Opinions

The Red Sea does not recognise political borders as maps draw them. Instead, it binds every country on its shores to a shared fate with its neighbours across the water. When the western shore of this sea is shaken, the eastern shore does not remain untouched. This is a hard geopolitical reality that Saudi Arabia has understood well through decades of dealing with crises in the Horn of Africa and Yemen as a direct extension of its own domestic security.

It is through this deep understanding of geography as a shared destiny that the agreement establishing the Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council, signed in Riyadh on August 17, 2026, should be read. It is the institutional expression of a firmly held Saudi conviction: that the stability of a unified Sudan is indispensable to the stability of the kingdom itself, and that Sudan’s collapse or fragmentation would inevitably become a Saudi national security crisis.

Historical ties and cultural common ground

Long before strategic considerations and geopolitical crises came to the fore, Saudis viewed Sudanese people with great respect and as among those to whom they felt closest. Since the earliest times, Hijazis have shared cultural and linguistic traits with people on the other side of the Red Sea, particularly Sudanese people.

Throughout modern history, relations between the two countries have not been marked by serious crises. Indeed, they have been distinguished by a unique historical fact: the relationship has never witnessed a political crisis between the two states or their peoples, and there has always been mutual appreciation between them. This exceptional relationship, rooted in religious, cultural and social ties, has made the two countries a rare model of intra-Arab relations that has withstood all regional storms.

Saudi Arabia has stood by Sudanese people through every ordeal, including Nile floods and natural disasters, as well as the country’s crises and civil wars. This has created a fabric of human ties that goes beyond narrow political interests. It was this unique historical legacy that made Saudi mediation welcome to both sides when the war broke out, with the Jeddah platform working to ease the conflict and address the humanitarian crisis.

Saudi Arabia’s current position towards Sudan, then, is not merely the product of cold strategic or political calculations. It is the natural extension of a relationship that lived in people’s hearts before it was translated into institutions and agreements.

A framework for strategic partnership

This relationship culminated in the Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council, whose founding agreement was signed in Riyadh on August 17, 2026, by the two countries’ foreign ministers, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and Mohieddin Salem. Sources say it is not merely a conventional diplomatic framework, but a comprehensive institutional platform intended to oversee 10 major strategic areas. These reflect the depth of the partnership between the two countries and their desire to move from political and humanitarian support towards a long-term strategic, economic and investment partnership.

The 10 areas covered by the council include Sudan’s reconstruction; agriculture and food security; livestock; gold and mining; the Red Sea and ports; energy and electricity; finance and banking; industry and food processing; communications and digital transformation; and tourism, real estate and services.

Taken together, these areas constitute an integrated roadmap for turning bilateral relations into a genuine development partnership, drawing on Saudi Arabia’s investment and technological capabilities and Sudan’s enormous natural and human resources.

According to the Sudanese foreign minister, the council’s priorities centre on security, defence and the economy, with the Red Sea added as an area of strategic cooperation because of its importance to both countries. This is why Sudan joined the maritime defence alliance established by Saudi Arabia on July 30, 2026. This reflects a shared understanding that security and stability are the essential preconditions for any economic development, and that Red Sea security is a shared responsibility that cannot be separated from the stability of the states along its shores.

Sudan and the wider Arab project

For more than a decade and a half, the Arab region has witnessed a wave of systematic projects of fragmentation targeting pivotal states such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Countries that once played an active role in the regional order have been turned into open arenas of conflict managed by regional and international actors through local proxies. With its enormous resources and vital location connecting the Arab world with the African interior, Sudan has always been an ideal target for such a project of division.

When Saudi Arabia acts to support a path that preserves the unity of the Sudanese state and its national institutions, it objectively contributes to thwarting one link in this scheme targeting the Arab world as a whole. Every Arab state protected from fragmentation represents another defeat for this project, while every state that succumbs to it represents a victory that encourages its repetition. From this perspective, Sudanese stability is a collective Arab battle, and Saudi Arabia finds itself in the position of a state capable of leading that battle in defence of a collective Arab project that cannot afford to lose another link.

