In normal times, the private jets would be stacking up at King Khalid airport in Riyadh about a fortnight from now. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s favourite international jamboree, the Future Investment Initiative – “Davos in the Desert” – is due to open on 26 October.
But these are not normal times. The airport was hit by Houthi missiles four times in a week, while the Saudi ruler – MBS as he’s known – is reported by The Wall Street Journal to be “shuttling between heavily guarded palaces equipped with bunkers”.
MBS’s war with the Houthis and Donald Trump’s war with Iran have stemmed the flow of two things the Saudis must have thought would never run short: oil and money. The result is that MBS’s dream for the kingdom – his “Vision 2030” – has collided with financial reality. In August, Saudi oil production fell to its lowest point in 36 years. Tankers cannot get safely through the Strait of Hormuz because of Iran, or through the other main sea-lane to world markets, Bab al-Mandab, because of the Houthis. The government had forecast that the economy would grow by 4.6 per cent this year; now the Saudi finance ministry expects it to shrink by 3.6 per cent.
This is not all the effect of these two, connected wars. There were signs of trouble even before hostilities erupted. In January, work was suspended on what was to be the world’s largest single structure, the Mukaab in Riyadh, a cube 400 metres on each side and supposedly “large enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings”. MBS’s steampunk city of the future, NEOM, was reduced from a 170-kilometre-long ribbon through the desert for nine million people, to a 2.4-kilometre stretch to house 300,000. The stadium that was to sit on top of it, a World Cup venue, has been “shelved indefinitely”. The 2029 Asian Winter Games, planned to take place on artificial snow in the desert, are going to Kazakhstan instead.
Saudi officials insist that everything’s fine, that work on all these projects will resume in a few years’ time. And Davos in the Desert will go ahead, they say. That is despite the fact that, at the weekend, the chief executives of ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP withdrew from an energy conference in the Saudi capital; the US energy secretary addressed it by video. That was inevitable with 13 dead and more than 300 injured at the airport and all flights cancelled. But of serious long-term significance: Saudi Arabia‘s expensive air defences seemed unable to stop the Houthi drones and missiles.
Part of this may be that the Saudis are running short of interceptors. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz put the stock at about 400 Patriot missiles, down from 2,800 when the Iran war began. More importantly, as “regional officials” told the Associated Press, some Houthi missiles “can manoeuvre and escape” the Patriots altogether. The Houthis are no longer the ragtag, flip-flop-wearing militia of 10 or 20 years ago. Now they make – and even reportedly export – sophisticated weapons, employing Iranian know-how.
MBS may have only himself to blame for the current crisis. He picked this latest fight with the Houthis. In July, he ordered his air force to crater the runway at Sanaa airport so that an Iranian plane could not land with Houthi officials coming home from Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral. (MBS’s Yemeni government allies claimed the strike, but it’s doubtful they acted alone.) To be fair, the Saudis may have thought the Iranian plane was carrying weapons, in defiance of the UN arms embargo. Either way, three days later, the Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, said: “The equation will be airports for airports, ports for ports, a blockade for a blockade.”
Most worrying of all for MBS, he asked for American airstrikes, and they never came. Axios reported that on 10 September, as the Red Sea town of Mokha fell to the Houthis, MBS rang Trump twice to ask for American bombing. Trump said no. Then, three days later, American officials sat down with the Houthis at the US embassy in Muscat. The Houthis reportedly promised not to touch American ships. And after one of the strikes on King Khalid airport, all Trump could manage was: “We may [help]. We’re going to look at it.” Khalid al-Malik editor of the Riyadh daily Al-Jazirah, reflected the official line when he wrote: “Politics is strange. Sometimes allies let you down, even when agreements are in place.”
So, the richest kingdom in the Arab world has been reduced to calling on Pakistan. The Mecca defence pact with Islamabad and Ankara was triggered on 5 October. A unnamed Pakistani official told Reuters that 30,000 to 40,000 of their troops were in the kingdom. (A government spokesman in Islamabad called that figure “invented”.) Riyadh has asked Britain, France, Egypt and Pakistan to assist in defending the kingdom’s airspace. It already has a drone-defence deal with Ukraine, signed in March. The Wall Street Journal reports that foreign fighters – mercenaries – may be recruited to go to Yemen.
All these things are consequences of what promises to be a hesitant, initially limited American withdrawal from the Middle East. President Trump is reluctant to fight on another front: Yemen. And there’s neither the money nor the political will to repair the billions of dollars’ worth of damage to US bases inflicted by Iranian missiles. Trump was always seen as closer to Saudi Arabia than any previous US president, but the Saudis are now finding him an unreliable ally.
MBS may conclude that the ultimate guarantee of the kingdom’s security is to have his own nuclear weapon. Back in 2023, he said that if Iran got the Bomb, Saudi Arabia would “have to get one”. Last month, the Washington Post reported that classified documents sent to Congress carried the intelligence community’s assessment that Saudi Arabia “has not ruled out the option of developing a nuclear weapons programme”. In this, as in many other things, President Trump’s erratic behaviour has a price.