In 2015, Saudi Arabia rallied a 10-nation coalition to launch a military operation called "Decisive Storm" against Yemen's Houthi rebels.
As a result, the operation was as fierce as a tiger, and the combat power was 0.5.
The dignified ten-nation alliance army was actually chased all over the world by a group of "straw shoe army" from the ravines.
The combat effectiveness of the "Wang Yejun" has once again refreshed the world's cognition.
People can't help but wonder, how can Saudi Arabia, a rich and weak country, survive to this day?
Next, we will analyze the survival of this "big dog" for you.
Saudi Arabia was originally just a street-level tribe in the Najd desert region, Riyadh.
In 1891, the Saud family was defeated by the Rashid family next door in a tribal dispute, and the family went into exile in Kuwait.
Among them was Ibn Saud, the founding patriarch of the country at the age of eleven.
Ibn Saud Ibn was determined to regain his homeland from an early age, and when he grew up, he traveled far and wide in search of funding.
At that time, a wealthy Kuwaiti man was moved by his sincerity and thought that he would definitely be able to achieve something in the future, so he sponsored him 40 Bedouin warriors to help him **Riyadh.
Relying on these 40 pairs of armor, Ibn Saud finally succeeded in recovering the sand chamber and returning it to the old capital in a village-level fight.
After recovering his homeland, Ibn Saud set about unifying the Arabian Peninsula.
Finally, in 1923, taking advantage of the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, Najd and Hejaz were successfully integrated, laying the foundation for today's Saudi Arabia.
It was said to be a country, but in fact, Saudi Arabia at that time was just a poor tribal alliance.
It wasn't until the American oil company came to the Najd Desert to discover a large oil field that Saudi Arabia began to make its fortunes.
In the beginning, they couldn't get the tribes with money.
Therefore, when it was first unified, Ibn took two measures to maintain the stability of the country.
In view of the nature of the tribal alliance, at the beginning of the establishment of the country, Ibn established a national policy of co-ruling the world with the powerful tribes.
Ibn led by example as a "seeder" and married into a large tribe in the country.
According to statistics, there are as many as 45 beauties in his officially famous harem, and there are countless who are not famous.
Ibn and his wife, whose names are not even named, had a total of 120 children, and almost every great tribe had a grandson with royal blood.
When these 120 children grew up, they continued to marry abroad.
The relationship between the major tribes and the royal family is really untidy and messy.
This is equivalent to each tribe being armed and participating in the interests of the royal family.
Since then, they have a relationship with the Saudi royal family, which is both prosperous and lossy.
And that's not all! In order to better trap the various tribes, Ibn also established a system of brother to brother.
Theoretically, the grandson of each tribe has the opportunity to inherit the throne, and as for whether you can win the lottery, it depends on whether you can live to that day, absolutely fair and just.
The second step taken by Ibn was to establish the Wahhabis as the state religion.
Wahhabi is a Saudi region, a more extreme religion, and even once established two Saudi kingdoms, which can be described as a tree with deep roots.
The famous bin Laden was actually a Wahhabi follower.
Osama bin Laden can see that this sect is by no means a good man and a woman, and that without including Wahhabism in the ruling system, there will never be peace.
To this day, the Sheikh family, who is in charge of the Wahhabi faction, is still one of the six major families in Saudi Arabia.
Relying on the double blessing of religious marriage, the Saudi family has since established an unshakable political position in Saudi Arabia.
In 1953, after Ibn left the Saudi people prematurely, his descendants followed the Song dynasty and self-emasculated the first team.
The reason why the "Wang Yejun" is so bad today is not that the Saudis are inherently incompetent, but the result of artificial design.
At that time, the revolutionary movement in the Arab region was surging, and the crowns of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Libya fell one after another, which made Saudi Arabia look cold in a sweat.
And the revolutions in these countries at that time, without exception, were launched by the Free Officers, influenced by Western ideas.
This makes Saudi Arabia extremely uneasy about its own country's army, which can be weakened as much as it can!
Whether this move by Saudi Arabia is good or bad, we will not comment too much.
But what is certain is that it is impossible for Saudi Arabia to be overthrown from within, even if the United States wants to launch a color revolution in him, there is no way to start! This is one of the reasons why Saudi Arabia has survived to this day.
Don't look at Saudi Arabia's national armed forces so weak, but if you really want to get in, you will definitely fall into the vast sea of people's war.
Any country that invades Saudi Arabia will have to consider the cost of rule due to extreme Wahhabi sects, tribal militants with royal hearts, and extreme desert terrain.
It doesn't taste better than Afghanistan!
