Daniel sent us this one, and it gets at something genuinely strange when you sit with it. The question is: how does military and intelligence cooperation actually work between countries that don't have diplomatic relations? Specifically Israel and countries like Saudi Arabia, where Israeli passport holders are banned from entry. The media calls it unofficial, but Daniel's point is that unofficial doesn't quite capture it, because this isn't someone passing notes in a back channel. It looks more like something structured, something that functions. So how does it function? Who shows up to the meetings, and where do those meetings happen, when your citizens can't even get off the plane?
I think what makes this particularly sharp as a question is that we're not talking about a historical curiosity. The architecture of Middle Eastern security right now, the whole thing that's either holding together or fraying depending on which week you're reading the news, runs on exactly these kinds of arrangements.
By the way, today's episode is powered by Claude Sonnet four point six.
Anyway, the paradox is real and it's not rhetorical. You have states that are publicly committed to the Palestinian cause, that issue statements condemning Israeli military operations, that maintain entry bans on Israeli passport holders as a matter of domestic law, and simultaneously those same states are plugged into shared radar networks with Israel. Their air defense systems are talking to each other in near real time. That's not a rumor or a speculative claim. There was a significant leak reported by ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, that came out last year and documented in some detail how Arab states deepened military ties with Israel even through the Gaza war, while publicly denouncing it. The duality is documented.
That gap between the public position and the operational reality is the thing Daniel is really asking us to explain. Not whether it exists, but the mechanics. Like, zoom in. How does a Saudi intelligence officer coordinate with an Israeli counterpart when there's no embassy, no bilateral framework, no legal basis for that person to even set foot in Israel?
Right, and the answer involves a few distinct mechanisms that are worth separating out, because they get conflated. There's the U.facilitation layer, there's the third-country meeting model, there's the multilateral framework that provides cover, and then there's the technology-mediated piece where you don't actually need physical presence because the cooperation happens through systems. Each of those works differently and has different implications.
Let's start with the U.layer because I think that's the load-bearing piece that most people underestimate. When people picture Israel-Saudi military cooperation, they imagine two parties making a deal. But the actual structure is usually triangular at minimum.
It almost always is. CENTCOM, that's United States Central Command, is the military command that covers the Middle East, and it has formal relationships with nearly every state in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and also with Israel, which was formally moved into CENTCOM's area of responsibility in twenty twenty-one, shifted from EUCOM, European Command. That shift was not incidental. It was a structural acknowledgment that Israel's security environment is regionally integrated, not European. And what it did operationally is it put Israel and the Gulf states under the same American military command umbrella for the first time.
CENTCOM becomes the hub through which cooperation can be routed without either party having to formally acknowledge the other.
And the specific application that the ICIJ reporting documented is air defense coordination against Iran. By twenty twenty-four, the radar systems of multiple Arab states were linked into a shared threat detection network that also incorporated Israeli data. The practical rationale is straightforward: a ballistic missile or a drone swarm doesn't respect the distinction between who has diplomatic relations with whom. If something is launched from Iranian territory toward the Gulf, Saudi radar sees it first, Israeli radar sees something else, and the question of whether those two pictures get stitched together in real time is a life-or-death operational question, not a diplomatic nicety.
The stitching happens through the American system.
Through CENTCOM coordination, yes. There was reportedly a conference in Qatar in twenty twenty-four where bilateral discussions about this kind of integration took place. Qatar is an interesting venue for that because Qatar has its own complicated relationship with both Israel and the broader Gulf bloc, but it hosts a massive American military presence at Al Udeid Air Base, which gives it a kind of neutral operational ground.
The American base provides the physical space where people who officially cannot meet can meet.
That's one version of it. And this is where Daniel's specific question about personnel movement gets interesting. If you're a Saudi military officer and you need to have a working-level conversation with an Israeli counterpart, you don't fly to Tel Aviv. You fly to a location where both parties have a legitimate reason to be present. That could be an American base. It could be a NATO facility in Europe. It could be a bilateral meeting in a third country that has relations with both. Jordan is the obvious example. Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel and normal relations with Saudi Arabia, so Amman becomes a natural meeting point. There have been reports of Israeli and Saudi military figures meeting in Jordan over the years, though those are rarely confirmed officially.
