E' la valutazione del BND, l'intelligence tedesca, contenuta in un documento che è stato inoltrato ad alcuni giornalisti. Secondo quanto riportato dal New York Times l'attuale leadership saudita, in particolare il giovane ministro della Difesa, mirerebbe ad espandere la propria reputazione all'interno del mondo arabo estendendo la propria influenza sull'area:

The memo was sent to selected German journalists on Wednesday. In it, the foreign intelligence agency, known as the BND, offered an unusually frank assessment of recent Saudi policy.
“The cautious diplomatic stance of the older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention,” said the memo, which was titled “Saudi Arabia — Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation” and was one and a half pages long.
The memo said that King Salman and his son Prince Mohammed bin Salman were trying to build reputations as leaders of the Arab world.
Since taking the throne early this year, King Salman has invested great power in Prince Mohammed, making him defense minister and deputy crown prince and giving him oversight of oil and economic policy. The sudden prominence of such a young and untested prince — he is believed to be about 30, and had little public profile before his father became king — has worried some Saudis and foreign diplomats.
Prince Mohammed is seen as a driving force behind the Saudi military campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, which human rights groups say has caused thousands of civilian deaths. […]

 

In its memo, the BND said that Saudi rivalry with Iran for supremacy in the Middle East, as well as Saudi dependency on the United States, were the main drivers of Saudi foreign policy.
The Saudi-Iranian rivalry plays out throughout the region, the memo said, most recently and strikingly in the Saudi military intervention in Yemen. There, it said, “Saudi Arabia wants to prove that it is ready to take unprecedented military, financial and political risks in order not to fall into a disadvantageous position in the region.”
In Syria, Saudi Arabia’s aim was always to oust President Bashar al-Assad, and that has not changed, the memo said.
But it suggested that the recent shift in Saudi leadership has added new factors in the Middle East. “The concentration of economic and foreign policy power on Mohammed bin Salman contains the latent danger that, in an attempt to establish himself in the royal succession while his father is still alive, he could overreach with expensive measures or reforms that would unsettle other members of the royal family and the population,” the memo observed, adding, “That could overstrain the relations to friendly and above all to allied states in the region.” […]