Middle East Power Shift? UAE-Saudi Pact Goes Viral US Pressure on Iran After UAE-Saudi Deal .

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[00:00:00]Saudi UAE secret pact, the midnight attack.

[00:00:03]That changed everything somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. Two of the most powerful men in the Middle East made a decision that the rest of the world wasn't supposed to know about. No press conference, no joint statement, no cameras. Just a quiet agreement between two crowns. And the consequences are still echoing across the region today.

[00:00:20]This is not a story that begins with a single dramatic event. It begins in the shadows, in the back corridors of power, where deals are struck not over negotiating tables, but over encrypted messages and private meetings that never make it into any official record. And when you start pulling on the thread of what really happened between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, what unravels is something far bigger, far [snorts] more calculated, and far more dangerous than most people realize. To understand the pact, you first have to understand the world these two countries were operating in.

[00:00:50]Because nothing in geopolitics happens in a vacuum. Every secret agreement, every covert alliance, every midnight decision is a response to something, to fear, to opportunity, or to the creeping sense that if you don't act first, someone else will act against you.

[00:01:05]The year was 2014, and the Middle East was burning. The Arab Spring, which had promised so much just a few years earlier, had curdled into chaos. Libya had collapsed. Syria had descended into a civil war that would eventually kill half a million people.

[00:01:19]Egypt had lurched from revolution to military coup. And in Yemen, the fractures were deepening by the day. The entire regional order, the one that had kept the Gulf monarchies stable for decades, was under existential pressure.

[00:01:32]Then came the moment that changed the calculus completely. In June 2014, a group called ISIS declared a caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. It was a shock to the system unlike anything the region had seen. But for Saudis, Arabia, and the UAE, there was a deeper, more personal fear running underneath the headlines. Because ISIS was not the only threat on the map. Iran was moving deliberately, patiently, and with terrifying strategic precision.

[00:01:58]Tehran had spent years cultivating proxies across the Arab world, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq, influence inside Syria through Assad, and now, most alarmingly of all, the Houthi movement in Yemen was gaining power at a pace that made Gulf leaders genuinely nervous.

[00:02:14]Yemen shares a border with Saudi Arabia.

[00:02:17]A Yemen controlled by Iranian-backed forces was not just a geopolitical problem. It was a knife pressed against the kingdom's throat.

[00:02:24]This is the environment in which Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, the two men who would come to define the Gulf's new era of power, began to see themselves not just as allies by geography, but as partners in survival.

[00:02:36]MBS, as Mohammed bin Salman would come to be known, was still consolidating his position inside the Saudi royal court in those years.

[00:02:44]He was young, ambitious, and in a hurry.

[00:02:47]His father, King Salman, had ascended to the throne in January 2015, and within months, MBS had been appointed defense minister, a role that gave him direct control over the kingdom's military machine at the age of just 29.

[00:03:00]The world looked at this and raised an eyebrow.

[00:03:02]Many in the Saudi establishment did the same, but MBS was not interested in playing the slow game of traditional Saudi politics. He had a vision, and he had found in Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE an older, more experienced mentor who shared his instincts.

[00:03:15]MBZ, as the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince is known, was everything MBS was learning to become, methodical, unsentimental, deeply suspicious of political Islam in any form. He had already built the UAE into something remarkable, a small nation with a strategic footprint of a much larger power. He had forged relationships with Washington, cultivated intelligence partnerships across the globe, and developed a military that punched dramatically above its weight.

[00:03:41]When MBS looked across the Gulf at what MBZ had built, he saw a blueprint. Their relationship was not simply one of equals.

[00:03:47]In the early years, it was more like a partnership between a seasoned operator and a gifted, impatient protege.

[00:03:53]MBZ saw in MBS the future of the Saudi monarchy, a leader willing to modernize, willing to break with the religious establishment, and willing to use force decisively.

[00:04:02]MBS saw in MBZ to the strategic sophistication he needed to navigate a world that was moving faster than Riyadh's traditional institutions could handle. And so, the pact was born. Not in a single moment, but through a series of convergences that locked the two countries into an alignment so close that foreign policy analysts began referring to them almost as a single actor.