The entry ban problem disappears because neither party is entering the other's territory.
The entry ban is a domestic legal instrument. It says you cannot enter this country. It says nothing about whether you can sit in a conference room in Amman or Frankfurt or Washington and talk to someone from that country. The legal prohibition is territorial. The cooperation is extraterritorial.
Which is, when you think about it, a very elegant workaround. The domestic politics of the entry ban are preserved. The hardliners at home can point to the fact that no Israeli has set foot on Saudi soil in any official capacity. And simultaneously the defense ministers are comparing notes somewhere in Jordan.
This isn't unique to the Israel-Saudi case. There's a historical precedent with Israel and China that's worth mentioning because it shows how durable this model is. In the nineteen eighties, Israel and China developed significant military technology cooperation through secret channels before they had any formal diplomatic relationship. The diplomacy followed the military and technological relationship, not the other way around. Formal diplomatic ties between Israel and China were only established in nineteen ninety-two, but the military-industrial relationship was a decade older.
The sequence people assume, you normalize first and then you cooperate, is actually often inverted.
And the Abraham Accords are a good contemporary case study in that inversion. The UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, those normalizations in twenty twenty, they didn't come out of nowhere. There was a pre-existing substrate of quiet cooperation, particularly between Israel and the UAE, that went back years. Intelligence sharing, technology transfer, back-channel security discussions. The public normalization was in some sense the formalization of an already-functioning relationship. The Middle East Institute has written about this in the context of what they call the Regional Security Construct, the idea that the Abraham Accords created a framework that could be extended to states that haven't yet normalized, as a kind of on-ramp.
Saudi Arabia being the obvious candidate sitting at the top of that on-ramp.
The biggest one, yes. And what's interesting about the Saudi case specifically is the degree to which the cooperation that exists is acknowledged in some quarters and strenuously denied in others, sometimes simultaneously by the same government. You'll have a Saudi official saying publicly that there will be no normalization without a Palestinian state, full stop, while separately the defense cooperation infrastructure is deepening. Those two things can both be true because they operate in different registers of political reality.
The public statement is for the domestic audience and the Arab street. The operational cooperation is for the threat environment, which doesn't care about the Arab street.
Iran is the forcing function here. This is the thing that makes the Israel-Saudi security relationship qualitatively different from, say, a hypothetical Israel-Morocco security relationship. The shared threat is existential in scale and immediate in timeline. Saudi Arabia and Israel have convergent threat assessments of Iran, not identical but substantially overlapping. Both see Iranian regional power projection, the proxy network through Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, as a direct threat to their security and stability. That convergence creates a strong structural incentive for cooperation that persists regardless of the political surface temperature.
Intelligence on Iran is probably the most valuable thing each party can offer the other.
Israel has extraordinary intelligence penetration of Iranian systems. The operations attributed to Israeli intelligence inside Iran, and I'm being deliberately vague because some of this is still in contested territory, suggest a level of human and technical intelligence access that no Gulf state can match. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has geographic proximity, linguistic and cultural reach into the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf region, financial intelligence networks, and relationships with actors that Israel doesn't have access to. Those are complementary capabilities.
You get genuine mutual benefit, not just Saudi Arabia receiving Israeli intelligence as a kind of favor.
Right, and that matters for the sustainability of the arrangement. Asymmetric relationships where one party is purely a consumer of the other's intelligence tend to be unstable. They create dependency and resentment. The fact that both sides have something to offer gives the cooperation a more durable foundation.
Now the ICIJ reporting you mentioned, the forty percent increase in intelligence sharing since twenty twenty-three, that's a striking number. What's the baseline for that kind of claim?
I want to be careful here because intelligence sharing metrics are inherently difficult to verify from outside. The figure that's been cited, and I've seen it in a few places, is that the volume of intelligence coordination between Israel and Saudi Arabia increased substantially from twenty twenty-three onward, and twenty twenty-three is specifically when the Gaza conflict escalated following October seventh. The intuition behind that makes sense: a major regional shock creates immediate demand for shared situational awareness. You want to know if Hezbollah is going to open a northern front, you want to know if the Houthis are going to expand their operations, you want to know what Iran is telling its proxies. Those are questions that require pooling intelligence rather than hoarding it.
