The brutal Gulf monarchy has been cheerleading Trump's insane war off-stage but won't commit to any direct role in the conflict
An antiwar billboard in Yemen, silhouetted by a Houthi machine gun, depicts President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.(Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)
On Monday, an unhinged President Donald Trump again publicly threatened to commit war crimes by putting Iranian power plants “out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.” Even without that threat bearing out, United States and Israel continue to use their formidable militaries to deliver, in the words of Secretary of Defense and aspiring televangelist Pete Hegseth “eternal damnation” to the “wicked souls” of the Iranians who happen to be in the path of their bombs and missiles.
This climate of apocalyptic fantasy and gathering doom underlines a little-discussed feature of the Iran war: the pivotal role played by Saudi Arabia—a major U.S. ally in the Middle East and one of the world’s most lavishly funded militaries. The Saudis have spent most of the month-long conflict whispering off-stage advice to the Trump White House; their official absence from the councils of war planning is hard to explain, especially as President Trump alternately berates and begs our erstwhile NATO friends for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz—a lifeline for the Saudi oil industry—to shipping traffic.
In 2025, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent $78 billion on its military, an extraordinary figure for a country of just over 35 million people and the seventh highest spending level in the world. And since the beginning of Trump’s unprovoked war against Iran, the Saudis and their sophisticated military featuring hundreds of billions of dollars in American and European hardware have contributed next to nothing to the war effort. With Iran lobbing retaliatory attacks against Saudi assets and the entire region’s economy unraveling as a result of the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it is fair to wonder why the Saudis won’t bring their considerable firepower directly into the conflict, especially as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) urges the U.S. to escalate rather than draw down the disastrous war.
Trump might not want to hear the answers to these questions, because they go something like this: The Persian Gulf is a money pit that America continues to pour money into with virtually nothing to show for it. America’s regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, still can’t or won’t defend themselves and would prefer to sit back and watch Washington light money on fire in perpetuity while they host wartime horse races and soccer matches for the international Epstein class. Still, the Saudis enjoy outsize clout with this White House, since they—along with other regional oil autocracies—are major financial backers of Trump-endorsed and-affiliated businesses. That’s why all the behind-the-scenes Trump-whispering from Gulf oil regimes is a major and under-appreciated factor in the world-reordering fiasco unfolding in and around Iran.
There is some irony here. Claiming to have improved the geopolitical climate of the Persian Gulf has been one of Trump’s favorite hobbyhorses, ever since 2020, when he signed the business-driven Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Last May, when Trump was just months into his second term and still oozing with unearned swagger, he delivered a bizarre soliloquy in Riyadh, ranting about the size of his swing state victories in 2024 and crowing that “it is within our grasp to reach the future that generations before us could only dream about, a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation and achievement right here in the Middle East.” The hawkish Gulf watchers James Jeffrey and Elizabeth Dent hilariously argued in Foreign Affairs, the in-flight magazine for the Beltway blob, that Trump’s outburst represented “a new path to Middle East security”; they fantasized that in his far-seeing wisdom, the American president “stressed the agency of Middle Eastern countries, particularly the Gulf states and Turkey, to run their own internal affairs and play a greater role in regional security—backed, when necessary, by decisive military operations.”
Come again? Less than a year later, after Trump capriciously started the kind of Middle East war he had spent the past decade promising to avoid, where exactly are these partners and their alleged regional security chops? According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar all rank in the global top ten in military spending as a percentage of GDP. How is it possible that all of this defense spending, in combination with the world-historic might of Israel and the United States, is incapable of subduing a badly hobbled, completely isolated regional power to secure a single, narrow shipping channel? The present quagmire is likely to stretch out across a very long timeline, but one thing seems clear: we shouldn’t expect our Saudi clients in particular to do anything about it anytime soon.
Tulane University political scientist Andrew Leber told me that “there is no future in which Saudi Arabia puts boots on the ground.” He said that the country is unlikely to take on a larger military role in resolving the crisis because Iran could still escalate and strike “targets that would make this even more of a catastrophe for Saudi Arabia.” Saudi leadership is also worried, he said, that visible participation in the war effort will destroy the existing cease-fire with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
According to Yemen expert Stacey Philbrick Yadav, an international relations professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Saudis are “happy to let the U.S weaken Iran while they retain the ability to stay focused on Yemen,” where Riyadh has recently been focused on wrangling disparate factions within the internationally recognized government. The Saudis “undoubtedly favor an outcome that limits the military capabilities of both Iran and the Houthis, but may not want to spread themselves thin by doing that work themselves,” Yadav said. That’s a prudent calculation, she notes, given that past Saudi military spending has been shown to be relatively “irrelevant” to battlefield outcomes in Yemen.
