What does Saudi Arabia want from the Iran war? Will it join the fray?

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RIYADH – For Saudi Arabia, being caught in the middle of the war between Iran and its archfoes Israel and the US is the realisation of a nightmare scenario the kingdom has long dreaded.

The country, which sees itself as the economic and political leader of the Arab world and a beacon for Muslims everywhere, has long regarded Iran as a rival – and as a threat, one the previous Saudi king repeatedly asked the US to take on.

But after the US did just that, Saudi Arabia has been alarmed to find itself dragged into the fight.

Iran has lobbed missiles and drones at the kingdom and battered its oil-based economy through its throttling of the Strait of Hormuz. 

How did the Saudis position themselves in the run-up to the war?

Weeks before the war, as diplomatic talks between Iran and the US appeared to be on shaky ground and US President Donald Trump raised the spectre of military action, Saudi officials went out of their way to assure their Iranian counterparts that they would not allow the kingdom’s territories and airspace to be used to attack the Islamic Republic.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Salman made such a commitment to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in a phone call on Jan 28.

Riyadh’s wealthy neighbours Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) did the same. 

How is the war affecting Saudi Arabia? 

Despite their pre-war diplomatic efforts, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE – plus Bahrain and Kuwait – have been pummelled by more than 5,000 Iranian drones and missiles since the start of hostilities, resulting in some 30 deaths so far across Gulf Arab states.

While the UAE has borne the brunt of these attacks, Iranian projectiles have struck vital Saudi oil fields and refineries in its Eastern Province, the Diplomatic Quarter in the heart of Riyadh, and the US Prince Sultan Airbase near the capital, among other targets. 

Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz – a vital route for exports of oil, gas and other commodities from the Persian Gulf – has compromised Saudi Arabia’s ability to gets its crude to market.

If Iran continues to control Hormuz and makes good on its threat to disrupt another vital chokepoint, the Bab El-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, it would spell disaster for Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter.

Bab El-Mandeb is now being used as a route for picking up Saudi oil flows from the Red Sea port of Yanbu in the west of the kingdom.

The Saudis are sending several million barrels a day of crude there from their eastern fields via a pipeline.

A further complication may be Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants, who on March 28 launched their first attacks of the war on Israel. The group previously brought shipping in the Red Sea to a near-halt.

Will Saudi Arabia enter the war?

Saudi Arabia has so far held back from military retaliation against Iran, fearing it would expose the kingdom to even greater aggression. But its patience appears to be wearing thin.

In the strongest remarks from a Saudi official so far, Prince Faisal Bin Farhan, the foreign minister, warned Iran on March 19 that his country and its regional partners possess “very significant capacities and capabilities that they could bring to bear”.

He said the “little trust” rebuilt with Iran after diplomatic ties between the two nations were restored in 2023 “has been completely shattered”, adding that continued aggression would leave “almost nothing” to salvage in the relationship.

Two days later, following a drone strike on Yanbu, the country’s authorities expelled Iran’s military attache, his assistant and three other Iranian diplomats. 

According to people with knowledge of the situation, Riyadh has told the US privately that it will respond with military action if Iran attacks its power and water infrastructure as it said it would if President Trump makes good on his threat to strike Iranian electric facilities. 

What war outcome is Saudi Arabia looking for?

While the Saudi leadership does not believe regime change in Iran is a realistic goal, it is supportive of muscular US action to reopen Hormuz and diminish Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities as well as its ability to project power through proxy militias, according to two Gulf people familiar with Saudi thinking.

Saudi Arabia, however, will continue to tread cautiously, experts say.

“Saudis have little confidence that this war will decisively eliminate the Iranian threat, or that the US, which bears responsibility for starting the current conflict, will protect the Saudis from Iranian attacks. That is especially true if Saudi Arabia were to become more directly involved,” Mr Michael Ratney, former American ambassador to the kingdom, wrote in a commentary for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“When the dust settles from the current conflict, their best-case scenario is an Iran run by a weakened version of the same Islamic Republic that has ruled the country since 1979, hopefully with the capacity and inclination to export revolution much diminished.”

Why are Iran and Saudi Arabia rivals?

Enmity and mistrust between the Arabs and the Persians native to Iran date back to the dawn of Islam, which originated in the 7th century in Mecca and Medina, both of which are located in modern-day Saudi Arabia.

