Why Saudi Arabia's Land Mass Advantage Cannot Solve the Credibility Gap Created by the Brotherhood Allegations

 

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 Saudi Arabia needs and cannot replicate through land mass, population, or religious authority. It has embedded presence.

The Ports and the Proxies: What $442 Million Purchased

To understand why the alleged Brotherhood outreach is occurring, one must look not at Cairo but at Berbera.
In 2016, DP World, a UAE-state-owned enterprise, signed a $442 million concession agreement to develop and operate the port of Berbera in Somaliland. This was not a neutral commercial transaction. Somaliland is a self-declared republic not recognized by the African Union or the United Nations. Its status is contested. Somalia's federal government considers it sovereign territory.
The UAE invested anyway.

Over the subsequent decade, this pattern repeated across the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea littoral. Abu Dhabi established military basing arrangements in Eritrea. It brokered the 2018 Ethiopian-Eritrean peace agreement. It developed port facilities in Bosaso, Puntland. It cultivated relationships with sub-state actors from Libya's Khalifa Haftar to Yemen's Southern Transitional Council to Sudan's Rapid Support Forces.
These are not diplomatic relationships conducted through chanceries. They are operational relationships conducted through checkpoints, shipping containers, and gold bullion.
By 2023, the UAE had achieved something Saudi Arabia had not: it had made itself indispensable to the movement of goods, weapons, and influence across the world's most critical maritime chokepoint. It had done so not by supporting central governments, but by betting on secessionists, rebels, and autonomous regions.

This is the asymmetry that the alleged Brotherhood deal is designed to correct.
And the deal is not confined to a single theater. According to the leak, the Brotherhood factions summoned to the clandestine meeting represent multiple countries. They are not emissaries of a unified organization; they are leaders of distinct national branches. The Libyan Brotherhood, the Yemeni Islah party, and Syrian Brotherhood figures operating between Idlib and the Turkish border were all present. Each has been offered the same arrangement: Saudi patronage, prisoner releases, and permission to re-enter formal political life. In return, each must realign its regional posture against Abu Dhabi.

The December 30 Airstrike and Its Aftermath

On December 30, 2025, Saudi warplanes struck an Emirati weapons shipment being unloaded at the port of Mukalla in Hadramawt, Yemen.
The strike was not a warning. It was a foreclosure.
For years, Saudi Arabia had tolerated Emirati support for the Southern Transitional Council, the separatist faction that controls much of Yemen's southern coastline. Riyadh's official position favored Yemeni territorial unity. Its practical position was to avoid confrontation with Abu Dhabi.

December 30 ended that tolerance.
Within days, Saudi-backed forces moved to dismantle STC command structures in Hadramawt and al-Mahrah. Riyadh demanded Emirati withdrawal from joint defense arrangements. The UAE, rather than escalate, withdrew its troops entirely from Yemen.
But Yemen was never the objective. It was the symptom.
The objective, visible in the Kamal al-Din leak, is the dismantling of Emirati proxy networks across the entire Red Sea–Horn of Africa–Yemen–Libya–Syria arc. And here Saudi Arabia faces a structural disadvantage that no amount of sovereign wealth fund assets can immediately remedy.
The UAE has been building these networks since 2016. It has spent nearly a decade embedding its commercial entities, security contractors, and local proxies into the governance structures of weak states. It has invested not in capitals but in coastlines. Not in presidents but in port directors.
Saudi Arabia, by contrast, has historically operated through state-to-state relationships. It supports the internationally recognized government in Yemen. It backs the Sudanese Armed Forces, the official army. It affirms Somalia's territorial integrity.
This approach is diplomatically correct. It is also strategically slow.

The Haftar Calculation and the Kufra Closure

Consider Libya.
For years, Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the Libyan National Army, has been a reliable Emirati client. Abu Dhabi provided him with military equipment, financial support, and diplomatic cover. In return, Haftar facilitated the transit of supplies to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan via the al-Kufra airbase in southeastern Libya.
This arrangement was not secret. UN sanctions monitors documented it. Human rights organizations reported it. Saudi Arabia observed it.

