion. Saudi Arabia, he says, sits above a landscape of tribes and regions whose incorporation into the kingdom did not erase their histories.

It is a provocative thesis. It becomes more interesting when one looks south.

The border with Yemen is younger than the societies it divides

The modern Saudi-Yemeni frontier was not drawn across empty land.

The war between Ibn Saud and Yemen’s Imam Yahya in 1934 ended with the Treaty of Taif. The settlement resolved competing claims over Asir, Najran and al-Mikhlaf al-Sulaymani, the region corresponding substantially to modern Jizan. It is tempting to reduce the result to a simple story of Saudi conquest. The historical record is more tangled.

Najran, for example, had its own tribal and religious order. It was dominated by the Yam confederation and an Ismaili religious establishment. Recent scholarship by Sultan Alamer shows that Najrani leaders manoeuvred between Riyadh and Sanaa and, after Yemeni forces entered the region, some sought Saudi protection. The settlement that followed turned a community with a considerable measure of local autonomy into part of the Saudi state.

The border itself was initially porous in ways that would look unusual today. The Treaty of Taif was concerned above all with raiders, political dissidents and criminals. Families, workers and pilgrims continued to cross. Only much later did the frontier acquire the harder character of a modern national boundary.

That history gives Crooke’s emphasis on Yemen its force. He argues that Yemen should not be seen as a peripheral, impoverished state confronting a natural Saudi centre. In his telling, Yemen belongs to one of the oldest cultural and genealogical landscapes of Arabia. Many Arab tribal traditions trace ancestry southward into Yemen, and communities on either side of the present frontier long existed inside networks older than Saudi Arabia itself.

Genealogy in Arabia is not a modern census, and claims of origin are often contested. But their political meaning cannot be dismissed simply because they are ancient. States govern territory. Memory moves differently.

Saudi Arabia has always known the power of Yemeni tribes

Riyadh’s own policy in Yemen demonstrates how seriously it has taken tribal authority.

For decades Saudi Arabia cultivated relationships with Yemeni sheikhs, particularly in the north. The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies has documented the system of payments and political ties through which Saudi officials built influence among tribal leaders, sometimes bypassing the Yemeni state altogether. Under Ali Abdullah Saleh, tribal politics remained woven into government. Hashid and Bakil were not social curiosities; they were part of the architecture of power.

The Houthis emerged inside that world.

Ansarallah began as a Zaydi revivalist movement in the northern highlands. It fought six wars against the Saleh government, seized Sanaa in 2014 and survived the Saudi-led intervention that began the following year. Iran and Hezbollah provided increasingly important weapons, expertise and training. The movement’s arsenal now includes ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and long-range drones. Reuters estimates that it can mobilise hundreds of thousands of fighters.

External support explains part of that evolution. It does not explain all of it.

A movement that was merely an imported proxy would have had difficulty surviving years of bombardment, internal war, blockade, political fragmentation and repeated attempts to dislodge it. Ansarallah’s coercion inside Yemen is well documented, as are its domestic enemies. But so is the movement’s rootedness in Yemeni society.

That is why the latest advance has been so unsettling for Riyadh.

The balance begins to run backwards

Saudi Arabia entered the Yemen war in 2015 with almost every conventional advantage.

Its aircraft were among the most advanced in the region. Its defence budget dwarfed Yemen’s economy. It had access to American intelligence, precision weapons and maintenance. Its coalition controlled the skies. The expectation, widely shared outside Yemen, was that sustained air power would force the Houthis back and restore a government acceptable to Riyadh.

More than a decade later, Saudi Arabia is again bombing Yemen, but the strategic picture has been inverted.

Ansarallah’s forces have taken Mocha and moved down the Red Sea coast. Reuters reported this week that the group seized Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline in a rapid offensive and reached the Bab al-Mandab, while more than 100,000 Yemenis have been displaced by the renewed fighting. Saudi-backed forces collapsed in several areas, abandoning weapons as they retreated. Riyadh has sought help from Egypt and other partners. The United States has offered intelligence support but has declined direct military intervention.

Meanwhile, the air war has become expensive in a new way. Saudi Arabia is reported to be running low on some missile interceptors and has asked Britain, France, Pakistan and Egypt for air-defence assistance. Cheap drones and missiles can force a defender to expend weapons costing far more than the objects they destroy.

Then came the F-15.

