Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, with Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar. File
| Photo Credit: Reutres

Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, once compared Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler, and warned that if Tehran acquired a nuclear bomb, his kingdom would do the same.

For years, rivalry between Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy, and Iran, a Shia theocracy, had been a defining feature of West Asian geopolitics. From Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen, the two backed opposing sides, with Iran supporting Shia militias and Saudi Arabia Sunni factions.

Yet, when Iran was rocked by mass protests over the past two weeks, Riyadh was conspicuously silent. And when U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iran over its crackdown on demonstrators, Riyadh told Tehran it would not allow its air space or territory to be used for such an attack, AFP reported.

According to Gulf and American officials, Saudi Arabia, along with Qatar, Oman and Turkey, lobbied the Trump administration against military action.

Why did Riyadh oppose an American strike on a country it had, until recently, regarded as its principal rival in West Asia?

Editorial The great reckoning: On the crises in Iran

Fear of instability

Three broad reasons stand out.

First, the Saudis appear wary of the narrative that external military punishment is justified as a response to internal repression. Despite their sectarian divide and geopolitical rivalry, both Saudi Arabia and Iran are governed by authoritarian systems.

In the case of Iran, at least there are national and parliamentary elections in which millions of people participate. Saudi Arabia holds managed elections only at the municipal level. If Iran can be “liberated” through an external attack, critics could invoke the same logic against the kingdom should it ever drift away from the U.S. orbit in West Asia.

What makes Iran a target and Saudi Arabia is not is not a qualitative difference in governance models, but two other factors. One, Saudi Arabia can trade, invest, accept investments freely and broadly meet the economic needs of its population, while Iran faces a severe economic crisis largely due to sanctions. Two, Saudi Arabia is an American ally that hosts U.S. troops; Ira, by contrast, is viewed as an adversary in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Second, having seen the chaos external interventions brought to countries like Iraq and Libya, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are wary of an invasion in Iran, which they fear could plunge the country of over 90 million into anarchy and instability. It could send tens of thousands of refugees to neighbouring countries.

Instability could spread across the Persian Gulf waters and reignite the Houthis’ war with Gulf monarchies, endangering Crown Prince Mohammed’s plan to turn the kingdom into an economic power house that is less dependent on oil.

The Israel factor

Lastly, and more important, geopolitics.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies have grown increasingly alarmed by Israel’s behaviour over the past two years. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has bombed at least six countries. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shia militia, has been degraded. In Syria, the pro-Iran regime of President Bashar al-Assad collapsed.

Emboldened by these developments, Israel, with the backing of the U.S., bombed Iran in June. In September, Israel struck Qatar, another American ally, in a failed bid to assassinate Hamas’s political leadership –which was seen as a breach of the red line by Arab kingdoms.

If the Islamic Republic of Iran were to fall, the regional balance of power would decisively shift in favour of Israel, enabling it to pursue dominance across West Asia.

Saudi Arabia, concerned about the U.S.’s shrinking security umbrella and Israel’s aggression, has already started diversifying its strategic options. Last year, it forged a security partnership with nuclear-armed Pakistan. It is also seeking to build closer strategic ties with Turkey, a former adversary, Qatar, on which Riyadh imposed a blockade in 2017, and Egypt.

So the kingdom doesn’t want a violent collapse of Iran’s republic—an outcome that could plunge the country into chaos, deepen regional instability which could have domestic consequences and leave Israel more powerful which could pose long-term security threats.

Published – January 16, 2026 05:50 pm IST

President Donald Trump points to a reporter as he meets Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House, on November 18, 2025, in Washington.
| Photo Credit: AP

U.S. President Donald Trump. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Scenes from ‘India Week’, held from November 2-10 at the Suwaidi Park in Riyadh as part of the ‘Global Harmony’ initiative of the Ministry of Media, Saudi Arabia
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

As world leaders gathered in Munich, Germany, for Europe’s top annual security conference, placating, pleasing, and managing US President Donald Trump stood as a top agenda. Trump’s phone call to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s disruptive speech challenging Europe, and, by association, the very nature of trans-Atlantic alliances, and demands to end the Ukraine conflict, has led to a mad rush to host such a process, in the Gulf. The question that perhaps comes immediately to mind, even though the conflict in Gaza remains a major global flashpoint, is, why?

The Meeting Between Rubio And Lavrov

Russia and the US are preparing to start initial consultations on Ukraine following an ice-breaking meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh. For Saudi Arabia and its powerful heir-apparent, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, this is a moment of both regional and global reckoning. Gulf powers in the Middle East have now been for a while re-positioning and re-posturing their geopolitics. This process started much before Trump’s return to the White House—arguably, prior to even the Russian war against Ukraine. The roots of this shift lie in two main realities. First, a change in the construct of global power contestation, that is, a bi-polar competition between the US and China and a demand for multipolarity by a host of middle powers looking to secure their own interests and not get caught in the Washington-Beijing dynamics. The second reality relates to a general idea of the US becoming increasingly unwilling to mobilise militarily power to protect its allies.

