Less than five months ago, Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal offered a confident defense of Saudi Arabia’s strategy of restraint. Riyadh, he argued, did not need to answer every attack with force. Its real strength lay precisely in its refusal to be drawn into a regional war: Saudi Arabia could see the bigger picture, absorb provocations and deny its adversaries the power to choose when and where the next war would begin.
Now that argument has reached an unmistakable turning point. The same prince, the longtime head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence apparatus and a former ambassador to the United States, is saying something fundamentally different: “Restraint is no longer applicable.”
That is more than a change in rhetoric. It raises a difficult question about the strategy itself. If restraint was once presented as evidence of Saudi strength and strategic wisdom, what does it mean when one of its most prominent advocates concludes that restraint has run its course? The answer may reveal the limits of a policy that succeeded in keeping Saudi Arabia out of a major war but failed to convince its adversaries that continued pressure would carry a cost.
Between those two statements lies a story larger than a change of mind by one man. It is the story of a severe test for a theory that has shaped an important dimension of Saudi regional policy in recent years.
In May, Prince Turki wrote in Arab News that Riyadh had to endure the “pain inflicted by the neighbor” in order to protect the lives and property of Saudi citizens. He said the kingdom had the ability to retaliate against Iran and strike its facilities and interests but had refrained because doing so could lead to a war involving the destruction of Saudi oil facilities and desalination plants, as well as loss of life. He presented this choice as a sign of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s wisdom and foresight.
It was a comprehensive defense of the theory of strategic restraint: not every decision to refrain from retaliation is weakness, and not every military response is strength. Sometimes the real victory stems from preventing your adversary from deciding where and when the battle will take place.
In principle, this is a reasonable argument. But the problem begins when restraint shifts from a temporary tactic into a policy that an adversary can predict and then build its own actions around. That is precisely what Prince Turki’s new statements invite us to consider.
In his latest interview with Arab News, Faisal reiterated that restraint had been a feature of Saudi policy since the days of King Abdulaziz, but that times had changed. With the Houthis expanding their military operations against Saudi territory, along with attacks by Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces and earlier Iranian attacks, he concluded that restraint was no longer applicable. This is not an off-hand remark.
The immediate question it raises is this: If restraint is no longer applicable today, what happened to the theory that, only months ago, was presented as evidence of the success of Saudi policy? Did Iran change, or did Saudi Arabia’s assessment of its behavior change? And did the Houthis, who are now pushing Riyadh beyond its policy of restraint, suddenly emerge as a problem, or had they been part of the same problem all along?
The truth is that Prince Turki himself leaves little room for ambiguity when it comes to Iran and the Houthis. In another article in June, he called on Iran to abandon its ambitions for regional hegemony and placed the Houthis, Hezbollah and Iraqi armed groups within a network of militias linked to Tehran. In his new interview this month, he went further, linking Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz to what the Houthis are doing in the Bab el-Mandeb, and saying he was confident that they had not undertaken their latest move without Iranian support and encouragement. Here lies the central contradiction.
If these fronts are interconnected in this way, it is difficult to separate them during a period of restraint. The problem was not simply how to avoid a war with Iran, but also whether avoiding direct confrontation gave Tehran room to use lower-cost tools that offered greater deniability.
In other words, a policy of restraint may have prevented a major war, but it did not prevent the accumulation of smaller wars. That is the fundamental weakness of the long-held approach.
Deterrence is not measured only by the number of wars a state has avoided. It is also measured by whether an adversary has become more or less willing to test its limits. If an adversary knows that you do not want war regardless of the provocations, the virtue of restraint can gradually become strategic information that is used against you.
This does not mean Saudi Arabia should have gone to war with Iran. That is not a conclusion supported by the facts, and the cost of direct confrontation—as Prince Turki himself wrote—could be enormous. But it does mean there is a difference between avoiding war and creating deterrence, and Saudi policy may have succeeded at the former more than the latter.
Indeed, Prince Turki’s articles over the past several months show this evolving understanding.