But Saudi Arabia, like the Song Dynasty, is not destined to die of internal strife, but he is destined to die of external troubles.
However, the Middle East is another place that is least lacking in external troubles.
At the beginning of Saudi Arabia's founding, the first external threat it faced was Egypt.
As mentioned earlier, revolutionary ideas were rampant in the Arab world at that time, and Egypt was the revolutionary center of the Arab world.
Egypt's ** Nasser was a well-deserved leading big brother in the Arab world in the Middle East at that time.
Nasser's pan-Arabism, which he advocated, was very popular in the Middle East at that time.
This pan-Arabism is to demand that the entire Arab nation unite and establish a unified Arab state.
Even in 1958, Nasser even merged Yemen, Egypt and Syria into one country.
The newly-born United Arab States is like a pincer that pits Saudi Arabia between the north and the south.
At that time, the second king of Saudi Arabia, Saud, came up with a bad idea in a panic.
He went so far as to bribe a Syrian officer to assassinate Nasser while he was on patrol.
But he obviously underestimated Nasser's place in the hearts of the Arab people.
After receiving the money, the Assassin turned around and ran to Nasser and sold Saoud cleanly.
As soon as this incident came out, the Arab world boiled.
I didn't expect you, the Saudi king, to be so reactionary that you even want to kill your own national hero.
This suddenly pushed Saudi Arabia to the forefront, and in order to calm down **, Saudi Arabia had to depose Saud and let his younger brother Faisal govern.
Faisal Faisal is the master of Saudi Arabia's generation, and he knows very well that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union will allow a unified power to emerge in the Middle East.
Sure enough, in the Third Middle East War in 1967, the US-backed Israel defeated Nasser's Triple Alliance in just six days.
The Soviet Union, the big financier behind Egypt, also took the opportunity to force Nasser to sign a ** treaty in an attempt to completely control Egypt.
After this battle, Nasser collapsed and finally died of depression two years later.
After his successor Anwar Sadat came to power, he began to abandon the strategy of fighting for hegemony and chose to be in a safe corner, and Egypt has since withdrawn from the ranks of the hegemony and is still a passerby to this day.
Sadat took over the hegemonic throne by Saudi Arabia, who was watching the drama from the sidelines.
The pattern of the Middle East can be summed up in one sentence, that is, the southeast, northwest and northwest chase the Central Plains.
The map of the Middle East is like a cross, with a powerful country standing in the south, east, west, and north.
Eastern Persia, Southern Saudi Arabia, Western Egypt, and Northern Turkey are sandwiched between a rich and fertile river basin.
Throughout the ages, whenever a great power rises in the southeast, northwest, and northwest, it must expand to the two river basins, take its wealth and population, and then expand its power to the other three regions.
In thousands of years of history, the four great powers of the southeast, the northwest and the northwest have all followed this path brilliantly.
For example, the Ayyubid Empire of Egypt, the Persian Empire, the Arab Empire, and the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
For the weak chicken Saudi, his first task is to prevent this kind of history from repeating itself.
And for the foreign powers, they also need to prevent this from happening.
From this point of view, Saudi Arabia naturally has the basis for cooperation with foreign powers!
After Egypt withdrew, the only threats to Saudi Arabia at that time were Turkey in the north and Iran in the east.
Iran was under the rule of the Pahlavi dynasty at the time, and its relations with Saudi Arabia were quite harmonious, and it had no intention of competing for hegemony in the Middle East.
As for Turkey, since the founding of the founding father Kemal, they have pursued an extreme secularist line, and they are eager to draw a clear line with these poor religious brothers in the Middle East so that they can break away from Asia and join Europe.
Turkey's founding father, Kemal, was short-lived, and in 1979, Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini launched the Islamic Revolution and established a theocratic regime.
The regime, which has legitimacy on religious expansion, has strong influence over countries such as Syria and Egypt in the valley of the two rivers, as well as Yemen in the south of Saudi Arabia.
This has once again put Saudi Arabia in the same predicament as it was in the Nasser era.
On this basis, Saudi Arabia has joined forces with the United States to blockade and suppress Iran for decades.
As Khomeini said earlier, Saudi Arabia's interests are highly consistent with those of foreign powers, and they don't like the emergence of a Middle Eastern power that is competing with the Central Plains.
In the past, when facing Egypt, which held high the banner of nationalism, Saudi Arabia was still secretive.
But when it comes to Shiite Iran, Saudi Arabia no longer has any scruples and exposes the face of his leading party.
With the support of the United States, Saudi Arabia has indeed been the leading big brother in the Middle East for decades.
But this kind of leading brother is really a shame in the Middle East.
