Events in Egypt and Syria have heightened the tensions inherent in Saudi Arabia’s counterintuitive and often ambiguous attitude toward Islamist groups, according to Jon B. Alterman and William McCants. Jon Alterman directs the Middle East Program and holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at CSIS. William McCants is a fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he also directs its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. Alterman and McCants explained how the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the dilemmas of Saudi policy toward Syria have affected Saudi leaders’ policies toward domestic Islamists during a Gulf Roundtable entitled “Islamists Rising and Falling: A View from Saudi Arabia,” at CSIS on April 14, 2014.
