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How the Saudis Keep Sidestepping a Costly Role in the Iran War

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 anti-war billboard in Yemen, seen in the distance behind a Houthi machine gun, depicts President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.

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 US 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 offstage 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 US 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 underappreciated 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........

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