[00:04:21]The GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council that was supposed to be the umbrella for regional solidarity, increasingly became window dressing. The real decisions were being made in a tighter circle. And at the center of that circle were [clears throat] two men whose personal chemistry was reshaping the Middle East.

[00:04:37]The clearest expression of this new partnership came in March 2015.

[00:04:41]It was an operation that was planned in secrecy, executed with startling speed, and announced to the world only after it had already begun.

[00:04:48]In the early hours of the morning, Saudi and UAE warplanes launched coordinated strikes against Houthi positions in Yemen.

[00:04:55]Operation Decisive Storm, they called it. And it was designed to do one thing, reverse the Houthi advance that had swept across Yemen with such alarming momentum in the preceding months.

[00:05:05]The Houthis, backed by Iran and allied with forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, had seized the capital Sanaa in late 2014. By early 2015, they were pushing south, threatening Aden, and putting the internationally recognized government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi on the verge of collapse. For Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, allowing this was simply not an option. A Houthi-controlled Yemen meant an Iranian foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. It meant missiles pointed at Saudi cities. It meant the entire strategic geography of the Gulf redrawn in Tehran's favor. The intervention was launched with minimal public warning.

[00:05:38]The Saudi and UAE governments notified the United States, secured a veneer of international legitimacy through an Arab League endorsement, and then acted. It was, in its own way, a demonstration of what the pact was capable of, decisive, coordinated military action that bypassed the usual labyrinth of consultation and hesitation that had historically paralyzed Arab collective security. But, here is where the story gets complicated because the Yemen intervention, whatever its strategic justification, very quickly revealed the fault lines that would eventually strain the Saudi-UAE relationship itself.

[00:06:11]The Saudis and the Emiratis were aligned on the broad objective: push back Iran, restore order, prevent Yemen from becoming a failed state under Tehran's influence, but they were not aligned on what kind of Yemen they wanted to create afterward.

[00:06:24]This distinction seems subtle. It was not subtle at all. It was, in fact, the seat of a rupture that is still playing out today.

[00:06:32]The UAE had a very specific vision for Yemen South. Abu Dhabi was not particularly interested in restoring a unified Yemeni state under Hadi's government. What the Emiratis wanted was influence, and increasingly they found their natural partners not in Hadi's internationally recognized administration, but in the Southern Transitional Council, a separatist movement that wanted to restore the independent South Yemen that had existed before unification in 1990. The UAE poured resources into the STC, trained its fighters, and effectively built a parallel armed structure in Southern Yemen that operated outside Hadi's authority.

[00:07:06]Riyadh watched this with growing unease.

[00:07:08]Saudi Arabia had its own interests in Yemen, and those interests aligned more closely with maintaining a unified, stable state that could be managed through Riyadh's traditional networks of tribals, influence, and patronage. A fragmented Yemen, one in which the UAE had carved out its own zone of control in the South, while the Houthis held the North, was not what Saudi Arabia had signed up for. This tension broke into the open most dramatically in August 2019 when UAE-backed STC forces seized the city of Aden, the seat of Hadi's government.

[00:07:38]Think about what that means for a moment. The troops of one coalition partner effectively overran the government that the coalition was supposed to be defending. It was an extraordinary moment, one that exposed the gap between Saudi and Emirati objectives in Yemen more starkly than any diplomatic cable or analytical report ever could.

[00:07:55]Behind closed doors, the relationship between MBS and MBZ became strained in ways that had never been publicly acknowledged. Saudi officials began quietly complaining that the UAE was operating its own foreign policy inside Yemen, one that served Abu Dhabi's interests at the expense of the coalition's stated goals.

[00:08:12]Emirati officials, for their part, were dismissive of what they saw as Saudi strategic incoherence. They had done the hard military work of building capable ground forces. They had achieved real results on the ground. Why should they subordinate that to a Saudi political framework they didn't fully trust? And then, in July 2019, the UAE made a decision that sent a signal louder than any statement. It began withdrawing its forces from Yemen.