The irony of October seventh is that it simultaneously made the public politics of Israel-Arab cooperation much harder, all those condemnations and the entry ban rhetoric got louder, while the operational security logic for cooperation got stronger.
That's the tension that runs through the whole ICIJ story. Arab states that were publicly demanding ceasefires and condemning Israeli operations were simultaneously deepening their defense integration with Israel because the threat environment wasn't pausing for the politics. And that's not hypocrisy in the simple sense. It's the management of competing pressures: domestic legitimacy, which requires a certain public posture, and national security, which requires a different operational posture.
Let's talk about the mechanism of the cooperation itself, the technology layer, because I think this is where the entry ban problem really gets solved in the most fundamental way. You don't need a person to fly anywhere if the systems are talking directly.
This is the piece that I find most technically interesting. Modern intelligence sharing doesn't require physical presence in the way it once did. You can have a liaison relationship where the actual exchange of information happens through encrypted communications systems, through shared data platforms, through what's sometimes called a fusion cell where analysts from multiple countries are contributing to a common picture without necessarily being in the same room. The radar integration I mentioned earlier is a version of this: the systems are interoperable, the data flows automatically, and the human coordination happens at a level of abstraction above the physical location of the hardware.
Though there are limits to what you can do purely through systems. At some point someone needs to be in the room.
There are definitely limits. The highest-value intelligence, the stuff with the most sensitive sourcing, typically moves through personal relationships between senior intelligence officers. That's a pattern that goes back to the history of intelligence cooperation globally. The relationship between the CIA and MI6, for example, was famously built on personal trust between individuals before it was institutionalized. The Five Eyes arrangement has a formal architecture now, but it grew out of human relationships. So yes, at some point you need the meeting in Amman or the conversation on the margins of a CENTCOM conference.
Those meetings happen. They just don't get announced.
They happen and there's a whole protocol around them that preserves deniability. The cover is often a multilateral event. If there's a conference on regional air defense, or a counterterrorism working group, or a military exercise involving multiple countries, you can have Israeli and Saudi officers present in the same space without either government having to acknowledge bilateral contact. The meeting is the conference. The bilateral conversation is what happens at the coffee break.
The coffee break is doing a lot of work in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
An extraordinary amount of work. And the multilateral framework is important not just as cover but as a legitimizing structure. If you're a Saudi military officer and you're asked back home why you were at a conference where Israeli officers were present, the answer is that it was an American-convened event about regional security, and you were there representing Saudi interests. That's a defensible answer domestically. It's very different from saying you flew to Tel Aviv for bilateral talks.
There's also a question of what the cooperation looks like at the working level versus the strategic level. Because the strategic level, the intelligence chiefs talking, that's one thing. But does this extend down to, say, technical personnel? Engineers comparing notes on air defense systems?
And I think the honest answer is that the technical cooperation is probably the most developed layer, because it's the most removed from the political surface. Arms sales and defense technology relationships have their own logic that can survive political disruption. Israel has a sophisticated defense industry, and some of its systems, or systems with Israeli-origin technology, have found their way into Gulf state arsenals through circuitous routes, sometimes through American contractors who integrate Israeli components into systems sold to Gulf states. The American defense industry has served as an integration layer there too.
The F-35 sale to the UAE, which was one of the things negotiated alongside the Abraham Accords normalization, that's partly about the Americans managing what the Israelis were comfortable with in terms of Gulf state military capability.
Right, and that negotiation was explicit. Israel has a qualitative military edge requirement written into American law, the concept that American military assistance to Israel should maintain Israel's ability to defend itself against any combination of regional threats. When the UAE wanted the F-35 as part of the normalization package, Israel had concerns, and there were negotiations about the conditions under which that sale could proceed. The point is that the American security relationship with both parties gives the U.a lever to manage the technology transfer question in a way that takes Israeli concerns seriously even in a sale to a Gulf state.
Which creates an interesting dynamic where Israeli interests are effectively represented in negotiations that Israel isn't formally a party to.
