IN the desert of the north-west, a wall was meant to rise. A mirrored city, 170 kilometres long, a straight line drawn across the sand, perhaps the most ambitious vision of the future any government has ever tried to pour into concrete.
By 2026, the original vision had been dramatically scaled back. A few hundred kilometres away, another site kept moving.
Diriyah: low, ochre, mud-brick. The birthplace of the first Saudi state, rebuilt stone by stone.
The most futuristic project was scaled back. The most ancestral one advanced.
When a government is forced by its budget to choose, that choice may be the most honest sentence it ever writes about itself.
Readers in Kuala Lumpur know this debate. Malaysia had it early: Look East; the long argument with the West over "Asian values"; the continuing conversation about Islam and modernity; the question of whether a nation must borrow a civilisation to borrow a technology.
So do not read what follows simply as news from Arabia. Read it as an old Malaysian question, now being tested at giga-scale, under intense fiscal pressure and, increasingly, under fire.
The usual way of putting the question is simple: can a country modernise without becoming Western?
Cinemas, women driving since 2018, capital markets, a sovereign wealth fund and data centres while retaining the mosque, the monarchy and the family.
At the level of appearances, the answer is plainly yes. But that answer is too easy, and it concedes too much. "Modernisation without Westernisation" still places the West at the centre, as the model from which everyone else must either converge or deviate.
It measures the experiment with the very ruler that the experiment may be breaking. The sharper proposition is this: Saudi Arabia is testing whether modernity was ever as indivisible as the dominant post-war development paradigm came to assume.
For much of the post-war era, modernity was presented as a single bundle: markets, elections, individual rights, secularisation and an expanding public sphere, all load-bearing, none removable, the whole package travelling together.
The Gulf is testing whether that bundle can be unbundled. Take the fiscal reforms, women entering the workforce, tourism, capital markets, entertainment, data centres and technological ambition.
Leave political liberalisation largely on the shelf.
Recombine
The components are then reassembled under the authority of a centralised state, within a society that continues to define itself through monarchy, Islam, family and national history.
And on its own terms, enough of it is working to unsettle old assumptions. Non-oil activities now account for more than half of real GDP.
Saudi Arabia has passed the threshold of 100 million domestic and international tourist visits annually, ahead of its original timetable.
Female labour-force participation has roughly doubled since the launch of Vision 2030, exceeding the planners' initial target. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) has grown into one of the world's largest sovereign investors.
The government's own scorecards report that the overwhelming majority of programme indicators have been achieved or remain on track.
Independent readers are more measured, and rightly so. A target met is not necessarily a transformation secured; a well-monitored process can sometimes dress itself up as a structural result.
But discount the official numbers substantially and something real remains: Saudi society has changed profoundly in less than a decade.
This is the part that should interest the rest of the developing world, Malaysia included.
For much of the past seventy years, "development" meant convergence. The poorer country would gradually come to resemble the richer one. The destination was fixed; only the speed of arrival remained in question.
What Riyadh proposes instead is divergence: reaching the technological and economic frontier without necessarily arriving at the Western institutional model.
A modernity that does not end in a copy. But look again at the two building sites.
The Line embodied a modernist dream in its purest form: the clean slate, the engineered city, the machine that overcomes geography and appears to begin history again from zero.
Diriyah expresses the opposite instinct: modernity as restoration; the future built through a deepening of the past rather than an escape from it.
When fiscal constraints hardened, the Kingdom did not abandon futuristic ambition.
But it became more selective about where that ambition should reside. The mirror was deferred; the mud brick continued to rise.
That may be the most revealing thing the transformation has yet said aloud.
Made to choose, modernity chose memory
And here is the catch, the loop on which the whole story turns.
The unbundling, the divergence and the ancestral future are still financed by the very resource from which the country is attempting to gain strategic distance.
The cities intended to reduce Saudi dependence on oil are financed by oil revenues and by the sovereign capital that those revenues created.
That is not hypocrisy. Resource economies have always used the rents of the present to finance the economy of the future.
But it does create a test: can the transformation become self-sustaining before the financial, geopolitical or environmental foundations of the old model weaken?
In 2026, that question ceased to be abstract. War reached the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade normally passes. Shipping slowed sharply.
Energy security, fiscal capacity and national transformation suddenly appeared on the same map. The "post-oil" ambition acquired a date, a geography and a chokepoint.
The stress test that planners had modelled in presentations arrived in steel. The honest conclusion, therefore, is not yet a verdict.
The unbundling is real: it appears possible to adopt much of the machinery of modern economic life without importing the entire political philosophy historically associated with it.
The divergence is also real: the destination is no longer singular. That alone challenges decades of assumptions about development, modernity and who is expected to become like whom.
But whether Saudi Arabia represents a genuine alternative path, or merely an exceptionally well-funded interval, will depend on whether the new economy can ultimately outlive the rent that is paying for its construction.
That question has now moved, without warning, from the seminar room to the sea.
There is a temptation, in Kuala Lumpur as in Riyadh, to read all this as vindication: proof that the West was never the only door.
Perhaps it was not.
But a door that can remain open only because of what flows through a single strait is not yet freedom.
It is merely a lease.
The Line fell silent.
The old city rose.
The tankers waited offshore.
We will know what kind of modernity this was by which of those three sentences still holds in ten years. - July 17, 2026
Pascal H. Grégoire is a career diplomat and essayist who served as Belgium's Ambassador to Malaysia from 2018 to 2022. He is the editor of Contre-Jour and currently the ambassador of Belgium to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The views expressed here are solely his own and do not represent those of The Vibes.