[00:08:37]The official explanation was a redeployment. The strategic reality was that Abu Dhabi had concluded that the Yemen war, as prosecuted, was not delivering returns worth the cost. The Houthis had proven far more resilient than anyone anticipated. The humanitarian catastrophe was generating reputational damage internationally. And the UAE had other priorities in the Horn of Africa, in Libya, in its broader strategic competition with Turkey and Qatar. For Saudi Arabia, the Emirati withdrawal was a gut punch. It left Riyadh holding a war it could not easily win and could not easily exit. The kingdom was spending billions every month on a conflict that had become, in the eyes of much of the international community, a humanitarian disaster, and the partner that had been its closest ally in launching the intervention had effectively stepped back.

[00:09:23]The Qatar crisis of 2017 had already provided a preview of this dynamic.

[00:09:28]In June of that year, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt simultaneously severed diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a comprehensive blockade, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism and maintaining links with Iran.

[00:09:41]It was one of the most dramatic ruptures in Gulf Arab politics in a generation, and the UAE was, by virtually all accounts, the driving force behind it.

[00:09:50]MBZ had long viewed Qatar as a destabilizing actor in the region.

[00:09:54]Qatar's support for the Muslim Brotherhood, its hosting of Hamas leaders, its independent foreign policy, its Al Jazeera network, all of this was anathema to Abu Dhabi.

[00:10:04]The UAE saw political Islam as an existential threat to the model of governance it had built, efficient, secular in orientation, intolerant of organized religious opposition.

[00:10:14]Qatar was funding and platforming the very forces that the UAE believed threatened Arab stability. The blockade looked from the outside like a coordinated Saudi UAE operation, and in its initial stages, it was.

[00:10:27]But within months, the cracks were showing again.

[00:10:29]Saudi Arabia began exploring a negotiated resolution far earlier than the UAE was willing to [clears throat] accept.

[00:10:35]MBS, under pressure from the Trump administration, which had initially seemed to endorse the blockade before reversing course, was looking for an off-ramp.

[00:10:43]MBZ was not. The Emirates wanted Qatar genuinely broken and its foreign policy fundamentally restructured.

[00:10:50]Riyadh was willing to settle for symbolic concessions.

[00:10:53]The blockade ended in January 2021 at the Al Ula summit, with Qatar making relatively modest commitments, and the broader Gulf rift declared officially healed. The UAE went along with the resolution, but did so with visible reluctance.

[00:11:05]In Abu Dhabi, there was a quiet fury at what was seen as Saudi capitulation to American pressure.

[00:11:11]So here, you have the paradox at the heart of the Saudi UAE relationship.

[00:11:15]These two countries are bound together by shared threats, shared values in some respects, geographic proximity, and a genuine personal connection between their leaders.

[00:11:23]But they are also increasingly rivals for influence in the Arab world, for economic leadership in a post-oil future, for the loyalty of smaller states across Africa and Asia, and for the narrative of what the Gulf should look like in the 21st century.

[00:11:37]The Abraham Accords of 2020 are another chapter in this story. When the UAE normalized relations with Israel in August 2020, followed quickly by Bahrain, the region was stunned. For decades, Arab normalization with Israel had been conditional on Palestinian statehood, the so-called Arab peace initiative that Saudi Arabia itself had championed in 2002. The UAE had just walked away from that framework.

[00:12:01]MBZ made the calculation that the strategic and economic benefits of an open relationship with Israel, intelligence sharing, uh technology cooperation, access to US political networks, outweighed the costs of abandoning Palestinian solidarity. It was a cold, rational calculation and it worked on its own terms.

[00:12:20]The Abraham Accords open opened doors for the UAE that had previously been firmly closed, but Saudi Arabia was not ready to follow. MBS was sympathetic to normalization in principle. He had reportedly made several quiet overtures to Israel over the years and had allowed Israeli flights through Saudi airspace, but he understood that Saudi Arabia was not the UAE. It was the custodian of the two holy mosques. It was the leader of the Sunni Islamic world in a way that Abu Dhabi could never be.

[00:12:46]A Saudi normalization with Israel without meaningful progress on Palestinian statehood would be politically explosive, not just regionally, but inside the kingdom itself.

[00:12:56]This created an awkward divergence. The UAE was operating openly with Israel.

[00:13:00]Saudi Arabia was doing so quietly at best. And the two countries were once again pursuing different timelines and different thresholds.

[00:13:09]The year 2023 brought another seismic shift that further complicated the map.