The Houthis say they brought it down with a Yemeni-made missile. Jane’s has confirmed the wreckage as an F-15SA, while the precise cause of the loss remains unconfirmed by Riyadh. The event does not overturn Saudi air superiority. One aircraft does not decide a war. But wars are lived through symbols as well as inventories.

A century ago, advanced weapons supplied by the leading outside power helped Ibn Saud defeat tribal challengers whose methods belonged to an older military world. Today the kingdom possesses the expensive aircraft, the imported interceptors and the modern state. Yemen has discovered ways of making that advantage less decisive.

Crooke’s wager

Crooke sees in this reversal something larger than a military setback.

His thesis is that the regional order built over the last century is beginning to turn back on itself. For much of modern history, Iran and Iraq were the great civilisational centres of the region. The oil age and Western power elevated the Gulf monarchies, above all Saudi Arabia, into a position of strategic weight that their populations and older political histories alone would not have produced. The United States and Israel then built regional strategy around those states: energy security, containment of Iran and, more recently, the hope that Saudi normalisation with Israel would anchor a new Middle Eastern order.

Yemen, in Crooke’s reading, is breaking the spell.

Not because the Houthis can conquer Saudi Arabia. There is no evidence that they can. Not because Saudi tribes are visibly preparing to overthrow the monarchy. There is no public evidence of that either.

What has changed is the demonstration of possibility.

A movement from Yemen has survived Saudi air power, pushed back Saudi-backed forces, threatened one of the world’s great shipping passages and struck infrastructure inside the kingdom. At the same time, the outside security patron on which Riyadh has relied is showing greater reluctance to fight another war on its behalf.

Crooke has gone further. He has said he has heard, but cannot confirm, that people may already be talking to Saudi tribal leaders about a future political arrangement less concentrated in one ruling family, perhaps some form of confederal structure. No independent evidence has surfaced publicly to substantiate that claim. It should not be reported as fact.

But the speculation tells us what Crooke believes the real contest is about. He is looking not at whether a particular tribe will revolt next month, but at the political assumptions that made such a question seem irrelevant for most of the oil age.

The old bargain beneath the new state

Mohammed bin Salman governs a country radically different from the one his grandfather unified.

Saudi identity is real. Urbanisation, education, bureaucracy and a national economy have transformed the social landscape. The crown prince has weakened rival royal centres, curbed the old religious establishment and promoted a nationalism that asks younger Saudis to think of themselves primarily as citizens of a modern state rather than members of a bargain among dynasties, clerics and tribes.

That project may prove durable. Nothing in the present fighting establishes that Saudi Arabia is nearing collapse.

Yet centralisation carries its own vulnerability. The more completely power is gathered at the centre, the more military setbacks, economic shocks and failures of protection attach themselves to that centre.

For generations, the Saudi monarchy could point to several forms of strength at once. It controlled the holy places. It distributed oil wealth. It possessed the strongest outside alliances. It could buy the most advanced weapons. It had defeated every serious internal challenger. The frontier with Yemen appeared to separate a rich, orderly kingdom from a fragmented and impoverished neighbour.

Now a Yemeni movement is forcing Saudi Arabia to ask for foreign air defences while threatening the Red Sea route on which the kingdom increasingly depends.

This does not mean the tribes will rise.

It means the history by which they ceased to matter politically no longer looks quite as remote.

A century apart

There is an uncomfortable symmetry between the Arabia of the 1920s and the Arabia of 2026.

In the earlier struggle, Britain wanted order around the Gulf, Iraq and the approaches to India. It backed Ibn Saud with recognition, subsidies and weapons. When the Ikhwan rebellion threatened the settlement, British armoured cars, machine guns and aircraft helped close the contest. The Saudi centre survived, and the kingdom followed.

Today another outside patron faces another Arabian war. Washington still supports Riyadh, but it has so far declined to fight the Houthis directly. Saudi Arabia remains richer and militarily stronger than Yemen by almost every conventional measure, yet it has not been able to turn that superiority into a durable political victory.

That is the thread connecting the wreckage in Marib to the machine guns of Sabilla.

The first Saudi state of the modern era was secured when one Arabian power, assisted by the dominant empire of the day, acquired the means to subordinate its rivals. Oil and American protection later made that hierarchy look permanent.

The war from Yemen is not yet overturning the kingdom. But it is revealing something that a century of centralisation had obscured: the political landscape beneath Saudi Arabia was older than the state, and the forces that shaped it were never entirely erased.

The question now is not whether history will simply repeat itself. It rarely does.

It is whether the balance of power that froze one version of Arabia into place a century ago has begun, however slightly, to move again.

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