Saudi Arabia’s desperate situation

Last Thursday, France announced that it was sending troops, defense systems, and radar equipment to Saudi Arabia to defend key oil infrastructure. The French decision could mark a significant turning point in the ongoing conflicts involving the U.S., Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. It may also reflect shifting strategies in the long term. 

The Saudis have been desperately searching for help ever since their simmering conflict with Ansar Allah (commonly referred to as the Houthis) in Yemen flared up again over the summer. That fighting exposed Saudi weakness and the unreliable nature of the United States as a security partner.

The Saudis are paying a price for some imprudent decisions. The greatest of those errors was in being too slow to recognize that the United States—which, for all its foreign policy flaws was once a reliable strategic partner for the Saudis—was far too unstable to be relied on for security as heavily as Saudi Arabia does.

That should have been plain during the first administration of Donald Trump, when the U.S. refused to respond to Ansar Allah attacks on Saudi oil fields. That incident angered the Kingdom and did cause some reassessment of their reliance on American support. 

But it did not cause Riyadh to move quickly enough to diminish Washington’s role in their defense. Instead, Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, moved to diversify its partnerships, press forward with efforts to revise the Saudi economy with the Saudi Vision 2030 plan, and deepen the U.S. commitment to it by pursuing a nuclear program with the U.S. and cooperating with Trump’s and Joe Biden’s obsession with getting Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel.

Meanwhile, MBS was also working with Iraq and China to improve their relations with Iran. But when that effort was strained by the American and Israeli attacks in 2025 and 2026, those efforts were scuppered.

The October 7 attack took any real movement toward normalization between the Kingdom and Israel off the table. The ensuing genocide in Gaza and the rapid acceleration of settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank only affirmed that setback. 

Riyadh continued to try to play all sides as the war on Iran entered its second phase at the end of February this year, publicly and privately encouraging diplomacy while also urging the U.S. to go all in on its attack, if attack was its intention anyway. But Iranian retaliation forced Saudi Arabia to deny the use of its land and airspace for attacks on Iran once the war was a few weeks old, and Saudi Arabia has borne far less attacks than other Gulf states as a result.

That might have worked, at least for a while, but then the Saudis made a huge blunder, attacking Sana’a Airport in July to prevent the return of a Houthi delegation from Iran where they were attending the long-delayed funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in an American airstrike. 

The attack, carried out in partnership with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, seems to have been an effort to dissuade Iran from enhancing its cooperation with Ansar Allah, perhaps hoping to discourage Ansar Allah from taking a larger role in the ongoing war over the Strait of Hormuz.

Whatever their thinking, the attack backfired severely on Riyadh. Ansar Allah ended the four-year period of relative truce and began attacking Saudi positions in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They soon moved to blocking Saudi ships from crossing the Bab-al-Mandab Strait to the Red Sea. 

Finally, Ansar Allah attacked key Saudi facilities in the port city of Yanbu and disabled parts of the East-West Pipeline that had been serving Saudi Arabia as an alternative route to the Strait of Hormuz for exporting oil.

Through all of this, the United States has remained on the sidelines. When MBS directly appealed to Trump, the man who had made billions of dollars for himself and his family off his relationship with Saudi Arabia turned his back on his erstwhile business partner.

The perils of relying on corruption

Doubtless, MBS feels betrayed by and frustrated at Trump. But this is where being the most corrupt president in American history puts Trump in a situation far beyond his capabilities to address. 

Trump waffled on helping the Saudis. He initially flat out refused then changed his mind, and American troops were mobilizing and equipment being loaded to attack Ansar Allah. Likely under the weight of his advisors’ panic, he reversed himself again.

Trump had come to an understanding with Ansar Allah on the Bab-al-Mandab Strait. The U.S. would leave Ansar Allah alone if they agreed not to close the crucial chokepoint. Ansar Allah agreed with the caveat that they were still going to stop Saudi ships from passing. Trump had little choice but to quietly consent, given that he had already imperiled the global economy by striking Iran.

Worse, the war with Iran, despite Trump’s endless bombast, has been disastrous for the American military. Most of its bases in the Persian Gulf region have been destroyed or badly damaged, it is experiencing a severe shortage of interceptor missiles, and its efforts to provide safety for some ships exiting the Strait of Hormuz, though moderately successful, are extremely costly in terms of resources and people power. Those efforts are unsustainable. 

The reality is that the United States is in no position to open another front in this war. We cannot afford to help Saudi Arabia, whether Trump wants to or not. 

Despite the obvious utility closing the Bab-al-Mandab would have for Ansar Allah’s Iranian partners, this arrangement worked well for them. Iran, for its part, still benefited from pressure on Riyadh, while the Saudis still wanted to avoid direct conflict with Tehran which can do enormous damage to the Saudi infrastructure and economy at any time. 

