David Schenker is the Taube Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of the Linda and Tony Rubin Program on Arab Politics. He is the former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.
Simon Henderson is the Baker Senior Fellow and director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at The Washington Institute, specializing in energy matters and the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
Articles & Testimony
During the 1960s, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought an eight-year proxy war in Yemen so fierce that Egypt repeatedly deployed chemical weapons against its Saudi-backed adversaries, the Yemeni royalists.
Fifty years on, the revolutionary ideology of Egypt's former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is a distant memory, and while Cairo and Riyadh have since periodically engaged in non-lethal competition for the mantle of Arab leadership, today regional developments -- in particular the ascendance of Iran -- have conspired to bring the Sunni, pro-US authoritarian states closer.
