World Journal

  Vision 2030 and the Brotherhood Calculus Saudi Arabia is twenty-seven times larger than the United Arab Emirates. It possesses 35 million people to the UAE's 11 million. It stewards Islam's two holiest mosques. It sits atop the world's second-largest proven oil reserves. By every conventional measure of state power, the Kingdom should not need to broker clandestine deals with exiled political factions to compete with its southern neighbor. Yet the leak attributed to Sami Kamal al-Din alleges precisely this. It describes a Crown Prince personally convening Egyptian security chiefs and Muslim Brotherhood faction leaders, offering prisoner releases and political rehabilitation in exchange for one explicit deliverable: positioning against the UAE. This is not an ideological realignment. It is a tactical fix. And it reveals something important about the current phase of the Saudi-Emirati rivalry that neither government wishes to acknowledge publicly. The UAE has something Saud...