Sudan in the regional equation

Sudan occupies a unique position that makes it one of the region’s most important strategic keys: it is an Arab state that borders both the Red Sea and the Nile, connects the Horn of Africa with the Sahara, the Sahel and the Arab hinterland, and borders seven African and Arab countries.

This location makes Sudan a natural bridge between the Arab world and Africa, a vital maritime gateway on the Red Sea and a strategic water nexus on the Nile.

If a state in such a position fragments, it opens a geopolitical rupture whose effects extend from the Nile Basin to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and from the African Sahel to the Arabian Peninsula. The recent experience of Yemen has clearly demonstrated how the collapse of a state on the Red Sea can transform a vital maritime chokepoint such as Bab al-Mandeb from a safe commercial passage into an arena of direct threats to global shipping.

Saudi Arabia, which has paid a heavy price in both security and economic terms as a result of the war in Yemen, has realised that the security of waterways cannot be safeguarded merely by guarding the passages themselves, but by ensuring the stability of the states whose coastlines surround them.

Security beyond borders

In classical and contemporary strategic thought, the security of any major state is measured not only at its immediate borders, but also through its “strategic depth”: the wider geographical sphere that absorbs shocks before they reach the core. This idea, whose roots can be traced to strategic thinkers such as Nicholas Spykman and Walter Lippmann, holds that a state exists within a geopolitical environment that either acts as a buffer and absorbs crises, or transmits and amplifies them.

Given Saudi Arabia’s position as a pivotal regional power, it cannot content itself with securing its immediate borders while crises rage throughout its strategic surroundings. From this perspective, Sudan is not merely a neighbour across the sea, but one of the most important components of Saudi strategic depth. Its stability means stability along the kingdom’s western maritime frontier, control over flows of irregular migration and smuggling, and keeping at bay the spectre of a security vacuum that could be exploited by armed groups and extremist organisations.

When Riyadh invests in Sudan’s reconstruction and development through permanent institutional frameworks such as the Coordination Council, it is building a wall of stability around its strategic depth. It has understood that genuine security cannot be bought with walls alone, but is built through the prosperity of its neighbours.

A new Saudi approach to Red Sea security

The security of major waterways is not simply the product of military protection of the passage itself, but of the strength and stability of the states along its shores. A Red Sea bordered or surrounded by fragile or collapsed states, or states penetrated by irregular forces, is an insecure Red Sea regardless of the military capabilities of the major powers along its shores.

From this lesson, a more mature Saudi vision has emerged: it is not enough for the kingdom to be strong on the eastern shore. The states along the western shore and the Red Sea’s southern approaches, including Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, must also be strong, cohesive and capable of exercising full sovereignty over their coastlines. By placing the “Red Sea” alongside security and defence among its areas of focus, the Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council puts this philosophy into practice: strengthening Sudan’s ability to control its coastline is a direct Saudi investment in the security of the Red Sea as a whole.

The responsibility of regional power

The Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council is an expression of a broader political philosophy embraced by Riyadh: genuine regional power does not grow stronger by isolating itself behind borders, but by assuming responsibility for the stability of its surroundings. At a time when projects of fragmentation are proliferating, supporting Sudan’s unity, strengthening Saudi strategic depth and safeguarding Red Sea security are three sides of the same coin.

When Saudi Arabia safeguards the unity of its neighbour, it safeguards the integrity of its own strategic project. When it protects the stability of the Sudanese coast, it protects the stability of its own. This is the dialectic of shared geography: neither neighbour can be secure without the other, and neither shore can be stable without the one opposite it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

It had been a lengthy and productive meeting with the chief of staff to a Republican member of Congress. We had discussed United States policy towards Israel, and the scepticism of many of the Grand Old Party members towards the relationship and the challenge they face in saying anything about it given President Donald Trump’s iron grip on it. But there was one final agenda item I needed to raise: the member’s participation in the newly created “Sharia-Free America Caucus”, a group of US representatives standing against what one founding member described as “a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest. Its laws and practices have no place in American society.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” the staffer said, with a wave of his hand. “Muslims are just the low-hanging fruit. Really it is about Indians. And brown people in general. And the Jews, too. It won’t get in the way of putting America first. Really the only Member [of the Caucus] who believes all the bullshit about Israel is Randy Fine.”

