Open, Sesame!
In the Arabian Nights, the words do not create the treasure. They open the door that hides it. Intelligence works much the same way. OSINT, military movements, official communiqués, source reporting and HUMINT fragments rarely provide the strategic answer by themselves. They open the cave. Once inside, we have to separate evidence from deception, coincidence from design, and tactical events from the structure they reveal.
What we find inside the Saudi cave in 2026 is not a secret alliance, nor a decision to abandon Washington for Beijing, Islamabad or Ankara. The treasure is a stockpile of options. Riyadh has been building enough military, diplomatic and economic alternatives that no single partner can determine Saudi policy by itself. American F-35s coexist with a defence pact involving Pakistan and Türkiye; Saudi strikes on Iran are followed by direct communication with Tehran; China is asked to exert pressure where Washington has little leverage; normalization with Israel remains available but deliberately unexercised; negotiations with the Houthis coexist with the readiness to strike them again. Examined separately, these choices can look contradictory. Taken together, they reveal a coherent strategic calculus.
This is also where the analytical frameworks developed in Guerra di Margini, the Quaderni Persiani and The Becoming of the Iranian Revolution and the New Geopolitics of Islam become useful. Guerra di Margini shifts the question away from absolute power and toward the cost and return of the next unit of effort. The Quaderni Persiani examine the Iranian system not simply as a hierarchy of proxies but as a network of institutions, armed actors, ideological affinities and partially autonomous interests. The Becoming of the Iranian Revolution places that network within the wider transformation of political Islam and the competition among different models of Islamic state legitimacy. Saudi policy in 2026 sits at the intersection of all three: marginal cost, networked power and competing political legitimacy.
The evidence comes from several layers. OSINT provides the visible architecture: aircraft movements, deployments, diplomatic meetings, missile attacks, defence agreements and weapons sales. Source-based reporting from CBS and Reuters adds a HUMINT dimension through American, Iranian, Saudi, Pakistani and regional officials with direct knowledge of events that governments have only partially acknowledged. The remaining task is analytical: determining whether those apparently disconnected observations form a pattern.
Pakistan provided the first clue. CBS News reported in May that American officials believed Iranian military aircraft, including an RC-130 reconnaissance platform, had been allowed to remain at Nur Khan airbase while Islamabad was simultaneously mediating between Washington and Tehran. Some analysts have inferred a Chinese role, arguing that Beijing had an interest in preventing successful Pakistani mediation from drawing Islamabad too far back toward Washington. That possibility is consistent with Chinese strategic interests, but direct Chinese orchestration has not been established publicly.
The broader Pakistani behaviour is more revealing anyway. Reuters reported on 18 May that Islamabad had deployed roughly 8,000 personnel to Saudi Arabia, together with combat aircraft, drone units and an HQ-9 air-defence system. Pakistan was therefore maintaining its strategic relationship with China, preserving access to Tehran, negotiating with Washington and reinforcing Saudi Arabia at the same time. This was not an inability to choose. It was the deliberate preservation of several choices at once.
Pakistan becomes more useful precisely because its relationships do not cancel one another. A Pakistan fully absorbed into the American system would lose part of its usefulness to Tehran. A Pakistan reduced to a Chinese dependency would become less valuable to Washington. A Pakistan openly hostile to Iran would weaken its role as mediator, while detachment from Saudi Arabia would sacrifice one of its deepest military and financial relationships. Islamabad’s room for manoeuvre rests on keeping enough doors open that every partner has to account for the others.
Saudi Arabia appears to have reached the same conclusion on a much larger scale.
Reuters reported in May that Netanyahu’s office said the Israeli prime minister had secretly met UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed during the Iran war, although Abu Dhabi disputed the account. Reuters also reported repeated visits by Mossad director David Barnea to the Emirates for military coordination. Intelligence reconstruction has gone further, suggesting that Abu Dhabi explored the possibility of a broader anti-Iranian alignment and encountered Saudi resistance. The precise conversations remain unconfirmed; the Saudi calculation does not.
