Under Fire but at the Table: Riyadh's Diplomatic Test

Saudi Arabia’s decision to keep its diplomatic channels open while under missile attack raises a question at the heart of international law and statecraft: what does a state owe to the rules-based order when it becomes a target? The Kingdom’s answer, maintained through Houthi strikes on its airports and an earlier Iranian attack on its infrastructure, has been to remain at the negotiating table. That choice rests on a defensible legal foundation and carries consequences for how the region’s institutions and alliances function.

The legal framework is explicit. Article 51 of the UN Charter enshrines the right of self-defense, but that right is bounded. In the Nicaragua case of 1986 and the oil platforms case of 2003, the latter brought before the International Court of Justice by Iran itself, the court confirmed that self-defense must be necessary and proportionate. A state that answers attack with calibrated force, while leaving diplomatic room open, does not weaken its legal position. It strengthens it. Each proportionate response and each channel kept open adds to the record that will matter when these events are eventually judged.

The Charter goes further than permitting self-defense. Article 2(3) obliges states to settle disputes by peaceful means, and Article 33 sets out the methods: negotiation, mediation, good offices and related approaches. In much of the Middle East these provisions are treated as decoration. Saudi Arabia has made them policy. Its 2023 agreement to restore relations with Iran and its direct talks with the Houthis in Riyadh that same year were serious attempts at peaceful settlement. That those efforts were later met with missiles says more about the other side than about Riyadh.

The diplomatic record behind this posture is substantial. Over the past three years, an unusual list of visitors has passed through the Kingdom. Envoys from the two warring sides in Sudan signed a declaration on protecting civilians in Jeddah in 2023. Later that year, representatives of some 40 countries met in the same city to discuss peace in Ukraine. In February 2025, the American and Russian foreign ministers sat down together in Riyadh, the first meeting of its kind since the invasion of Ukraine. A month later, American and Ukrainian officials met in Jeddah and agreed a ceasefire proposal. A country long seen as a party to regional rivalries rather than a neutral broker had become one of the world’s busiest venues for negotiation.

That standing carries institutional weight. A state that both sides of a war can visit gains access to information, influence and gratitude that cannot be bought. Saudi Arabia’s role in the Russia-Ukraine prisoner exchange of 2022 gave it standing with Moscow and Kyiv that few states of its size possess. Its hosting of American-Russian talks also made it useful to Washington at a moment when usefulness counts for a great deal.

The value of that reputation becomes visible in a crisis. When the Kingdom is attacked, it is not regarded as just another party to a regional conflict. It is seen as a state that has kept its word as a convener, and governments are slower to abandon a partner whose diplomatic services they may need next month. Turkiye and Pakistan’s decision this month to activate their defense commitments to Riyadh reflects military calculation, but also a judgment that Saudi Arabia is worth standing by.

Meanwhile, the logic extends to capital markets. Investors look for jurisdictions that reduce the risk of conflict as well as absorbing it. A state that mediates in other people’s wars is unlikely to start reckless ones of its own, an underestimated element of the Saudi risk profile.

Kuwait understands this dynamic well. Its own tradition of mediation, exercised most recently during the Gulf rift of 2017, rests on the conviction that small and medium states gain security by being indispensable to dialogue. Saudi Arabia has taken that tradition and given it the scale of a G20 economy. Gulf states should treat it as a shared asset, since a region that produces mediators is harder to cast as a source of instability.

The same reasoning points to a practical step. The Gulf Cooperation Council should back Saudi efforts to revive the Yemeni peace process the moment the attacks stop. Collective support would signal to the Houthis and their backers that escalation has not divided the Gulf, and that the way to Riyadh’s negotiating table still runs through diplomacy rather than missiles.

Critics will argue that Saudi Arabia, being a party to the Yemen conflict, cannot serve as a neutral mediator. But mediators do not have to be uninvolved; they have to be trusted. Over the past three years, Riyadh has demonstrated that rivals and adversaries, from Moscow to Kyiv and from Khartoum to Washington, are willing to sit at its table. That kind of trust is hard to build and easy to lose, and the Kingdom has guarded it carefully even under fire. The Houthis are betting that missiles will push Riyadh away from the table. They are likely to find that the table is in Riyadh.

Dr. Bashayer Al-Majed is a professor of law at Kuwait University and a visiting fellow at Oxford.