What Does Saudi Arabia Want From Yemen?
It can be said with confidence that this is the wrong question, one on which we have wasted twenty years.
There is probably no Yemeni of my generation who has not heard this question, or asked it himself at least once, at a qat gathering or in a public place, or heard it on television or from the mouth of a political analyst, or read it in a newspaper or on a website.
What does Saudi Arabia want from us? We ask it as though we are searching for a hidden intention, as though uncovering it would solve the puzzle. After years of following this issue, I believe that the question itself lies at the root of our analytical problem. We ask about intent, when in reality the problem is structural.
Let us begin where we should begin: Riyadh does not conduct a foreign policy toward Yemen. And this is an important point to understand. It manages an internal security file.
This is not a rhetorical phrase, but an institutional description. For decades, the Yemen file was not handled by the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but by the “Special Committee for Yemeni Affairs,” which was headed by Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz. It was a committee that paid salaries to Yemeni sheikhs, officers, journalists, and religious scholars. It was not buying loyalty; it was buying behavior. Whoever understands the difference between the two understands half of our modern history with our northern neighbor.
The second point is geography. Geography, not conspiracy, created this arrangement.
The Kingdom’s longest land border is its border with us, stretching more than 1,300 kilometers across mountains, deserts, and tribes extending across both sides.
This border was legally demarcated twice: through the Treaty of Taif on May 20, 1934, following the defeat of Imam Yahya, and then through the Treaty of Jeddah on June 12, 2000. Yet the border remained a space for negotiation rather than simply a dividing line, because what crosses it is not armies, but people, weapons, goods, and influence.
From this comes a principle that many of us Yemenis refuse to grasp: Saudi Arabia does not view northern Yemen as a neighboring state in the full sense of the term. Rather, it views it as an extension of its own tribal hinterland. Dealing with an extension is therefore different from dealing with a state.
Then come demographics and poverty as secondary considerations. We are more numerous, poorer, and too close to be ignored.
This disparity produced chronic anxiety in Riyadh, while also giving it one of its most effective tools: the labor market. In 1990, when Saleh took his position on the invasion of Kuwait, hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers were expelled within weeks.
The figures commonly cited range from 700,000 to one million, estimates for which there is no precise count. But the number is not what matters. What matters is that Riyadh discovered that day that economics could take effect faster than an army, while we discovered that proximity could be turned into collective punishment with a single decision. Thirty years have passed, and both sides still behave according to the lesson they learned that year.
Here we must also dispel another comforting illusion that we frequently repeat: the illusion of permanent sectarian hostility. It is often said that Saudi Arabia is a permanent doctrinal enemy of Zaydism. This claim does not withstand history.
In 1962, Riyadh backed the Zaydi royalists against the republicans, who were a mixture of Shafiis and Zaydis, because the threat at the time was Nasserist nationalism, not sectarianism. In the 1980s, it funded Salafi expansion in Saada because the threat had changed. For Riyadh, sectarian identity is a tool invoked when needed and set aside when it is not, rather than a doctrine governing its decisions. Anyone who builds his analysis on the assumption of permanent sectarian hostility will be surprised every time.
Then came the war, exposing what we had concealed from ourselves.
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