Direct intervention would also put Riyadh “on the same side as Israel when MBS has maintained a careful balancing act of neither recognizing Israel nor confronting Israel too openly,” Leber said. As Galip Dalay and Sanam Vakil wrote in October, “Israeli actions have provoked such outrage across the Arab world that any form of visible alignment with Israel has become a direct threat to the legitimacy and security of regimes.”
That sums up in a nutshell the shockingly fragile regional alliance and security system the U.S. has built in the Middle East. On one side is an increasingly violent and aggressive pariah state in Jerusalem—one that’s decided its qualitative military edge grants it the right to violate the sovereignty of its neighbors at will. On the other are harshly autocratic client states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are either unwilling or unable to put their expensively equipped war machines at risk. The vaunted regional security architecture that the United States has brokered looks to be little more than elaborate flim-flam artistry. It serves the immediate aim of cloaking the Trump family’s narrow economic interests in the Gulf in the rhetoric of peacebuilding and development, but it has vanishingly little operational value.
This is largely how Saudi interests want things to play out—despite the massive global PR offensive presenting MBS as a moderation-minded apostle of peace and broadly distributed prosperity. In reality, Saudi Arabia ranks slightly worse than Iran in political freedoms; the global index maintained by the non-partisan Freedom House scores the Saudi regime a paltry 9 out of 100 on a combined measure of political and civil liberties, compared to Iran’s 10. Last year, the Kingdom executed a record 356 people, per this year’s Freedom in the World report, which notes that “many of those executed were foreign nationals convicted of nonlethal drug-related offenses.” That’s a nice way of saying that the Saudi royals are fond of murdering the indentured servants from places like Bangladesh, Pakistan and India who make up roughly half the country’s labor force. That’s the ugly reality behind what Trump fawningly called a “major business, cultural and high-tech capital of the entire world.”
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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It is virtually impossible to know what is going through the president’s rapidly decomposing mind at any given moment. But to the extent that this war is being fought partly because he believes the region’s friendly petrostates and their resource wealth need to be protected from the clerical regime in Tehran, he is also making the same expensive and self-defeating mistake that has plagued decades of American policymakers. Our military misadventures in the Gulf not only failed comprehensively on their own terms long before Trump’s Iran war; they also don’t even add up in terms of basic cost-benefit analysis. As Robert Vitalis (full disclosure: one of my dissertation advisors) wrote in his sharp-elbowed 2020 book Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy, “what taxpayers pay for the impossible-to-estimate good called energy security is roughly equal to what the world pays each year for Middle East oil and ten times higher than what U.S. refiners pay.”
Saudi Arabia’s princes and potentates have cleverly spread their wealth and talking points across countless university centers and think tanks around the United States, but not even their most ambitious propagandists could have imagined that they might have persuaded an American president to take on the task of overthrowing Iran’s government by force. What’s more, the colossal military buildup among the Gulf autocracies has proven unequal to the task of preventing Iran from shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and potentially triggering a global recession. In a strange twist of fate, it was the Trump administration’s own idiotic choices that both conjured the crisis into being and exposed the shocking inadequacy of our own force posture in the region. Most of all, the acute myopia of the White House war planners has exposed the utter weakness of allies like Saudi Arabia, whose leaders clearly are pursuing other priorities that don’t necessarily align with America’s.
The longstanding effort to prop up the Saudis as the masters of their own fate and the upholders of the regional security status quo is but the latest entry in America’s effort to endow its transactional Saudi relationship with mystic properties of regional security. On the Saudi side, the regime’s paper-tiger standing is rooted in the PR fable depicting its brutal leaders as reasonable and reform-minded modernizers.
This is why it’s particularly galling to see the Saudis and their display-window military calling for escalation from the sidelines, including an effort to convince Trump to overthrow the Iranian regime with a ground invasion if necessary. MBS has pushed Trump to “consider putting troops in Iran to seize energy infrastructure and force the government out of power” as well as a “military operation to seize Kharg Island, the hub of Iran’s oil infrastructure,” according to a March New York Times report.
This obviously insane plan sounds a lot like the kind of selfish free riding that Trump falsely claims our democratic European allies are doing in the Gulf. But Trump is glad to ignore such conduct from the Gulf monarchies, since he very much admires their pitiless despotism—even as they push for deepening an already disastrous war whose costs will be paid by others.
David FarisDavid Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Washington Monthly. You can find him on Bluesky at @davidfaris.bluesky.social.