In May, restraint was presented as evidence of wisdom and success.
In June, Iran was urged to abandon its regional network of militias, and the need to confront the sources of instability was discussed explicitly.
In August, in discussing the Mecca defense alliance among Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, the rhetoric shifted more toward building power and alliances and establishing new defense arrangements.
Then came October and the clearest statement yet: restraint is no longer applicable.
Thus, in the space of roughly five months, the rhetoric shifted from quietly commending Saudi Arabia’s ability to absorb continued strikes while avoiding war, to seeking new defense alliances, and then to declaring that the period of absorbing attacks has ended.
There is another paradox. In May, one of the arguments for not retaliating was that if Saudi Arabia entered a war with Iran, it would play into an Israeli effort to push Riyadh and Tehran into conflict. Prince Turki explicitly said Saudi Arabia had prevented such a scenario by staying out.
Today, his assessment of the threat is markedly different. He no longer sees Israel alone at the top of the threat hierarchy. Instead, he says Iran and Israel have become equal threats to the security and stability of the region, explaining that his assessment had been different eight or 10 months earlier.
This may be the most consequential shift in his entire argument. The issue is no longer framed as a dispute with Iran that could be resolved through the Beijing agreement or Chinese diplomacy. Rather, according to his new description, Iran represents a regional threat on a par with Israel.
Even the Beijing agreement appears less solid today than it did when it was signed. “Trust in Iran must be earned through actions that demonstrate that Iran deserves to be trusted,” Prince Turki says, adding that China, as the sponsor of the Saudi-Iranian agreement, must play its part. In other words, the question has shifted from how to preserve the reconciliation to whether Iran can prove that the reconciliation deserves to be trusted in the first place. And that brings us to the heart of the reassessment now required.
One might still argue that Saudi restraint was not, in itself, a mistake. It gave the kingdom years of relative peace, protected its economic activity from open warfare and afforded it considerable diplomatic space. Yet every strategy has an expiration date, particularly when an adversary learns its limits.
The problem is not that Riyadh exercised restraint. The problem may be that it placed too much faith in the idea that restraint would produce reciprocal restraint from the other side. That did not happen to the extent required.
According to Prince Turki’s account, Iran has not abandoned its network of armed allies. The Houthis have not become an ordinary Yemeni political movement. Iraqi armed factions have not disappeared. And the threat to maritime corridors has shifted from Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb, while drones and missiles have blurred the line between war and peace.
The phrase “restraint is no longer applicable,” therefore, should not be dismissed as a mere rhetorical hardening. In part, it is an acknowledgment that the previous theory has reached its limits.
A policy that, only months ago, was judged by its ability to help Saudi Arabia absorb strikes without being drawn into war now requires a different measure of success: Can it prevent the next strike in the first place? The challenge lies at the intersection of risk management and deterring the source of the risk.
Saudi Arabia has largely mastered the first strategy in recent years: de-escalation, reconciliation, dialogue with Iran, engagement with Washington and Beijing, and avoidance of costly wars. But recent developments raise a legitimate question about the second.
Deterrence, in the end, is not what a state says about its ability to respond, but what its adversary believes about its actual willingness to use that ability. And when one of the most prominent defenders of Saudi Arabia’s policy of restraint says that restraint itself “is no longer applicable,” the issue is no longer merely a change in language. It is a policy reassessment that warrants serious attention.
Riyadh may find that the question it faces in the next phase is not whether to abandon diplomacy. There is no indication of that, and the crown prince himself has said he will continue efforts at de-escalation while retaining the right to respond to threats.
Rather, the question is this one, and it is harder: How do you move from a policy that prevents war to one that also prevents an adversary from believing that avoiding war means accepting attacks? That is the new test.
Diplomacy without power can be tested, while power without diplomacy can leave Saudi Arabia in a state of neither war nor peace. Between the two lies deterrence. And judging from Prince Turki al-Faisal’s own words, Riyadh appears to have discovered that restraint alone is not deterrence.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
