Why Has Saudi Arabia Suffered Less Iranian Attacks Than Gulf Neighbours? – OpEd |
Every picture tells a story. This one is quite clear. In the now region-wide war between the US-Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia has been let off the hook. The question is, why has Iran aimed only a fraction of its assault at what was once its biggest rival in the region?
Iran is sparing Riyadh the worst not because it lacks the capability but because it now has more to gain from holding back. The fragile détente brokered by China between the countries in 2023—in which they agreed to reopen diplomatic relations and stop actively sabotaging each other’s core interests, has offered benefits to both sides.
Iran, fighting on multiple fronts with a constrained drone and missile industrial base, and needing to prioritise where to spend scarce hardware and political capital, is able to conserve kinetic energy. Bludgeoning Saudi Arabia would risk blowing up a working arrangement that currently serves both sides better than open confrontation.
For Saudi Arabia, this has relieved pressure in its hostilities with the Houthis. Tehran has partially reined in its encouragement of the Houthis and the flow of arms to them that enable crossborder strikes on the Kingdom, while Riyadh has pursued direct talks with the Houthis, locking in quieter borders and fewer attacks on Saudi infrastructure.
This allows Saudi Arabia to refocus some of its spending away from security towards Vision 2030, which has made Saudi Arabia more expensive to run. Riyadh is having to bear down harder on deficits, debt and the commitments of its sovereign wealth fund to keep the project moving. Spending on gigaprojects and a thicket of national strategies has driven state expenditure sharply upwards, with costs repeatedly overshooting the glossy launchdeck assumptions.
Visionbranded budgets now bake in persistent deficits – 5.3% of GDP in 2025 and a projected 3.3% in 2026 – even after finance officials have trimmed revenue forecasts and pushed back consolidation. In practice, the leadership has accepted higher public debt and a swollen, hyperactive PIF balance sheet as the entry fee for Neomscale schemes and diversification initiatives in logistics, tourism and AI.
Softer oil prices and more erratic Aramco dividends meant the easy money that once underwrote Saudi grand projects has been no longer guaranteed, and Vision 2030’s burnrate is testing the outer limits of what the Saudi state can sensibly finance on its own.
The current spike in oil prices would certainly help the Saudis along. Iranian drones did hit the Saudi refinery at Ras Tanura, forcing a temporary shutdown of key units and underlining that energy infrastructure is not offlimits, even if Aramco insists damage is contained and operations are being restored. But for now, this looks more like a warning shot than systemic disruption, and the Saudis may yet hope for an oil price bump bonus to help it over their 2030 hump.
One way and another, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will be quietly congratulating himself on some prescient diplomacy that has diverted the brunt of Iran’s anger elsewhere in the region.