Reuters reported on 12 May that Saudi forces had conducted previously undisclosed strikes inside Iran after Iranian attacks on the kingdom. Riyadh was not neutral and was not reluctant to use force. It retaliated, demonstrated that Iranian attacks would carry a price, and then communicated with Tehran to prevent retaliation from becoming an open-ended war. The logic was clear: strike when failing to strike would weaken deterrence; stop when another round of escalation would cost more than the additional deterrence it might purchase.
Saudi Arabia was therefore prepared to attack Iran without accepting that Iran had to become the permanent organizing principle of Saudi foreign policy. It could share a threat perception with Israel without accepting an Israeli definition of the regional order. It could use American military capabilities without making American protection the only pillar of its security. The underlying objective was not neutrality but freedom to change instruments as circumstances changed.
The Saudi calculus can be reduced to four variables: threat, substitutability, opportunity cost and option value. How much damage follows if a threat is left unanswered? How replaceable is the partner or capability being offered? What other objectives are sacrificed by committing resources to the confrontation or alliance? How much future freedom disappears once the commitment becomes difficult to reverse? These questions explain Saudi behaviour more effectively than asking which bloc Riyadh is joining.
Yemen is the clearest demonstration. Saudi Arabia entered the war in 2015 with overwhelming superiority in money, aircraft, precision weapons and conventional military capability. The Houthis nevertheless survived, consolidated territory and developed increasingly effective missiles and drones. The problem was never simply insufficient Saudi power. It was that superior power failed to produce a political outcome at an acceptable price.
By 2023, Riyadh was negotiating directly with the Houthis because the return on additional military effort had deteriorated. Another year of bombing could destroy more infrastructure and kill more fighters, but it could not guarantee a different political outcome. This is precisely the type of problem examined in Guerra di Margini: an actor can possess overwhelming resources in aggregate while discovering that the next increment of effort costs more and produces less.
Vision 2030 made the opportunity cost increasingly obvious. Saudi Arabia was trying to attract capital, develop tourism and logistics, build new industries and reduce the economy’s reliance on hydrocarbons. Permanent war imposed costs through military expenditure, infrastructure protection, insurance, investor perception and political attention. A contained Houthi threat could therefore be less expensive than an attempt to eliminate the movement completely.
The renewed Houthi offensive in 2026 is the price of that earlier choice. Reuters reported in September that the Houthis had expanded operations along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and resumed attacks against Saudi territory and infrastructure, with Riyadh and Yanbu again under threat. This matters because Saudi Arabia’s western infrastructure is part of its insurance against the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz. If Gulf shipping becomes dangerous, the East-West Pipeline and Red Sea export terminals provide an alternative route. If the Houthis can threaten the Red Sea while Iran can threaten Hormuz, two supposedly separate risks begin to converge.
The Houthis are therefore testing more than Saudi air defence. They are testing whether Riyadh’s strategy of maintaining alternatives has enough depth to survive pressure on several of them at once.
This is where the framework developed in the Quaderni Persiani becomes important. Ansar Allah cannot be treated simply as an Iranian military formation operating through a remote control in Tehran. Iranian weapons, technology, training and political support have strengthened the movement, but the Houthis have accumulated their own territory, leadership, institutions and strategic interests. Iran possesses influence, not perfect command. That distinction is decisive because it means that a Saudi agreement with Tehran cannot by itself solve the Yemeni problem.
Nor does the renewed offensive prove that Riyadh was wrong to de-escalate earlier. The relevant comparison is not between the present threat and an imaginary Yemen in which the Houthis disappeared at no cost. It is between the present danger and another decade of Saudi military intervention with no guarantee of decisive success. Riyadh exchanged the certainty of continued war for the possibility that the threat would return. It has returned, and the calculation must now be made again.
If attacks on Riyadh, Yanbu, oil infrastructure and Red Sea access continue to raise the expected cost of restraint, stronger military action becomes more attractive. If a major campaign would still fail to eliminate the Houthis, however, escalation remains an expensive instrument with a ceiling on its likely return. The question is not whether the Houthis are dangerous. It is what the next increment of force actually buys.