And that's a feature of the relationship, not a bug. Israel doesn't need to be in the room if American commitments mean that the room is sensitive to Israeli equities. That's a form of security guarantee that operates below the level of formal diplomacy.
Now I want to push on the misconception Daniel is implicitly identifying in the prompt, which is that unofficial cooperation is somehow less real or less effective than formal cooperation. Because I think the evidence points the other way.
It often does, yes. Formal agreements have their own vulnerabilities. Italy's suspension of its defense cooperation agreement with Israel earlier this year is a good example of this. When you have a formal bilateral defense pact, it can be suspended or revoked through a political decision, and then you have a public rupture that affects the whole relationship. Informal arrangements don't have that fragility in the same way. There's no document to tear up. The relationship continues at the working level even if the political temperature changes at the top.
Though you also lose the enforcement mechanisms that formal agreements provide.
That's the tradeoff. Formal agreements give you recourse, dispute resolution mechanisms, clear obligations. Informal arrangements depend entirely on shared interests and personal trust. They're more flexible and more durable in some ways, but they're also more vulnerable to changes in personnel, because the relationship is between individuals rather than institutions, and more vulnerable to shifts in the underlying interest alignment.
The interest alignment in the Israel-Saudi case has been remarkably stable because the Iran threat has been remarkably persistent.
That's the foundation. And I think it's worth being direct about this: the cooperation exists because both parties benefit from it, not because either party has overcome some principled objection to working with the other. Saudi Arabia cooperates with Israel on security matters because Iranian power projection threatens Saudi Arabia, full stop. The Palestinian question is a genuine political constraint on the form that cooperation can take, but it's not strong enough to override the survival calculus.
Which is also why the cooperation deepens in moments of acute Iranian threat and sometimes recedes when the immediate pressure is lower.
The pressure-dependence is real. The Houthi missile and drone campaign, which has been sustained and which has demonstrated an ability to hit targets deep inside Saudi Arabia, that's been a significant accelerant. When you're watching missiles launched from Yemen land near your oil infrastructure, the question of whether you're officially talking to the Israelis becomes somewhat abstract.
There's a dark pragmatism to all of this that I think gets sanitized in the normalization discourse. The Abraham Accords coverage was very warm, a lot of talk about a new Middle East, peace dividends, shared prosperity. And some of that is real. But the security cooperation that predated and enabled the Accords was built on a much colder logic.
And the pre-normalization UAE case is instructive on this. Before the Abraham Accords, there was already a functioning intelligence relationship between Israel and the UAE. There were Israeli technology companies operating in the UAE under various covers. Cyber security cooperation, which is a particularly sensitive area, was reported. The public normalization in twenty twenty was in some sense the political acknowledgment of a relationship that had been quietly functional for years. The Accords didn't create the relationship; they legitimized it.
For Saudi Arabia, you could argue the question isn't whether the cooperation exists, it's whether the political conditions will ever allow the formalization.
That's where it gets uncertain. The Saudi position has been consistent in its public framing: normalization requires progress on Palestinian statehood. The American position under the current administration has been to push for a normalization deal as a significant diplomatic achievement, but the Palestinian track is complicated. I'm not sure the pieces are in place for formalization in the near term, which means the informal architecture is probably going to carry the load for a while yet.
Carry it effectively, based on everything we've been describing.
Based on the evidence, yes. The informal architecture is not a placeholder for the real thing. It is, in many respects, the real thing. The formalization would add layers of legitimacy and some additional capabilities, particularly around things like open commerce and civilian travel and investment. But the security core is already functioning.
Which brings us back to Daniel's original observation about the paradox. A country that bans your passport holders from entry is simultaneously running shared radar with you. And the answer to how that's possible is: carefully, through third parties, through American frameworks, through extraterritorial meetings, through technology that doesn't require visas, and through a shared threat that makes the alternative, not cooperating, more dangerous than the domestic political cost of cooperating quietly.