[00:13:14]In March, China brokered a diplomatic agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a normalization of relations between the two countries that had been bitter enemies since the Saudi execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr in 2016 and the subsequent attacks on Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran, the deal was historic and it was done without American involvement.

[00:13:33]For the UAE, this was cause for both relief and concern. Relief because a reduction in Saudi-Iranian tensions meant a calmer Gulf environment. Concern because Abu Dhabi had not been consulted as closely as it might have expected from its closest partner.

[00:13:48]The UAE had its own complex relationship with Iran. They share maritime borders and a long history of trade and Emirati pragmatism has always led Abu Dhabi to manage Tehran more carefully than Riyadh.

[00:14:00]But the optics of being on the outside of a China-brokered deal that reshaped the Gulf's strategic architecture were not comfortable.

[00:14:07]China's growing role in the region is itself a threat worth following because it illuminates something crucial about where both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heading.

[00:14:15]Both countries have invested heavily in their relationships with Beijing.

[00:14:19]Saudi Arabia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with China in December 2022 during Xi Jinping's high-profile visit to Riyadh.

[00:14:26]The UAE has been one of the most significant entry points for Chinese technology and infrastructure investment in the Arab world, including contracts with Huawei that generated considerable friction with Washington.

[00:14:37]Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are playing a game of deliberate non-alignment, refusing to choose definitively between the United States and China, extracting maximum benefit from both relationships and using the competition between the two superpowers as leverage.

[00:14:52]It is a sophisticated strategy. It is also one that requires these two Gulf capitals to coordinate carefully because if they pull in opposite directions on the China question, they undermine each other's bargaining power.

[00:15:03]Now imagine you are sitting in the situation room of a competing regional power, Turkey or Iran or Israel, watching all of this unfold.

[00:15:12]What do you see? You see two countries that are intensely aligned on some issues and increasingly divergent on others. You see a relationship that is simultaneously the most powerful bilateral partnership in the Arab world and one that is visibly under s- stress.

[00:15:26]And you see two leaders, MBS and MBZ, who have built so much of their countries strategic posture around their personal relationship that any deterioration between them carries consequences far beyond what a normal diplomatic disagreement would produce.

[00:15:40]That is the fragility embedded in the pact. It is a relationship built on individual chemistry rather than institutional architecture. There's no treaty. There's no formal security alliance with defined obligations.

[00:15:50]There's a set of shared interests, a reservoir of trust built over years of cooperation, and the force of two very strong personalities who have chosen to work together. When those personalities converge, the partnership is extraordinarily powerful.

[00:16:04]When they diverge, there is no institutional mechanism to hold things together. The economic dimension of the Saudi-UAE relationship adds yet another layer of complexity. Both countries are racing to diversify their economies away from oil dependence.

[00:16:17]Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE's various economic blueprints are, in their broad outlines, remarkably similar. Attract foreign investment, develop tourism and entertainment, build knowledge-based industries, become regional logistics and financial hubs.

[00:16:31]These ambitions are complementary in some ways. A more prosperous, diversified Gulf is better for both.

[00:16:37]But they are also in direct competition.

[00:16:39]Dubai and Riyadh are both trying to become the premier business hub of the Middle East. They are competing for the same multinational headquarters, the same international talent, the same financial services companies. Saudi Arabia has been offering extraordinary incentives to companies willing to base their regional headquarters in Riyadh, and has made clear that companies that choose Dubai instead may find themselves locked out of Saudi public contracts. It is hardball economic competition dressed up in the language of partnership.

[00:17:05]The financial services industry has watched this dynamic with fascination.

[00:17:09]For decades, Dubai was the unrivaled nerve center of regional business, the place where everyone came to set up their Middle East operations.

[00:17:17]Saudi Arabia, for all its oil wealth, was seen as too socially conservative, too bureaucratically complex, too unpredictable for comfortable business operations.

[00:17:26]MBS's reforms have changed that calculus dramatically. The social liberalization, the entertainment sector, the new infrastructure, the sheer scale of investment opportunities, all of this has made Riyadh a genuine competitor to Dubai in a way that would have seemed implausible 15 years ago. The UAE's leadership understands this.