China provides one of the alternatives available to Riyadh. Saudi Arabia does not need Beijing merely to speak to Tehran; it has its own diplomatic relationship with Iran. China matters because it brings economic leverage. Beijing is Iran’s principal oil customer and one of its most important economic partners, while maintaining senior political access in Tehran. It also demonstrated in 2023 that it could operate between the two governments when it brokered the restoration of Saudi-Iranian diplomatic relations.
Reuters reported on 17 September that Riyadh asked Beijing to intervene over the Houthi escalation and that China subsequently pressed Tehran to use its influence on the movement. The mechanism was therefore explicit: Saudi Arabia sought Chinese pressure on Iran because Iran possessed some capacity to influence the Houthis.
None of those links constitutes command. China cannot simply order Iran to comply, and Tehran cannot necessarily order the Houthis to stop. The network described throughout the Quaderni Persiani is more complex than that. Influence travels through incentives, resources, ideological affinity, institutions and shared interests; it does not require perfect hierarchical obedience. Beijing does not have to control Tehran, and Tehran does not have to control Sana’a, for Chinese pressure to alter the cost calculations inside the network.
This is why Saudi relations with Washington and Beijing are not interchangeable. Washington provides capabilities Beijing cannot match: advanced combat aircraft, missile defence, intelligence, targeting support and integration with the world’s most sophisticated military system. China provides economic and political leverage in Tehran. Pakistan contributes military depth while retaining communication with Iran. Türkiye adds conventional military capacity and a rapidly expanding defence industry. Each performs a different function.
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed on 7 August by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye formalized part of that architecture. According to the official Turkish account, an armed attack on one of the three is to be treated as an attack on all, while the agreement is intended to deepen collective deterrence and defence cooperation. Yet Riyadh did not sign that agreement and move away from Washington. Six weeks later, the United States approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of forty-eight F-35 fighters and associated equipment to Saudi Arabia, subject to congressional approval.
Those two decisions are not contradictory. They are the strategy.
A Saudi Arabia abandoning the American security system would not be seeking F-35s. A Saudi Arabia satisfied with complete American dependence would have much less reason to construct an additional defence framework with Pakistan and Türkiye. Riyadh wants the American capability and the non-American fallback.
The alternatives do not have to be equally good. If Washington can provide one hundred units of a capability while Pakistan or Türkiye can provide sixty, America remains the superior partner. But sixty is strategically transformative compared with zero because it lowers the cost of an American refusal. Riyadh does not need another United States. It needs enough alternatives that no refusal becomes catastrophic.
The same logic applies to Israel. Israeli intelligence, cyber capabilities, missile defence and military technology could provide substantial additional value. The relevant question is how much they add once Saudi Arabia already possesses American intelligence cooperation, its own capabilities, Pakistani support and Turkish defence cooperation. The incremental gain must then be compared with what Riyadh would have to surrender to obtain it.
The Palestinian question belongs inside that calculation, and The Becoming of the Iranian Revolution and the New Geopolitics of Islam helps explain why. The Iranian Revolution did not merely create another state ideology; it transformed political Islam into a competing infrastructure of legitimacy, mobilisation and regional influence. Saudi Arabia responded over subsequent decades with its own model of Islamic state authority, centred on custodianship of Mecca and Medina, state resources and a different relationship between religion, monarchy and modernisation. Palestine remains one of the arenas in which those competing claims to Islamic legitimacy intersect.
Formal integration into an Israeli-led regional architecture before a politically defensible Palestinian outcome would therefore cost Riyadh more than diplomatic criticism. It would spend part of a political asset that Iran has repeatedly tried to contest. Another weapons platform can be purchased; Islamic legitimacy cannot be replaced so easily.
Normalization consequently has value before it occurs. As long as it remains possible but conditional, Washington and Jerusalem must continue to calculate what Saudi participation is worth. Immediate normalization would consume part of that leverage, while permanent refusal would eliminate future economic, technological and security benefits. Keeping the decision open preserves both possibilities.
Iran presents the reverse calculation. Permanent accommodation would weaken deterrence, while permanent confrontation would increase military expenditure, expose Saudi infrastructure to repeated attack and deepen dependence on external protection. Riyadh therefore keeps both force and diplomacy available. The Saudi strikes inside Iran matter because they demonstrate that preserving options is not equivalent to avoiding confrontation. Diplomacy has value only when the other side knows that refusing it can become expensive.