That's the frame. And I think what's worth adding is that this model isn't unique to Israel and Saudi Arabia. It's a recurring pattern in the history of intelligence and military cooperation, where the operational relationship runs ahead of the political relationship because operational necessity doesn't wait for diplomacy. The Israel-China case in the eighties, various Cold War arrangements between states that were technically hostile, the Five Eyes in its early form. The pattern is old. The Middle Eastern version of it is just unusually visible right now because of the stakes and the media attention.
Let's go deeper on the specific mechanisms, because I want to make sure we're giving listeners a concrete picture of what the logistics actually look like—starting with the relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia right now.
And that relationship is more complex than it appears on the surface. The public framing—no diplomatic relations, no direct flights, Saudi passports not valid for entry to Israel, Israeli passports not valid for entry to Saudi Arabia—is accurate, but it only scratches the surface. Underneath it, you have two states that share a threat environment, share American security relationships, and have been in some form of indirect contact for decades.
The surface is maintained because it has domestic political value for Saudi Arabia. The Palestinian cause has genuine resonance in Saudi society and across the Arab world. The optics of normalization without Palestinian statehood are difficult for the Saudi government to manage publicly.
Which is why the distinction between what's visible and what's functional matters so much here. The unofficial cooperation isn't a workaround or a second-best arrangement. It's a deliberate architecture that serves both parties because it lets the operational relationship run without triggering the domestic political costs that formalization would impose.
When we say unofficial, we don't mean informal in the sense of two guys having a chat. We mean structured, deniable, and insulated from the political surface.
That's the right way to put it. There's a whole spectrum here. At one end you have covert intelligence contacts, individual officers meeting in third countries, no paper trail. At the other end you have something like the CENTCOM air defense coordination, which is multilateral, involves American institutional scaffolding, and is in some sense acknowledged even if the bilateral dimension isn't advertised. The common thread is that neither government has to stand up and say we have a security relationship with this country we officially don't recognize.
It's structured ambiguity, essentially. Functional enough to deliver real security value, ambiguous enough to survive domestic scrutiny—especially when it comes to the practicalities of military coordination.
Right, and those practicalities are actually more concrete than most coverage suggests. Take the question of how military personnel physically move between countries that don't recognize each other. The answer in most documented cases is that they don't. They meet somewhere else. Jordan has been a consistent venue for this kind of thing, partly because Jordan has peace treaties with Israel and longstanding relationships with the Gulf states, which makes it a natural intersection point. You have Israeli officers and Saudi counterparts who can both travel to Amman without either government having to explain why an Israeli showed up in Riyadh or a Saudi official appeared in Tel Aviv.
Jordan has strong incentives to facilitate this, not just as a favor to either party.
Jordan's own security environment depends heavily on regional stability, and Jordan has a direct interest in both Israeli and Saudi security capacity being functional. The Hashemite monarchy has its own complicated relationship with the Palestinian question, its own concerns about Iranian influence, and its own need to maintain American support. Being a useful venue for this kind of regional security architecture serves all of those interests simultaneously.
The third-country meeting model isn't just a workaround for the entry ban. It's actually built on a network of states that each have their own reasons to make it work.
Right, and Qatar plays a similar role in a different register. The ICIJ reporting from last year on the CENTCOM leak described a conference held in Qatar in twenty twenty-four where bilateral discussions between Israeli and Gulf state representatives took place in the margins of a multilateral air defense meeting. Qatar hosts American military infrastructure, specifically Al Udeid Air Base, which is the largest American military installation in the Middle East. That American institutional presence provides a kind of neutral ground, or at least a ground where the American umbrella gives all parties a reason to be in the same building.
The American base as a diplomatic venue. There's something almost elegant about that from a logistics standpoint.
It solves multiple problems at once. The American military framework means that any individual bilateral interaction can be characterized as part of a multilateral process. Nobody has to say we had a meeting with the Israelis. They can say we participated in a CENTCOM-facilitated regional security discussion, which is accurate, and which also happened to include some direct exchange with Israeli counterparts.
What about the intelligence sharing side? Because that's presumably even more sensitive than military officer meetings, and it operates on a different track.
