Sometimes an entire political order confesses itself in a single telephone call.

Saudi Arabia, custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, self-appointed pillar of Arab leadership and purchaser of some of the most expensive weaponry ever manufactured, has reportedly found itself seeking Israeli intelligence assistance through US Central Command against Ansar Allah in Yemen. The Jerusalem Post reports that CENTCOM-mediated discussions concerned intelligence that could help Riyadh understand Houthi deployments and future operations.

There is something almost indecently perfect about the image.

For decades, the Saudi state cultivated the mythology of sovereignty while constructing one of the most elaborate systems of strategic dependency in modern history. Washington supplied the security architecture. Western contractors supplied the weapons. Foreign technicians sustained the machinery. American bases anchored the regional order. Oil revenue financed the spectacle.

Riyadh bought nearly everything power was supposed to look like.

It apparently forgot to buy power.

That omission becomes difficult to conceal when a Yemeni movement battered for years by Saudi airpower, American and British strikes, and Israeli attacks can still impose strategic costs on a kingdom whose military expenditure dwarfs its own. Whatever one thinks of Ansar Allah’s ideology or domestic rule, its endurance has transformed it from a movement Riyadh once imagined it could bomb into submission into a force capable of shaping Saudi calculations.

The contrast is brutal: one side possesses palaces, Patriot........

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