After Iran adopted Islam as its official religion in the 16th century, through the founding of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and until the present day, the relationship has oscillated between collaboration and estrangement.

Most Saudis belong to the Sunni branch of Islam, whereas most Iranians belong to the rival Shi’ite branch.

There was significant cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 1970s. By the end of that decade, the Saudis were attempting to conclude a security agreement for the Gulf region that included Iran.

Relations took a sharp turn for the worse when Iran’s monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was toppled in 1979.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, establishing a Shi’ite theocratic regime and championing a brand of revolutionary Islam that posed a direct threat to the religious legitimacy of the Saudi kingdom and its ruling Al Saud dynasty. The relationship became adversarial in the subsequent decades. 

There tends to be a lot of focus on the idea that Iran, an Islamic theocracy, and Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, are vying against one another for leadership of the Muslim world. But their rivalry in recent years has crystallised more around two competing visions for the Middle East.     

Crown Prince Mohammed, 40, who has launched an economic and social transformation plan known as Vision 2030, has said he wants to move the region away from conflict to focus on development and prosperity.

The region would remain strongly allied to the US and would integrate Israel, normalising ties with it under the right conditions. It is a conception also championed by Mr Trump, with whom MBS, as the Saudi leader is known, has built deep ties. 

On the other hand, Iran, under the leadership of the late 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and now his son Mojtaba, has remained committed to armed resistance to Israel and its backers, chiefly the US.

Its leaders conceive of a region free from what it calls American and Israeli hegemony – be it military, cultural or economic – and wants a greater role for powers such as China and Russia. Tehran is using this vision to frame the current war. 

Iran is hoping to convince “Gulf states that the US bases are not really there to protect them; they’re there to wage war against Iran and invite war on the Gulf,” Professor Vali Nasr at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies told Bloomberg Weekend in mid March.

“They’re hoping that when this war ends, it will problematise the US presence in the region.”

So far, Iran’s strategy is having the opposite effect on most Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. 

How has the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia played out over the years?

In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia backed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran.

After the US overthrew Saddam in 2003, Iran worked to build its influence, largely through a network of allied governments and proxy militias in countries including Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria and Yemen. 

According to leaked US diplomatic cables, at one point the then-Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, repeatedly urged the US to “cut off the head of the snake” by launching military strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme, which the US and its allies have long worried could be used to build atomic weapons.

Riyadh severed its diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2016. They were only reestablished in 2023 in a deal brokered by China.   

Both sides have in the past traded accusations of seeking to destabilise each other from within.

Riyadh has previously charged Tehran with seeking to radicalise Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and in neighbouring Bahrain, while Iran has pointed the finger at the kingdom for its alleged support for ethnic Arab separatists in its coastal Ahvaz region.    

But the military and political dimension of the rivalry has played out particularly through proxies and the backing of opposing factions and governments throughout the Middle East.

In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia has openly accused Iran and its proxy Hezbollah of being behind the 2005 assassination of its ally, former prime minister Rafic Hariri, to take over the country and neutralise Riyadh’s influence.

In Syria, the two sides competed for decades to win over the Assad family regime; the struggle culminated in Saudi Arabia’s favour when the Iran-backed Bashar Al-Assad was ousted at the end of 2024 by Islamists now being supported by the kingdom. 

The struggle closest to home for Saudi Arabia was in Yemen, where MBS launched a war in early 2015 against the Iran-backed Houthis, who had overthrown the government in Sanaa.

At the time, Prince Mohammed openly framed the war in Yemen as a battle to push Iran out of the Arab world. But his failure to oust the Houthis culminated in a ceasefire agreement with the group, and it was the main motivation for the 2023 deal to re-establish ties with Tehran. 

Before the Oct 7, 2023 attack by the Iran-backed Palestinian group Hamas on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, MBS was on the cusp of a defence deal with the US that would have also included normalisation of ties with Israel.

Afterward, Prince Mohammed moved in favour of fostering better ties with Iran while also seeking to deepen relations with other regional powers such as Pakistan and Turkey in order to counter what experts say is Saudi concern over Israeli hegemony.

The current war, especially Iran’s attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, is likely to reorder the kingdom’s priorities once again. BLOOMBERG