The intelligence track is where a lot of the most valuable cooperation happens, and it's also the hardest to document precisely because of what it is. What we know from reporting and from the occasional leak is that the sharing happens through several channels. One is direct, where Israeli and Saudi intelligence services have established communication protocols, almost certainly including secure technical channels, that allow them to pass information without either government having to formally acknowledge the relationship. A second channel is American brokerage, where the CIA or NSA acts as an intermediary, receiving intelligence from one party and sharing relevant elements with the other, so neither party has to be in direct contact.
The American intelligence community as a clearing house.
Which the Americans are quite willing to do because it serves their own interests. If Israeli signals intelligence on Iranian nuclear activity is relevant to Saudi threat assessment, and the Americans want both parties to be working from the same picture, routing it through American channels achieves that without requiring a direct bilateral acknowledgment.
The third channel?
This is underappreciated. A significant portion of what intelligence cooperation looks like in practice isn't people meeting in rooms. It's shared systems. By twenty twenty-four, according to the CENTCOM reporting, the radar systems of Gulf states including Saudi Arabia were linked for shared threat detection with Israeli air defense infrastructure. That linkage doesn't require a Saudi officer to ever set foot in Israel or an Israeli officer to set foot in Saudi Arabia. The data moves through the network. The cooperation is embedded in the technical architecture.
Which also means it's much harder to switch off than a personal relationship. You can stop a meeting from happening. Unwinding an integrated radar network is a much bigger decision.
That's a really important point. Once the technical integration exists, the cooperation becomes somewhat self-sustaining, because the cost of discontinuing it is operational, not just political. You're degrading your own air defense picture if you pull out of the shared architecture. That creates a kind of lock-in that personal relationships don't have.
The tradeoff you mentioned earlier, formal agreements have enforcement mechanisms but can be suspended, informal arrangements are flexible but depend on trust, that calculus looks different for technical integration. Technical integration has its own enforcement mechanism, which is that discontinuing it hurts you.
And I think that's part of why the air defense cooperation is so significant strategically. It's not just about the immediate tactical value of shared radar coverage. It's about creating interdependencies that make the cooperation durable in a way that political arrangements aren't. The Houthi missile threat has been the accelerant here, because every time a missile is tracked across the region, every state in the network has a direct, visible demonstration of why the shared picture matters.
The threat does the work that the diplomats can't.
In a very real sense, yes. And it's worth noting the scale of what we're talking about on the intelligence side. There were figures cited in reporting on the post-October twenty twenty-three period suggesting that intelligence sharing between Israel and Gulf states increased substantially, something in the range of forty percent since twenty twenty-three, driven almost entirely by the Iran dimension. That's not a marginal increase. That's a relationship that's been actively deepened under pressure.
Under the worst possible political conditions for doing so openly.
Which tells you something about where the actual priorities sit. The Gaza war created enormous public pressure on Arab governments to distance themselves from Israel. And at the same time, the security cooperation was getting more intensive, not less, because the threat environment was getting more complex, not less. The public posture and the operational reality were moving in opposite directions.
That gap has to create its own pressures eventually.
It does, and that tension is something we should probably dig into when we look at the broader implications. Because the question of how long a government can sustain that gap, and what happens when it becomes visible, is one of the more interesting strategic uncertainties in the whole picture—especially when we consider cases like the UAE.
The UAE comparison is worth pulling in here, because it's the one case where we actually got to see what happens when that gap closes.
It's instructive precisely because it wasn't a sudden development. The Abraham Accords in 2020 were treated in a lot of coverage as a breakthrough, which they were diplomatically, but the underlying security relationship between Israel and the UAE had been functioning for years before the formal normalization. There were technology transfers, intelligence contacts, shared concerns about Iranian proxies in Yemen and elsewhere. The normalization didn't create the relationship. It surfaced it.
Which suggests that for Saudi Arabia, the question isn't whether the relationship exists. It's whether the political conditions for surfacing it ever arrive.
The UAE case tells you something about what those conditions look like. What shifted for the UAE wasn't the security calculus. That had been pointing toward Israel for a long time. What shifted was the domestic political calculation, partly driven by generational change in the leadership, partly by the sense that the Palestinian track was stalled and waiting for it to move was costing the UAE real strategic opportunities. Mohammed bin Zayed made a decision that the benefits of formalization outweighed the costs, and the infrastructure for normalization was already mostly in place because the cooperation had been running quietly for years.
