Oil and gas moving through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and along Red Sea routes reach Europe via the Suez Canal. Any disruption there would be felt far beyond the region, in household budgets and economies across the free world. That is the everyday stake behind a question most people rarely consider: whether Saudi Arabia can withstand the pressure Iran has built against it for decades.
Despite its image as a formidable power, the Kingdom has been losing ground for years. The story began in earnest in 1979, when the Iranian revolution brought a Shi’ite revolutionary and theocratic leadership to power in a more populous neighbor, one that loathed the Sunni Kingdom. Iranian hostility was driven in part by Saudi Arabia’s long-standing suppression of its own Shi’ite minority in the south along the Yemen border, and, more critically, by the presence of Shi’ites in the very region where the Saudis produce most of their oil.
The Saudis recognized the threat early. During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, they backed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, keeping it afloat financially. The investment appeared to work: for the following decade, the exhausted Iranian mullahs and Revolutionary Guard largely refrained from attacking Saudi Arabia directly, whatever their ideological fervor. That proved to be the last time the Kingdom engaged the Iranian threat with any success, even indirectly.
What followed was a long retreat. Iran expanded its militia proxies in nearby countries, aiming to build a ring of fire around Israel and, in the long run, to turn the Gulf states into Iranian vassals paying financial tribute, in effect protection money, into Iranian coffers. Lebanon was likely the first battleground of this proxy war, and the Saudis lost. They tried in vain to mobilize the Sunni minority, alongside their Christian-Maronite counterparts, against the rising Shi’ite militias, first Amal and later Hezbollah, both backed by the Alawite Assad regime in Syria, Iran’s only Arab state ally.
For a time it seemed the Saudis had succeeded, with a government headed by the pro-Saudi Rafic Hariri, supported by the Sunni community and most of Lebanon’s Christian political forces. But the Saudis soon learned that in the Middle East, Iranian military and terrorist power would prevail over Saudi financial clout. Hariri was assassinated in 2005 in a demonstration of force on the streets of Beirut. Three years later, Hezbollah cowed the Lebanese parliament into changing the rules of the game, giving it essentially the decisive say in Lebanese government and politics. The Saudis withdrew, leaving the Lebanese population to bear the costs of the war Hezbollah initiated in 2023 against Israel in support of Hamas.
Graver losses came on the Iraqi and Yemeni fronts, both along Saudi Arabia’s long borders. When the United States removed the Hussein Sunni regime that had served as a counterweight to Iran, the Saudis tried in vain to support minority Sunni militias, possibly even ISIS, to prevent Iraq’s Shi’ite majority from consolidating power. The Iranians instead used the ISIS threat to build powerful Shi’ite militias that came to control the Iraqi political elite and state apparatus, much as they had in Lebanon. Once again, the Saudis backed off in defeat.
In Yemen, the Saudis directly confronted the Iran-backed Houthis in a six-year war that achieved little. In 2022 they sued for a truce and their air force ceased attacks, though the Kingdom continued supporting the official Yemeni government the Houthis had ousted from Sanaa, the capital, and most of Yemen’s populated areas. Now, in another regional war not of Saudi making, Houthi advances are giving the group increasing control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which much of Saudi oil and gas transits, and greater control of the Red Sea, where the Houthis could jeopardize the Kingdom’s major pipeline and the Yanbu port that exports oil to Europe through the Suez Canal.
More ominous still is the possibility of a surprise Houthi attack across Saudi Arabia’s vast and largely unpopulated south, where the population that does exist is mostly Shi’ite, and an advance along Route 10, the highway linking the south to the massive oil fields and to Riyadh. The goal would not be to seize the capital but to push far enough to threaten the oil fields and processing plants directly, forcing the Saudis to acknowledge defeat and become a tributary state of Iran and its Houthi proxy.
The United States and Israel, acutely aware that surprises in the Middle East are real, as the Hamas attack on Israel and the fall of the Assad regime demonstrated, must prevent this outcome at all costs. That means closely monitoring Houthi movements, quickly building the intelligence needed to distinguish Houthi fighters from civilians fleeing them, especially since Houthi forces may disguise themselves as civilians, and stopping the Houthis even at the price of boots on the ground. An Iran backed by Saudi financial clout would be a nightmare for the free world, a world in which only two states, the US and Israel, are both ready and able to provide protection, at least in the Middle East. Preventing the fall of Saudi Arabia is vital to protecting the free world.
The writer is a senior researcher at the JISS and professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University.