The intelligence assessment therefore opens a much larger strategic picture. We enter expecting to find a hidden alignment and instead discover a treasury of alternatives. The United States provides high-end military capability. Pakistan provides military depth and access across rival relationships. Türkiye adds conventional and defence-industrial capacity. China provides economic leverage in Tehran. Direct Saudi-Iranian channels offer a route out of escalation. Israel remains a potentially valuable source of intelligence and technology whose political price Riyadh has not yet accepted.
None needs to replace the others because they do different things.
The compact framework remains threat, substitutability, opportunity cost and option value. Riyadh does not need to maximize every relationship. It needs to obtain sufficient value from each while avoiding commitments that unnecessarily destroy the others.
The Houthi crisis is now testing whether this architecture works under pressure. If Saudi Arabia can combine its own military force, American technology, Pakistani depth, Turkish support, Chinese leverage in Tehran and direct diplomacy with Iran to restore deterrence without reopening an indefinite Yemen war, diversification will have produced genuine strategic value. If those alternatives disappear when pressure becomes serious and only direct American intervention can secure Saudi interests, much of the apparent freedom will prove more diplomatic than operational.
Saudi Arabia is therefore not accumulating allies in the traditional sense. It is accumulating usable alternatives. Some will prove weaker than expected, some partners will refuse when needed, and some options will carry risks of their own. The Houthis themselves demonstrate that preserving one option can also preserve a future threat. The objective is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to prevent uncertainty from leaving Riyadh with only one possible course of action.
This is what makes the title more than a literary device. Intelligence says “open sesame”, and when we enter the cave we do not find a single secret alliance. We find a thousand and one options: American aircraft without American monopoly, Pakistani military support without Pakistani control, Turkish cooperation without entering a Turkish sphere, Chinese leverage in Tehran without Chinese security dependence, communication with Iran without accepting Iranian primacy, and the possibility of Israeli normalization without surrendering the right to determine its timing and price.
Saudi Arabia cannot postpone every choice indefinitely. Major wars eventually force alignment and some doors will close. The objective is to ensure that Riyadh, rather than another capital, decides which doors close first, when they close, and what Saudi Arabia receives in return.
That is the new Saudi strategic calculus. Its strength does not lie in finding one protector powerful enough to solve every problem. It lies in keeping enough doors open that no protector, adversary or prospective ally can safely assume that Saudi Arabia has nowhere else to go.
Bibliography
CBS News (2026) ‘Pakistan allowed Iran to park military aircraft on its airfields despite mediator role in conflict with U.S.’, 12 May.
Palombi, M. (2026) Guerra di Margini, Kdp Amazon.
Palombi, M. (2026) Quaderni Persiani (in peer rewieving)
Palombi, M. (2026) The Becoming of the Iranian Revolution and the New Geopolitics of Islam: How the Iranian Revolution Changed the Face of Social and Political Islam and Why That Islam is Changing Everywhere. Kdp Amazon
Reuters (2026a) ‘Saudi Arabia launched covert attacks on Iran as regional war widened, sources say’, 12 May.
Reuters (2026b) ‘UAE denies Netanyahu held secret meeting with Emirati president in the UAE during Iran war’, 13 May.
Reuters (2026c) ‘Pakistan deploys jet squadron, thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia during Iran war’, 18 May.
Reuters (2026d) ‘China presses Iran to help rein in Houthis after Saudi appeal, sources say’, 17 September.
Reuters (2026e) ‘US clears way for $24.3 billion fighter jet sale to Saudi Arabia’, 17 September.
Reuters (2026f) ‘How Yemen’s Houthis went from a small mountain militia to a big regional threat’, 17 September.
Reuters (2026g) ‘Flames, smoke seen near Riyadh airport; Houthis claim attacks on Saudi capital’, 19 September.
Republic of Türkiye Directorate of Communications (2026) ‘Türkiye and Saudi Arabia sign a Joint Defence Agreement’, 7 August.