Why it’s unlikely that Saudi Arabia wanted the US to bomb Iran

A report in the Washington Post the day after the Iran war began suggested that Saudi Arabia and Israel had both lobbied Donald Trump to attack Iran. The Saudis swiftly denied that they had pushed for war.

In the days since, as Iran lashed out in retaliation, Saudi Arabia came under attack. An Iranian drone hit the US embassy in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and an oil processing plant at Ras Tanura was targeted. Two people were killed on March 8 after a projectile fell on a residential area in Al-Kharj city, near an airbase used by the US military.

My academic and civil society contacts in Saudi Arabia expressed deep scepticism of the idea that Saudi Arabia had pushed the US to bomb Iran. The attacks go against everything that the Saudis have been doing for the past few years, when long-simmering tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia had begun to thaw.

Heated history

Iran and Saudi Arabia have a long and complex history. Saudi Arabia is an overwhelmingly Arab, Sunni state, while Iran is a mainly Persian, Shia state.

Tensions between the two rivals came to a head in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Iran’s new leader, Ayatolloh Ruhollah Khomeini, began to criticise the Saudis, saying they were unfit to be the custodians of the two holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina. That antagonised the Saudis, who tried to diminish the credibility of the new Islamic Republic

Iran then began to provide support to groups across the region who wished to change the status quo, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. For the Saudis, this attempt to undermine regional order fuelled the antagonism.

In the early 1990s, after the death of Khomeini, more political space opened up and tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran eased. But after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, relations deteriorated. Iraq descended into a civil war, with Iran and Saudi Arabia supporting different groups in the conflict.

By 2010, diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks revealed Saudi King Abdullah had repeatedly pushed the US to strike Iran’s nuclear capabilities, urging the Americans to “cut off the head of the snake”. In 2016, the two countries cut off diplomatic relations after an attack on the Saudi embassy in Iran following the execution of a Saudi Shia cleric.

An era of rapprochement

Ever since a deal struck in 1945 between US President Franklin D Roosevelt and the Saudi King Abdul Aziz Al Saud on an aircraft carrier, Saudi Arabia has relied on the US for its security.

But after an attack using Iranian-made drones and cruise missiles in September 2019 against oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia, the Saudis became worried that they couldn’t rely purely on the Americans. The Houthi rebel group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but subsequent investigations by the UN said they were not involved.

Iran denied allegations it was behind the attacks. The US did deploy air and missile defence forces to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the attacks, but the muted response still led to a dramatic change in Saudi Arabia’s approach to regional politics.

At the same time, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) realised that if Saudi Arabia wanted to enact its domestic reforms, in particular the ambitious Vision 2030 transformation, the country needed investor confidence and – crucially – regional stability. That meant a move away from comments, such as those by MBS in 2018, likening Iran’s supreme leader to Hitler.

A softening of Saudi rhetoric on Iran began, and back channel dialogue opened up. Then, in April 2021, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Iran sat down in the Iraqi capital Baghdad for talks, followed two years later by a Chinese-brokered normalisation deal signed in Beijing.

The two countries reopened embassies and started diplomatic initiatives, expressing joint statements in support for each other and carrying out joint military drills. All of this pointed to a thawing in relations – until the new Iran conflict began.

Iran conflict

With the arrival of a US armada in the Gulf in recent months, the Saudis and their Gulf neighbours would have expected another attack on Iran was imminent. But they don’t want a destabilised Iran.

Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hossein experienced a terrible, violent period of instability that did not improve the region’s political, social or economic conditions, or encourage investment – all things the Gulf’s leaders hanker after. The US killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khameini in the hope that it would facilitate some type of peaceful transformation will seem like a huge gamble to Gulf leaders at a delicate time in their political trajectories.

If the perception in Iran is that Saudi Arabia has been pushing for war, it could start to pull the US and Saudi Arabia closer together. There is some anger from the Saudis too, however, that the Americans have not done more to protect them. A Saudi analyst told Al Jazeera that America had abandoned it. While Gulf states have very advanced hardware, they have small militaries, and will be now worried about their own security, and about being drawn into a long regional war.

With the future of Iran still deeply uncertain, and very real potential for prolonged instability on their doorstep, Gulf states will be carefully weighing their next move. Whatever happens, Iran’s decision to bomb its neighbours will make it very difficult to rebuild the sort of the trust that had been cultivated over recent years.

This article is based on an interview Simon Mabon gave to The Conversation Weekly podcast, published on March 5.

Simon Mabon receives funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Henry Luce Foundation. He is a Senior Research Fellow with The Foreign Policy Centre