The whipping up of Islamophobia in the US has become visible and visceral, to the extent that many in the Muslim community now look back almost wistfully to the days of George W Bush, who made a point, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, of visiting a mosque and declaring that “Islam is peace”. Such efforts at inclusivity have almost vanished entirely from the Republican Party, replaced by an outright bigotry that has inspired a spike in anti-Muslim attacks, such as the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego in May that killed two worshippers and a security guard. A recent proposal by Dallas Fort Worth international airport to add unobtrusive foot-washing stations for Muslims wishing to perform wudu (and presumably anyone else with dirty feet) was swiftly abandoned in the face of condemnation by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that the installation of such stations would be unconstitutional.

Where is all this coming from? To be sure, some of it is a reflection of the politics that Trump has promoted since his very first day of presidential campaigning in 2015 to divide Americans by suggesting that the country’s White majority and its historic place atop the social hierarchy are at risk; in this context it is not only Muslims who are under attack, but all minorities, as demonstrated by his administration’s attacks on Black history or Hispanic culture. But when it comes to Islamophobia, there is a more targeted driver of the trend.

In January this year, the government of Israel hosted an anti-Semitism conference in Jerusalem. This, by itself, is rather unremarkable. But what is noteworthy is who attended: leaders from across the European far right, including representatives from Poland’s PiS, Spain’s Vox, Hungary’s Fidesz, and France’s Rassemblement National. The event was, perhaps, the largest gathering of European right-wingers to discuss anti-Semitism since the US-led umerziehung (re-education) process in post-war Germany.

But the far right are now allies, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them, in the fight against the “invasion of radical Islam”. Since January, Netanyahu has continued on this theme, recently warning that “the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic republic of Britain”, and campaigning for re-election under a billboard titled “Don’t let them win” that features the faces of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders alongside those of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Israel’s promotion of Islamophobia is not limited to Netanyahu, nor does it end at its own shores. As Israel’s own reputation has cratered, rather than examining its actions (particularly in Gaza), it has decided its salvation rests in more effective public relations and propaganda campaigns. Some of this has materialised in an effort to prop up its own reputation: “The US-Israel relationship promotes stability”, explained an automated text message that millions of other Americans and I recently received via Israeli-contracted Clock Tower X. But Israel is also going on the offensive by trying to knock down and delegitimise its critics and by rallying the right through a purposeful campaign of Islamophobia.

The strategy may have been informed by a leaked study solicited by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from US public relations firm Stagwell Global, which found that the most effective tactic in shifting public opinion would be to drive fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism” but, in the absence of any compelling reason why the US should continue to back his country, Netanyahu has increasingly leaned into the argument that Israel is, as he claims foreign leaders have told him, the “model in the struggle against radical Islam which threatens the entire civilised world”.

This has manifested itself in Israel’s leveraging of increasingly virulent Islamophobia as part of its hasbara strategy, for instance in Canada in 2024, when an Israeli-government-funded influence operation using the name United Citizens for Canada conducted social media campaigns claiming that Muslim immigrants to the country posed a threat to society and were trying to impose Islamic law.

In many cases, Americans and Europeans have seen through such efforts. Recent primary wins for prominent Muslim congressional candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed have demonstrated a cross-communal rejection of Islamophobic rhetoric. But in other areas, Muslim communities increasingly feel under siege.

Israeli society is premised on Jewish supremacy and the pursuit of demographic homogeneity, but Western countries are increasingly diverse in both their demographics and their leadership. While the path to peace for Israel may be one that makes Israel look more like the West – a country with equality for all its people – at the core of its current propaganda campaign is the desire to make the West look more like Israel. That poses a test for Western pluralism, but even if the West fails that test, Israel should not assume that such a failure would inherently lead to an embrace of Zionism.

Fear and hatred are powerful tools, and the current Islamophobic campaign is likely to unleash further and deeper harms. But even on its primary objective, to stem the loss of support in Israel’s last bastion of Western far-right opinion, it is far from clear that it will succeed. In the meantime, Europeans and Americans would be wise to see it for what it is: a desperate foreign influence operation driven by a state that is increasingly running out of options.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.