Saudi Arabia has increasingly found itself caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Now, the kingdom’s leadership is assessing dwindling options on how to respond.
In recent weeks, the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has repeatedly attacked the kingdom, threatening to throttle its ability to export oil and piling pressure on the global economy. But Saudi Arabia has been left frustrated and disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to confront the Houthis, former diplomats and analysts say.
The kingdom’s diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran have also had limited results. A meeting planned on Monday between officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries was abruptly postponed on Sunday night, as the gap between their positions remained vast.
“Right now the Saudis are really frustrated,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “In some sense it’s their worst-case scenario.”
The Saudi government’s Center for International Communication, which fields queries from journalists, did not respond to a request for comment.
The kingdom’s conundrum underscores the heavy costs that the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has imposed across the Middle East, including on countries whose leaders opposed the war or have sought repeatedly to bring it to an end.
In the first few months of the fighting, Saudi Arabia was relatively untouched by Iran’s retaliatory attacks, compared with its neighbors. Now, with no end to the hostilities in sight, Iran is seeking greater leverage over the United States, and Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest oil exporter until the war knocked it down the list — has become a primary target.
Over the past two weeks alone, Saudi Arabia has faced Iran-backed attacks from the east, the south and the north.
A Saudi oil tanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz at the end of August, killing two sailors.
On Friday, the Houthi militia, which had already declared a blockade on Saudi oil shipments through the Red Sea, seized territory on an important global shipping route and trounced Saudi-allied forces in Yemen.
The same day, the Saudi authorities announced that they had been forced to shut down a critical oil pipeline, blaming a drone attack by an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. The pipeline had become a key alternative export route for Saudi Arabia to get its oil to the Red Sea, after Iran effectively choked off the Strait of Hormuz.
“The reason a country like Saudi Arabia invests so heavily in developing a security partnership with the United States is for just this sort of eventuality,” said Mr. Ratney, the former ambassador.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the country’s de facto ruler, had reasons to be confident in that partnership. For years, his government has invested billions of dollars and extensive political capital in building personal relationships with Mr. Trump and his family.
But when the crown prince asked Mr. Trump last week to take military action against the Houthis, the president declined, according to officials with knowledge of the conversations.
Saudi officials and pundits have been clear that the kingdom does not want to fight the Houthis alone. That is especially true because an earlier military campaign that Saudi Arabia led against the group turned into a decade-long quagmire.
“This demands international support, not only from Saudi Arabia and regional countries,” Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a columnist close to the Saudi government, wrote in a Saudi-owned newspaper on Saturday.
Mr. Trump, however, appears reluctant to get involved.
“Already confronting one open-ended conflict with Iran, with an overstretched Navy and a diminishing munitions stockpile, it’s unsurprising that he does not want to open this new front,” said Dan Shapiro, a former top Middle East policy official in the Pentagon during the Biden administration. “But it is bitterly disappointing to the Saudis.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump told journalists on a trip to Ireland that the Houthis had “called us and they don’t want to fight with us.”
“There’s just one country that they’re not too happy with and we’ll get that straightened out,” he added, referring to Saudi Arabia.
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi political official, denied that the group had reached out to the United States. “We did not communicate with Trump, nor did we ask him not to attack us,” he said.
Whether the United States gets involved in Yemen is still a matter of discussion, and Washington is continuing to assist Saudi Arabia with intelligence, said Vice Admiral John W. Miller, a retired U.S. Navy commander in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia are now likely turn to diplomacy, according to Barbara Leaf, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs at the State Department. Despite years of Saudi, U.S. and Israeli bombing campaigns against the Houthis, “no one has come up with a military solution” for dealing with them, she said.
Saudi Arabia could also work with its neighbors and Iran to hammer out an “ugly set of arrangements” to bring the war with Iran to an end, she said.
The kingdom could look to China to try to find a solution, but Beijing’s previous diplomatic efforts in the region have not led to lasting peace deals, she noted. China brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023 that has since frayed.
For now, Saudi officials are unlikely to complain publicly about the United States, however frustrated they feel, analysts said.
“They’re not going to show some sort of distance,” she said. “They’re going to have to generate some other diplomatic effort.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington and Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting from Sanaa, Yemen.
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