Trump’s decision to join Israel in waging war on Iran marked the nadir of a steadily deteriorating Saudi-U.S. security relationship. The decision was made despite the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s repeated attempts to prevent it; nor do the decision-makers appear to have considered the consequences for Saudi Arabia’s security. And even though the war has now led the Houthis in Yemen to resume their attacks on Saudi Arabia, Trump has so far resisted Saudi requests to strike them.
For two decades, Saudi Arabia has been trying without success to solve a persistent security predicament. The geopolitical interests that once bound it to the United States have slowly but progressively diverged. This has left the Kingdom with a partner that is no longer reliable and whose wars risk entrapping it. As the Saudis have tried to address the problem, their solutions have swung like a pendulum between seeking closer relations with the Americans (a binding defense treaty) and reducing its dependency on them (by diversifying its security partners). The current war is unlikely to stop this oscillation. Instead it will intensify and quicken the swings.
The 2003 Iraq War changed this security arrangement, creating a predicament that Saudi Arabia has since struggled to resolve. The war signaled that the U.S. role in the region had shifted from preserving the status quo to disrupting it.
The war has in fact caused direct damage to Saudi Arabia. The waves of missile and drone attacks from Iran and its allies in Iraq in the first few weeks of the war comprise the largest assault that Saudi Arabia’s military and oil facilities have ever faced. Saudi GDP in the second quarter of this year was 4.8% lower than in the same period last year. The decline would have been even worse had the government not spent some $202.6 billion in the first half of this year, 15.4% more than it spent in the first half of 2025.
More importantly, the war ended the 2022 de facto ceasefire between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen. In July, the Houthis announced that they would bar Saudi vessels from passing through the strait of Bab al-Mandeb. They followed that announcement by successfully occupying the Red Sea coast up to the strait, increasing their capacity to act against seaborne traffic passing through. Meanwhile, they constantly escalated their attacks against Saudi vital infrastructure facilities. On Sept. 10, Iraqi militias joined them in attacking the East-West pipeline that carries Saudi oil from the Gulf to the Red Sea, forcing its shutdown.
While these developments are dramatic and unprecedented in Saudi history, they do not change the basic security predicament the Kingdom has found itself in since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Before 2003, Saudi Arabia relied on an unofficial but reliable security partnership with the United States to protect itself against both Iran and Iraq. The United States provided two things. First, it sold more advanced and sophisticated air defenses and air fighters to Saudi Arabia, making it the strongest air power among the three countries. Second, the United States intervened militarily to protect the status quo, as it did when Iraq invaded Kuwat in 1990, and has since then maintained a semi-permanent deterrent military infrastructure presence in the Gulf region.
The 2003 Iraq War changed this security arrangement, creating a predicament that Saudi Arabia has since struggled to resolve. The war signaled that the U.S. role in the region had shifted from preserving the status quo to disrupting it. From 2007 onward, American interventionism gave way to a strategic commitment to minimal involvement and a pivot to Asia. That commitment was interrupted only by ad hoc bursts of engagement in response to regional developments, from the rise of ISIS to the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Additionally, the American invasion of Iraq paradoxically led to the expansion of Iranian influence in the region at the expense of Saudi Arabia. It removed Iraq as a regional counterweight to Iran and turned it into an arena of competition. Iran seized the opportunity and established its dominance in Iraq through a coalition of Shia political and militia allies. At the same time, Iran’s power was growing in Syria. When the weaker Bashar al-Assad succeeded his powerful father as president in 2000, the Iranian-Syrian security partnership shifted decisively in Tehran’s favor. In Lebanon, Iran’s ally Hezbollah gradually filled the power vacuum left by the 2005 assassination of Saudi ally Rafik Hariri and Syria’s forced withdrawal that followed.
It is all of these changes that have prompted the Saudi search for new security arrangements. Riyadh tried at first to seek a formal, legally binding defense treaty with the United States, one that includes a NATO-style Article 5 commitment, as a way to reconcile the two countries’ diverging interests and offset the incoherence of U.S. policy in the region. Since concluding a treaty meant involving the Senate, both Trump and Biden administrations preconditioned it on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel. The Saudis came closest to achieving this in the period just before the October 7 attacks, when Crown Prince Mohammed ibn Salman told Fox News that “every day we get closer” to normalization with Israel.
Meanwhile the Saudis have sought to diversify security partnerships and reduce sole reliance on the United States. This effort has taken various forms. One was to deepen partnerships with America’s European allies. Yet accusations of human rights violations in the war in Yemen and the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have made these countries even less reliable than the United States and more susceptible to domestic pressure.
The current war has proved that Saudi air power supremacy and expensive air defense capabilities are either very costly or inadequate to meet the challenge of low-cost drones and missiles.
Between 2015 and 2022, Saudi Arabia also explored diversifying its security partnerships with America’s two great-power rivals, Russia and China. This attempt proved futile as well. China made clear that it had no interest in playing this role, and Russia’s protracted war in Ukraine since 2022 showed that it could not replace the United States.
When neither European partners nor great powers proved viable, Saudi Arabia began cultivating ties with Arab and Muslim-majority middle powers, chiefly Turkey, NATO’s largest Muslim-majority member; Pakistan, the only Muslim-majority nuclear power; and Egypt, which has the largest and most powerful Arab military. This trend culminated in bilateral and multilateral defense agreements that have nonetheless so far failed to provide the security Saudi Arabia needs.
The current war has proved that Saudi air power supremacy and expensive air defense capabilities are either very costly or inadequate to meet the challenge of low-cost drones and missiles. It has also shown that the 1990s U.S. military infrastructure in the region has shifted from a deterrence asset to a burden. The more exposed Saudi Arabia becomes, the more urgently it will swing between solutions that have so far failed.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