The Saudi version of that calculation is harder. The stakes are different. Saudi Arabia carries symbolic weight in the Muslim world that the UAE doesn't, the custodianship of the holy cities, the historical role in Arab politics. Mohammed bin Salman can't make the same move Mohammed bin Zayed made without it meaning something categorically different.
Which is why the framing around Palestinian statehood keeps coming up in the Saudi position. It's not purely a moral commitment, though there's genuine resonance there. It's also a political cover mechanism. If normalization is conditional on Palestinian progress, then the Saudi government has a principled reason to delay that isn't just about domestic pressure. It's a way of managing the symbolic weight.
The cooperation deepens in the background while the stated condition remains unmet, and that can go on for quite a while.
Potentially a very long while. The Iran dimension is what makes it sustainable, because Iran is the pressure that keeps both parties invested in the operational relationship regardless of where the political surface sits. Every Iranian advance in its nuclear program, every Houthi missile that crosses Gulf airspace, every IRGC operation in the region, reinforces the shared interest that makes the cooperation valuable. The threat is doing continuous work to hold the arrangement together.
There's an almost uncomfortable irony in that. Iranian aggression is functionally one of the main things keeping the Israel-Saudi security relationship intact.
Iran has been, unintentionally, one of the more effective architects of Israeli-Arab security cooperation for about two decades. The threat environment Iran creates is precisely what gives states like Saudi Arabia a reason to maintain contact with Israeli intelligence and military capacity that they couldn't easily replicate through any other partnership.
What does that mean for the normalization question practically? Because if the security cooperation is already delivering a lot of what normalization would deliver operationally, what's actually left on the table?
That's the right question, and I think the answer is: more than people sometimes assume. The formal relationship unlocks things the informal one can't. Direct commercial ties, open technology transfer without the need for third-country routing, diplomatic coordination in international forums, the ability to build institutional relationships between ministries rather than just intelligence contacts. The UAE relationship with Israel post-normalization has generated a significant amount of economic activity, direct investment, tourism, joint ventures in technology and agriculture. Saudi Arabia's economic scale dwarfs the UAE's. The potential there is substantial.
There's a military dimension to formalization too, beyond what the informal track provides.
A formal defense agreement, or even a formal security partnership, creates obligations and enforcement mechanisms that the current arrangement explicitly lacks. We talked earlier about how the informal cooperation is durable in some ways because of technical integration, but it's still ultimately dependent on political will on both sides remaining aligned. A formal treaty changes the legal and institutional landscape in ways that make the cooperation more resilient to political fluctuation.
Italy is an interesting counterpoint here. There was reporting this year about Italy suspending a defense cooperation agreement with Israel, which is the kind of thing that can happen with formal agreements when political conditions shift.
It is a real vulnerability of the formal model. When you have a signed agreement, you also have a signed suspension. The informal model doesn't have that exposure in the same way, because there's nothing to formally suspend. But I'd push back slightly on the implication that this makes informal better. Italy's suspension is a political statement as much as an operational one. The underlying security relationships don't evaporate because a formal cooperation agreement is paused. And for Saudi Arabia, the absence of a formal framework means the cooperation also can't be publicly credited, can't be built upon institutionally, and can't generate the kind of trust that comes from governments having actually committed to something in writing.
Structured ambiguity has a ceiling.
And I think that ceiling is part of what makes the normalization question open rather than resolved. The cooperation that exists is real and valuable. But it's also operating below what the relationship could theoretically support, and both sides know that.
The gap between what's functional and what's possible is itself a kind of strategic fact.
One that the Americans are actively interested in closing, which adds another layer to the whole picture. The Biden administration's attempt to broker a Saudi-Israel normalization deal was explicitly tied to American security guarantees for Saudi Arabia and Saudi civilian nuclear cooperation. The Trump administration has its own version of that interest. The American stake in Saudi-Israel normalization isn't just ideological. It's structural. A normalized relationship changes the regional architecture in ways that reduce the burden on American mediation and strengthen the anti-Iran coalition in a more durable form.