Reconsidering America’s Role

Regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are evaluating the very fundamentals of the decades-long American hegemony, which has provided security blankets in the region. This also provides them with an opportunity to build their own geopolitical repertoire as middle powers with their own agency, instead of being viewed as client states, a tag that has plagued many of them for decades. The UAE as well has thrown its hat into the ring, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy landed in Abu Dhabi, mere hours after both Russia and the US eluded to excluding Kyiv from talks regarding Ukraine’s own future (Zelenskyy later cancelled a planned visit to Saudi). While this position by the Trump administration delivered tremors across European capitals, it has also played into an increasingly constrained space between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for regional influence. And peace diplomacy, or mediation, is the flavour of the day.

However, the proverbial gold-rush to host Ukraine talks has more solid foundations in regional competition than an international one. For long, Oman has been the state that has consistently pitched itself as the main mediator, playing the role of ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’, where Muscat seemingly prioritises neutrality and offers a common ground for warring parties, such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi militia, or even the US and Iran, to talk.

The Qatar Question

Saudi Arabia and the UAE installed a blockade against Qatar between 2017 and 2021 for what they saw as Doha not aligning and punching above its weight, and, more specifically, for its support for Political Islam. But the Qatari leadership had another trick up its sleeve to ratchet its power quotient. In February 2020, under Trump’s first tenure, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the US signed a historic agreement for the latter’s exit from a two-decade long war in the country. Doha hosted the political office for the Taliban, and managed Kabul, to deliver this outcome to a president who, more than anything else, adores deals. This “success” gained Qatar the title of becoming America’s first and preferred ‘major non-NATO ally’ in the region. Today, Qatar also hosts America’s largest military base in the Middle East. For others, such as the UAE, the meteoric rise of Qatar’s influence in Washington was seen as a challenge. Within Abu Dhabi, questions were raised with Emirati diplomats in the US on why the Taliban’s office was not hosted in either Abu Dhabi or Dubai.

Saudi And UAE Have Bigger Goals

For Saudi Arabia, despite its functional relations with Russia and China alike, a security relationship with the US remains paramount. The same strategic aim is consistent for the UAE as well, one of the few Arab states that normalised relations with Israel as part of the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords and which continues to have functional relations with Iran. Despite continuing pressures on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to help deliver lasting solutions to the Israel-Palestine crisis and the Israel-Hamas war, both have broader, long-term aims with regard to their positions as poles-of-power within a multipolar framework. Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi share this world view with the likes of India, but American power projection is infinitely more critical to political structures in the Middle East. This is truer today after the experience of the Arab Spring, and, more recently, the collapse of the Bashar Al Assad regime in Syria at the hands of a self-styled ‘lapsed’ jihadist group, the Hay’at Tahrir Al Sham (HTS).

Is This The Future Of Mediation?

The Saudis are not stopping just at giving space to the US and Russia to debate Ukraine. As per reports, Riyadh is also open to hosting talks between Iran and the US over the former’s nuclear programme. The Saudi-Iran détente was achieved in March 2023 with the help of China, the main competitor to the US, and a state that has unreservedly supported Arab positions in Gaza. Beijing, meanwhile, also remains open to mediating and helping to bridge political gaps across the region. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visits to the region have been welcomed with gusto by Saudi Arabia and the UAE alike, both as a function of being the world’s second-largest economic power and using this position to hedge risk with Western partners. The future of mediation between the Riyadh-Abu Dhabi-Doha trifecta is a cat and mouse game within the Arab construct. External powers such as the US, Russia, and China, are part of the utility kit. This push for one-upmanship will have a tremendous impact on regional politics where in the coming years economic and political competition is only expected to increase.

(Kabir Taneja is Deputy Director and Fellow, Strategic Studies Programme, Observer Research Foundation)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

Moscow:

A Russian delegation including foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov has arrived in Saudi Arabia for high-level talks with US officials, Russian state TV reported Monday.

The Rossiya 24 news channel showed the officials disembarking a plane in the Saudi capital Riyadh. “The main thing is to begin a real normalisation of relations between us and Washington,” Ushakov told a reporter after landing.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington, United States:

A senior team from US President Donald Trump’s administration will start talks in Saudi Arabia with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators on ending the Ukraine war, US officials said Saturday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Trump’s Middle East negotiator Steve Witkoff will head to Saudi for the talks, the officials said.

The move comes just days after Trump announced that he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time since returning to office, and that they had agreed to start talks on a ceasefire in Ukraine.

The officials gave no further details of when the meetings would happen or when the officials would travel.

But Rubio had already been due to visit Saudi Arabia as part his first tour of the Middle East, which began on Saturday when he arrived in Israel, an AFP journalist reported.