In January 2026, Haftar temporarily closed al-Kufra. Reports indicated that Cairo and Riyadh had pressed him to do so. The closure did not last; weapons continued to flow. But the signal was received.
Haftar, like many regional strongmen, now finds himself caught between rival patrons. He cannot afford to alienate Abu Dhabi, which has invested heavily in his survival. He cannot afford to ignore Riyadh and Cairo, which represent the region's largest economies and its most traditional sources of legitimacy.
This is the kind of leverage Saudi Arabia can deploy. It is diplomatic, financial, and slow. It persuades. It does not compel.
The Brotherhood, by contrast, compels.
And in Libya, the Brotherhood's political arm—the Justice and Construction Party—maintains networks across Tripolitania and Misrata. Under the alleged deal, these networks would be activated not against Haftar, but alongside him. The objective is not the defeat of Emirati clients; it is their conversion into Saudi-aligned actors. Haftar's January closure of al-Kufra was a first installment. The Brotherhood's re-entry into formal Libyan political life, funded and coordinated from Riyadh, would be the second.

The Syrian Track: Rehabilitating the Exiles

The Syrian component of the alleged deal is perhaps the most sensitive, and therefore the most revealing.
Since 2011, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has existed in a state of suspension. Its historic leadership fled to Turkey in the 1980s under Hafez al-Assad. The 2011 uprising offered a moment of return, but by 2013, the Brotherhood had been eclipsed by more armed, more radical factions. Today, Syrian Brotherhood figures maintain a presence in Istanbul, Gaziantep, and along the Turkish-controlled corridor of northern Aleppo. They operate charitable networks. They maintain relationships with Turkish intelligence. They have no military wing and no territorial control.
They are, in other words, available.

The Kamal al-Din leak alleges that these exiled Syrian Brotherhood figures were present at the clandestine meeting—not as observers, but as participants. The offer extended to them mirrors the offers extended to their Libyan and Yemeni counterparts. They would be permitted to reorganize. They would be funded. They would be positioned as a legitimate political alternative inside any post-conflict Syrian settlement.
In return, they would align with Riyadh and against Abu Dhabi.

This is not a trivial adjustment. For a decade, the Syrian Brotherhood's primary external patron has been Turkey. Ankara provided refuge, operational space, and political validation. The alleged Saudi outreach is not seeking to expel Turkish influence; it is seeking to counterbalance Emirati influence. But realignment carries consequences. Brotherhood figures who accept Saudi patronage must distance themselves from Doha, which has historically hosted their leadership, and recalibrate their relationship with Ankara.
The objective is not the Brotherhood's ideological rehabilitation. It is its operational re-deployment.

The 20,000 Prisoners and the Missing Denominator

The Kamal al-Din leak specifies that a large number of Brotherhood detainees would be released as part of the alleged arrangement. It does not specify the number. It does not need to.
Egypt holds, by various estimates, tens of thousands of political prisoners. A significant portion are affiliated with or sympathetic to the Brotherhood. Their detention has been a consistent demand of human rights organizations and a persistent irritant in Egypt's relationships with Western capitals.
The release of a "large number" would constitute a humanitarian act regardless of its geopolitical motivation. It would reunite families. It would restore livelihoods. It would, for the individuals involved, be an unqualified good.
But it would also be transactional.
The alleged deal does not envision the Brotherhood's reintegration through a national dialogue process administered by neutral parties. It envisions reintegration through Saudi brokerage, with Brotherhood factions emerging from the process indebted to Riyadh and hostile to Abu Dhabi.
This is the difference between reconciliation and realignment.
Reconciliation produces gratitude. Realignment produces obligation.

The Quiet Split Washington Does Not See

The January 13, 2026 US terrorist designations were intended to constrain the Muslim Brotherhood. They may instead constrain Saudi Arabia.
A congressional aide familiar with discussions during Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan's January 6 Washington visit described the dynamic succinctly: the designations recalibrated what Washington considers acceptable engagement. Selective cooperation with Brotherhood-linked actors, previously tolerated as a wartime expedient in Yemen, now carries greater diplomatic risk.
Saudi Arabia appears to have read this not as a demand for alignment but as a warning about Washington's narrowing tolerance for hedging. Its response, according to the same aide, has been to widen its options. Discussions with Pakistan. Advanced negotiations with Turkey.

This is not defiance. It is diversification.
But diversification carries its own costs. The same networks that make Riyadh less dependent on Washington also make it more dependent on actors—Ankara, Islamabad, exiled Brotherhood politicians from Damascus to Tripoli—whose interests do not perfectly align with Saudi Arabia's.
The Crown Prince's Vision 2030 requires $3 trillion in investment and a stable security environment. It does not require reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. It does not require confrontation with the UAE. It does not require a clandestine meeting in a room that, if the leak is accurate, now casts a shadow over every subsequent Foreign Ministry statement about counterterrorism cooperation.

A country twenty-seven times larger than its rival should not need to choose between its official legal framework and its operational requirements. That it appears to be making precisely this choice suggests that the rivalry with Abu Dhabi has moved beyond competition into something more corrosive.