[00:17:44]And while they continue to publicly celebrate the partnership with Saudi Arabia, there is a sharp-edged awareness in Abu Dhabi and Dubai that the kingdom to their west is no longer content to be the sleeping giant that leaves the commercial space to its smaller neighbor. And then there is Yemen, still.

[00:18:00]As of the mid-2020s, the Yemen war has settled into a grinding stalemate punctuated by fragile truces.

[00:18:06]The Houthis control the north and the population centers.

[00:18:09]The internationally recognized government and its various allies, including UAE-backed southern forces, hold parts of the south and east. Iran continues to supply the Houthis with drone and missile technology.

[00:18:20]Saudi Arabia continues to pay the financial and reputational costs of a conflict it cannot win but cannot afford to lose.

[00:18:27]For MBS, Yemen has become the defining strategic albatross of his tenure.

[00:18:32]The swift, decisive campaign he envisioned in 2015 did not materialize.

[00:18:37]Instead, the war exposed the limits of air power, the resilience of determined guerrilla forces, and the cost in human lives and international reputation of an intervention that lacks a clear end game.

[00:18:47]The Saudi government has been quietly exploring various exit scenarios, ceasefires, power-sharing arrangements, Houthi incorporation into a transitional political framework, but none of these have yet produced a durable resolution.

[00:19:01]The UAE, having stepped back from direct military involvement, has nonetheless retained its influence in the south through the STC.

[00:19:08]Abu Dhabi has effectively secured the strategic assets it wanted, influence over the port of Aden, and the broader maritime corridor of the Bab el Mandeb Strait without bearing the full cost of the continued conflict. It is a tactically successful outcome from the UAE's perspective.

[00:19:24]From Riyadh's perspective, it looks suspiciously like a partner who took the prize and left the bill on the table.

[00:19:30]What does all of this mean for the next decade? Let's think through several possible trajectories because the future of the Saudi-UAE relationship is not fixed. It is being actively contested and shaped by decisions being made right now in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

[00:19:43]The optimistic scenario is one of managed competition within a framework of continued strategic partnership. In this scenario, both countries successfully diversify their economies, find a way to divide the regional commercial landscape without open conflict, and maintain sufficient alignment on the big security questions: Iran, political Islam, great power competition to present a united front when it matters. MBS consolidates power inside Saudi Arabia, completes enough of his reform agenda to genuinely transform the kingdom's economic and social landscape, and eventually finds a path out of Yemen that preserves enough face to be politically manageable.

[00:20:19]The UAE continues to leverage its institutional advantages, its legal framework, its financial infrastructure, its talent ecosystem to remain the indispensable hub for the global economy's engagement with the Middle East. Both countries manage their relationships with China and the United States without having to make a definitive choice.

[00:20:36]This scenario is possible, but it requires a level of discipline and coordination between two increasingly assertive increasingly nationalist governments that has not been consistently on display.

[00:20:47]The more troubling scenario is one of gradual divergence that eventually tips into open rivalry. Consider what that might look like. Saudi Arabia, emboldened by its economic scale and its centrality to global oil markets, begins to use its leverage more aggressively against Dubai's commercial dominance.

[00:21:02]The UAE, no longer confident in the security umbrella that the Saudi partnership provides, deepens its independent military and diplomatic capabilities to a degree that begins to look less like a compliment to Saudi power and more like an alternative to it.

[00:21:16]Small states in the region, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, smaller African partners, find themselves forced to choose between competing Gulf patrons.

[00:21:25]The coherence that the Saudi UAE access brought to regional politics dissolves into a more fragmented, more competitive Gulf landscape. And Iran, watching carefully, finds opportunities to exploit the gap.

[00:21:38]This scenario is also possible. The trajectory of the religion relationship since 2019, the Yemen divergence, the Qatar resolution disagreement, the quiet economic competition, points toward it more clearly than toward the optimistic alternative.

[00:21:52]Dah. And then there's a third scenario, perhaps the most interesting of all.

[00:21:57]The scenario in which an external shock, a major war, a dramatic escalation in the Iran nuclear standoff, a global economic crisis, or a catastrophic climate event that accelerates the post-oil transition faster than either countries economic diversification plans can absorb, forces a new kind of reckoning.