Because he is essentially no different from a puppet, he simply cannot represent the interests of the broad masses of people in the Middle East.
On the contrary, he is also the ** of those extraterritorial powers that exploit the people of the Middle East.
After talking about the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the major countries in the Middle East, let's talk about the relationship between Saudi Arabia and foreign powers.
This is the core of all the survival logic of Saudi Arabia.
As for this extraterritorial power, the first one to recommend is, of course, the United States.
The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a long story.
As early as the time of Ibn Saud, American oil companies were already operating in Saudi Arabia, but at that time neither side looked at it.
Ibn believes that it is impossible for these Westerners to dig oil out of the sand.
If you have this effort, you might as well help me dig a few more wells.
The Americans feel that Saudi Arabia is poor and backward and has no use value, and even if a large oil field is discovered later, they do not think much of Saudi Arabia.
At that time, the pawn used by the United States to counterbalance the Arab world was Israel.
But as soon as they used it, the Americans found that something was wrong, and Israel was able to fight without pretense, and basically won every battle.
But the harder Israel wins, the tighter the Arab world hugs the polar bear's thighs.
In fact, this was also Stalin's calculation when he supported the establishment of the state of Israel.
The Americans found that if they wanted to take the Middle East into their pockets, they had to raze it.
And after looking around for a week, the United States finally chose Saudi Arabia.
As mentioned earlier, the United States has always ignored Saudi Arabia, and the reason for its sudden turn is also due to the first oil crisis.
In the third Middle East war in 1973, the United States provoked the Arab world by disregarding its face.
After Saudi Arabia led the Gulf oil states to sanction the West, the United States suddenly discovered that in addition to Egypt, the thorn in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia can also make a statement!
It just so happened that at that time, the United States, because of the collapse of the Bretton system, was questioned by the whole world, and urgently needed to find an anchor outside the **, and oil was the best choice.
So Nixon sent Kissinger to Saudi Arabia and established a secret oil-for-security treaty with him.
As Nixon said earlier, Saudi Arabia, like the Northern Song Dynasty, was destined not to die in civil strife, but in the invasion of foreign enemies.
The Northern Song Dynasty could exist for more than a hundred years because of the alliance with the Liao State, which helped him avoid external threats from the north and make up for the last link in the survival logic of the Song Dynasty.
Once the Liao State was destroyed and the Northern Mongolia and Jin States rose, the Great Song Dynasty, which was destined to die from external troubles, was not far from death.
The same is true for Saudi Arabia.
In 1974, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Saudi Arabia signed a petrodollar for security treaty, which is Saudi Arabia's alliance with Saudi Arabia.
It is with the help of the United States, such as Saddam, Muammar Gaddafi and Iran, countries that seek hegemony in the Middle East, that Kissinger will be cut down one by one.
It is precisely because of the protection of the United States that Saudi Arabia can avoid being touched by foreign powers such as the Soviet Union, Britain and France.
Of course, Saudi Arabia will not really hang itself on the big tree of the United States.
Over the years, Saudi Arabia has been the leader of the wrongs and has taken turns throwing money to buy arms among the P5, do you think he is really a stupid person with a lot of money?
People are just paying protection money in disguise!
By throwing money everywhere, Saudi Arabia has a good relationship with the other four permanent members.
It is estimated that in today's world, there is no major country that cannot think of rectifying Saudi Arabia.
In addition, Saudi Arabia also has a big guaranteed card, that is, his sword-bearing guard Pakistan.
It is said on the Internet that China and Pakistan are iron brothers, but in fact, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are really iron.
Pakistan's financial crises every year have been all about Saudi Arabia taking real money ** and hanging on to him.
The United States has tried to impose financial sanctions on Pakistan several times because of its disobedience, but each time it has been Saudi Arabia shouting that the knife will keep people.
And Saudi Arabia is so good to Pakistan, naturally because Pakistan is the only Muslim country with nuclear **.
After India's nuclear explosion that year, Pakistan became nuclear overnight.
If Iran completes its nuclear test in the future, this miracle will be 100% repeated in the "big dog".
At that time, Saudi Arabia will be able to protect itself even if it does not rely on the support of foreign powers.
Saudi Arabia actually very much wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, so that he can naturally have nuclear weapons.
Therefore, on the Iranian nuclear issue, Israel cried, made trouble and hanged himself, while Saudi Arabia's attitude was extremely ambiguous.
All in all, although Saudi Arabia is weak, he has a lot of cards in his hand, and he is not as easy to bully as everyone thinks.
This article was originally written by "Literature and History", and has been opened for rights protection on the whole network.