Which means the Americans have an incentive to push normalization even when the parties themselves are content to let the informal arrangement run.
That external pressure is part of what makes the current moment uncertain. The informal architecture is stable. But stable doesn't mean static, and the combination of American interest in formalization, the ongoing Iran threat, and the generational shift in Saudi leadership means the conditions for a change in the political surface are more present now than they've been at most points in the past. So, in practical terms, what does this mean for understanding the region?
How should someone trying to make sense of how the Middle East actually works, as opposed to how it's described in formal diplomatic terms, interpret all of this?
I think the first thing is to recalibrate what "relations" means. When you read that two countries don't have diplomatic relations, that's a statement about a specific, narrow category of formal interaction. It tells you nothing about whether their intelligence services are talking, whether their militaries are coordinating through a third framework, whether their officials are meeting in a third country. The absence of an embassy is not the absence of a relationship.
Which sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but the coverage consistently treats formal status as the meaningful variable.
It's a useful heuristic that breaks down at exactly the moments when it matters most. The most consequential relationships in the region right now are the ones that don't show up in the formal ledger. And if you're reading only the formal ledger, you're getting a systematically distorted picture of where the actual power and coordination sits.
The second thing I'd pull out is that unofficial doesn't mean weak. We've been through the mechanisms in some detail today, and what's striking is how much structural weight the informal track can bear. Shared radar integration, regular intelligence exchanges, military meetings in third countries, these aren't informal in the sense of being casual or improvised. They're informal in the sense of being deliberately unacknowledged.
Deliberately unacknowledged is exactly the right framing. And recognizing that distinction changes how you read a lot of news. When a Gulf state official gives a speech denouncing Israeli actions and then the next week there's a quiet meeting at a CENTCOM facility, those two things aren't contradictory. They're operating on different tracks that are both real simultaneously.
The practical implication for anyone following this space is to watch the operational signals, not just the diplomatic statements. Troop movements, defense procurement patterns, which multilateral exercises a country participates in, where officials travel, those are the data points that tell you where the real alignment sits.
The ICIJ reporting from late last year was a good example of that. The leaked material on Arab states deepening military ties with Israel during the Gaza war was striking precisely because it made visible something that the public diplomatic record was actively obscuring. That kind of investigative reporting is valuable because it bridges the gap between the formal narrative and the operational reality.
The gap that, as we've established, can run for a very long time before it closes, if it closes at all.
Which is maybe the most important thing to hold onto going forward. The informal architecture we've described isn't a transitional phase waiting to resolve into formal normalization. It might be a durable equilibrium in its own right. Or it might be the foundation that normalization eventually builds on. Both are plausible, and which one materializes depends on political variables that are uncertain.
Watch the variables, not just the headlines.
Herman, where does that leave us on the normalization question itself? Because we've spent a lot of time on the mechanics, and I think the honest answer is that nobody actually knows whether this ends with a formal agreement or just... continues as is, indefinitely.
Honestly, I'm not sure anyone inside the process knows either. The variables are real and they're moving. The Palestinian statehood condition isn't going away as a stated requirement, but the operational relationship isn't waiting for it. And the generational shift in Saudi leadership matters in ways that are hard to quantify. Mohammed bin Salman is not his father's generation of Arab leadership. The ideological framework is different even if the public positioning looks similar.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the informal architecture we've described is load-bearing. It's not fragile. Which cuts both ways. It means normalization isn't urgently necessary for the security relationship to function. But it also means that if normalization does happen, it's building on something real rather than starting from zero.
That's actually the most optimistic reading of the current situation. The trust deficit that would normally make a formal agreement very hard to reach is partially addressed by the fact that these institutions have been working together, quietly, for years. That's not nothing.
You're not asking two militaries to suddenly share a room. They've been sharing a room. Just not a room anyone admits exists.
Which is a strange foundation for a formal relationship, but historically it's not unusual. The Israel-China precedent we mentioned is one version of it. The Abraham Accords themselves were another. The UAE relationship looked like a leap from the outside and looked like a formalization from the inside.
The question isn't whether the relationship is real. It's whether the political conditions ever align to let it be acknowledged.
That's open. I wouldn't bet heavily on a timeline.
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