[00:22:15]In this scenario, the Saudi UAE relationship is tested to breaking point or forged into something far more durable than it currently is, depending on how the crisis unfolds and how the two leaderships respond to it. History suggests that Gulf politics is consistently shaped by exactly these kinds of external shocks. The Arab Spring was one. The Iranian nuclear negotiations were another. The COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price crash of 2020 were a third.

[00:22:39]Each of these moments revealed something about the underlying structure of Gulf alignments that the surface-level stability of normal times conceals.

[00:22:46]What we can say with reasonable confidence is this.

[00:22:48]The Saudi UAE pact, whatever its internal tensions, remains the central organizing fact of Arab regional politics. No other bilateral relationship in the Arab world comes close to matching its combination of financial weight, military capability, and diplomatic reach. When Riyadh and Abu Dhabi agree on something, it tends to happen. When they disagree, regional paralysis often follows.

[00:23:12]The personal relationship between MBS and MBZ remains the pivot point of this entire architecture.

[00:23:18]MBZ is now in his early 60s, a statesman of considerable experience who has navigated every major regional crisis of the last two decades.

[00:23:26]MBS is in his late 30s, still with most of his political career ahead of him and a kingdom to reshape. The mentorship dynamic of the early years has evolved into something more complex. A relationship between two men who need each other, but increasingly see the world through slightly different lenses shaped by different national contexts and different personal calculations about risk. What we know about power, about relationships between states, and about the specific dynamics of the Gulf suggests that the pact will survive in some form. The shared threats are real.

[00:23:55]The economic interdependence is deep.

[00:23:57]The personal investment that both leaders have made in the relationship creates its own gravitational pull.

[00:24:02]But survive is not the same as thrive.

[00:24:05]And the distance between a Saudi-UAE relationship that is managing its tensions effectively and one that has deteriorated into strategic rivalry could, in the wrong circumstances, be disturbingly short.

[00:24:17]For the rest of the world, for the United States recalibrating its Middle East posture, for China pursuing its Belt and Road ambitions across the region, for Europe navigating energy dependence, for the smaller states of the Arab world seeking patrons and partners, the health of this relationship matters enormously. The secret pact that was never written down, never publicly acknowledged, never ratified by any parliament or constitutional process, has nonetheless become one of the most consequential political arrangements of the 21st century.

[00:24:45]It was forged in the particular fire of a particular moment, a moment when the old order was collapsing, when Iran was advancing, when the United States seemed to be retreating, and when two ambitious men with aligned instincts and complementary capabilities decided that they were stronger together than apart.

[00:25:02]Whether that calculation still holds as the circumstances that produced it continue to evolve, that is the question that will define the Gulf's future.

[00:25:10]Think about what the midnight decisions of 2015 have produced. A war in Yemen that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and created one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. A blockade that tore the Gulf Cooperation Council apart and reshaped Qatar's foreign policy orientation. The Abraham Accords that fundamentally altered the Arab world's relationship with Israel. A new era of Arab authoritarianism that has smothered the democratic aspirations of the Arab Spring with a definitiveness that might take a generation to undo.

[00:25:39]And a strategic architecture in which China has found in the Gulf a partner willing to hedge against American hegemony in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. None of these outcomes was planned in their entirety. None of them is the exclusive product of the Saudi UAE relationship.

[00:25:54]But all of them bear its fingerprints because when you control the oil, the money, the geography, and the military force that these two countries command, your decisions do not stay within your borders. They radiate outward across the Arab world, across the Islamic world, across the global economy, and into the calculations of every major power on the planet.

[00:26:13]The midnight attack that changed everything was not a single airstrike, not a single diplomatic cable, not a single phone call between two princes.

[00:26:21]It was the cumulative weight of a thousand decisions made in rooms that the public was never invited into by men who were certain enough of their own vision to reshape the world around it without asking permission.

[00:26:31]Whether history will judge those men kindly depends on whether the world they have built proves more stable, more prosperous, and more just than the one they dismantled. The evidence so far is mixed. The ambition is not in question.

[00:26:44]The consequences are still unfolding.

[00:26:46]And the pact, secret, unwritten, and yet somehow more durable than many formal alliances in world history, continues to define the Middle East in ways that no one who wants to understand the world can afford to ignore.