This delicate balancing act was upset when Saudi Arabia’s miscalculation in escalating the conflict with Ansar Allah. Before, the Yemini group had to content itself with threatening traffic from its inland strongholds. 

But as the conflict expanded, Ansar Allah captured all the territory along Yemen’s southwest coast bordering the Red Sea, as well as several key towns and islands. Now, Ansar Allah fully controlled the territory around the Bab-al-Mandab. This meant that they could close the strait more completely and with less effort, in ways that would make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for opposing military forces to protect shipping or force the strait open.

But Ansar Allah understands that if it does close the strait to all traffic, other countries will be forced to act. The global economy simply cannot withstand another hit of that magnitude. So, they are content to use this as leverage rather than to act on it. 

That, however, does not mean they will ease up on Saudi Arabia. 

Saudis beg for help

It may be surprising that Saudi Arabia seems so helpless in the face of Ansar Allah’s attacks. After all, Riyadh has a large military, and it has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of American technology and weaponry over the years.

Saudi Arabia is hampered by its own nature. Its military, though large, is deployed in ways designed to ensure the regime’s security in power. The national guard is, in many ways, a check on the military. The entire system is meant to deter attacks and ensure that the military cannot stage a coup, not to engage in fighting. 

The military purchases Saudi Arabia makes are also largely intended to deter outside attack and are often calculated not on the basis of strategic needs but rather as a means of ingratiating the kingdom to more powerful countries like the United States. 

The result is a military that is considerably less than the sum of its parts. After a decade of fighting Ansar Allah, and even with the assistance of numerous allies, including the U.S., Saudi Arabia has been unable to defeat the group. Some of that is due to Ansar Allah’s sophistication and mastery of asymmetric warfare and its clever deployment of the assistance it gets from its more powerful partner, Iran.

But a good deal of Riyadh’s disadvantage stems from its need to use its military within the state rather than against outside threats and its reliance on allies to come to its aid when needed.

Alternatives to the Americans have not jumped to Saudi Arabia’s defense, but there are some options that are taking shape.

Riyadh appealed to Israel for help with intelligence on Ansar Allah. It is an arena in which Israel can certainly provide aid. Yet even though it is surely in Israel’s interest to help Saudi Arabia in its fight in Yemen, the Israelis seem to be holding their aid hostage against Saudi steps toward normalizing relations. 

While it seems unlikely that Israel believes that Riyadh would agree to normalize merely in exchange for intelligence on Ansar Allah, they may think that they can convince MBS to soften his stance on what Israel would have to give to the Palestinians—which, to date, has been an “irreversible” commitment to a Palestinian state—in exchange for normalization.

Mostly, Benjamin Netanyahu is probably just trying to get whatever he can out of MBS ahead of next month’s election. 

There is also the Mecca Pact. At first, Saudi Arabia did not try to bring its partners in that deal—Türkiye and Pakistan—into the conflict with Yemen, knowing they would see it as a distant fight that doesn’t affect their interests, beyond the fact that it impacts the entire global economy.

But now, Riyadh is trying to convince the two countries to join the fight. 

Yet both Pakistan and Türkiye seem at once reluctant to get too involved but still obligated to help their Saudi ally in some capacity. The responses from the two non-Arab states have been supportive but have strongly implied that they do not intend to involve their own militaries deeply enough to risk a response from Ansar Allah or, more worrisome, from their Iranian partners.

While the United Kingdom has pledged some support to Saudi Arabia in the form of a refueling jet, that help is mostly symbolic. That leaves France’s pledge as the most substantial show of support by far to date.

The timing of this is crucial. Saudi Arabia is facing a real threat from Ansar Allah to its territory and from the entire war with Iran to its economy. It has been forced to renege on promised deliveries of oil, and its prospects for diversifying its economy through international trade and tourism have taken a huge hit.

All those threats are going to be magnified if, as many expect, the United States escalates the fighting against Iran in November after the midterm election. This probably explains why France too feels a sense of urgency around this.

Yet it remains to be seen how serious France is about helping the Saudis. Are they willing to put their own troops in harm’s way? That is unclear. The same can be said for Pakistan and Türkiye. 

It seems likely that, at some point, Israel will either get something from MBS or simply relent and help him with intelligence. It is likely that an American escalation will lead Ansar Allah to act in the Red Sea more broadly, which will force Trump’s hand.

That is an escalatory scenario that will benefit no one and will bring the entire global economy even deeper into peril and ruin. 

Like this entire war, it is absolutely avoidable. There has never been a more important moment to agitate for the complete end of this war. Iran has just offered the United States the opportunity to open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for immediately fulfilling some of its commitments under the old Memorandum of Understanding and negotiating the rest of the issues. 

It is hard to imagine Trump accepting this eminently reasonable, even generous (under the circumstances) offer, though nothing is ever out of the question with Trump. 

But that is exactly why allies all over the world, and people across the globe, need to raise their voice to demand an end to this senseless, pointless war.