Rubio earlier Saturday had a telephone call with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, in which he “reaffirmed President Trump’s commitment to finding an end to the conflict in Ukraine,” the State Department said.

Former property developer Witkoff was heavily involved in a prisoner exchange deal earlier this week that paved the way for the call between Trump and Putin.

Witkoff even traveled to Moscow to bring home US detainee Marc Fogel.

In a social media post announcing the Putin call earlier this week, Trump had said he had tasked Rubio, Waltz, Witkoff and CIA chief John Ratcliffe to immediately get to work on a deal with Russia to end the Ukraine war.

Kyiv and its European allies were however blindsided by Trump’s sudden move to start negotiations with Russia. 

Both fear being frozen out of negotiations on Ukraine’s future after the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

If talks go well, the death machines will fall silent in West Asia, or at least Gaza, on Sunday. The US and Qatar have reportedly brokered a deal between Israel and Hamas to end the war.

It’s been a long wait for the misery to end. The killings began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters from Gaza attacked Israel on a Jewish holiday. They went about indiscriminately shooting and kidnapping unsuspecting civilians and some soldiers. The worst attack was on a music festival where hundreds of young Israelis were partying. All of it streamed live by the attackers’ body-mounted cameras. By the time Israeli forces took out the last gunmen, the body count had topped 1,200. Over 250 hostages were carried across to Gaza to be stashed away in a subterranean maze where they remained undiscovered even after the whole house was burnt down.

Perhaps the most dramatic and horrific cross-border assault on any country since the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008, it triggered such a display of overwhelming force that it left the world aghast. The shockwaves have left the regional map perceptibly different. It has riven apart communities and split institutions. The scars run so deep that they will not heal in a very long time. It has also laid bare the remarkable pragmatism bordering on chutzpah of the Arab nations.

Reduced To Rubble 

According to multiple reports, nearly 46,000 Gazans, a substantial number of them women and children, have perished in the 15-month war. Most of Gaza has been flattened and rendered uninhabitable. Israel is estimated to have demolished over 1,61,600 homes and damaged 1,94,000 other civil structures. More than 1.9 million of the 2.2 million Gazans have become refugees, most of them corralled into a tiny corner in the north of the Strip. More than 1,000 medical facilities have been destroyed; Rafah does not have a single hospital. The economic loss is estimated at $37 billion. 

Hamas was decapitated when its political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, where he had gone to attend the inauguration ceremony for Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Its director of war, Yahya Sinwar, was killed in Gaza last year, just after the first anniversary of the Hamas attack. A video of a dying Sinwar defiantly throwing a piece of wood at an Israeli military drone indicated that Hamas would not back down despite the carnage. By the end of 2024, Israel had spent over $67 billion on war. It had cost the United States nearly $23 billion until September 2024. Yet, about a hundred Israelis remain hostages somewhere in the ruins, or, more likely, under the ground. 

The Deal

So, what is the new acceptable middle ground in the new deal that the failed talks since the first successful one in November of 2023 could not find? After all, the original objective of the war—freeing hostages—was not achieved. Not only that, Israel will release over 1,000 Palestinians, including those arrested after October 7 and presumably Hamas fighters, in a prisoner exchange. That means while thousands of innocent Gazans, including women and children, paid for the Hamas attack with their lives, its fighters may yet return, alive, prison-hardened, and ready to fight another day. 

On December 20, 2024, American journalist Seymour Hersh—famous for blowing the lid off a cover-up of a massacre of the villagers of My Lai in Vietnam by US troops in the 1960s—wrote that an Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal was in the works. The contours of the just-announced deal are nearly identical to that in his report.  One crucial piece of information, which was not in the deal made public but available in Hersh’s Israeli source-based account, was the role of Saudi Arabia and the quid pro quos. Hersh wrote that as per the deal—reportedly made possible after incoming US President Donald Trump shook his fist at the belligerent Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—the US would extend its nuclear umbrella to Saudi Arabia if Iran gets hold of a nuke. In return, Saudi will fund the reconstruction of Gaza, look away when Israeli warplanes raid Syria, and allow its once-arch rival access to an airfield inside its territory. 

When Iran hit Israel with a barrage of missiles after it assassinated Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and killed scores of others in a “pager attack”, Tel Aviv had to precisely plan its retaliation because of the distance its fighter planes would have had to cover to reach targets deep inside enemy territory. Those targets would be minutes away if the planes were to launch from Saudi Arabia, however. So, the Israeli hostages, who have now spent over 460 days in captivity, paid the price for Tel Aviv to have a closer shot at Iran. 

The Aftermath

Almost all conflicts in West Asia in the past over 50 years somehow link back to the Palestine issue and a still-pending two-state solution. Palestine-trained activists and revolutionaries helped overthrow the Shah in Iran in 1979. That regime has since helped create multiple armed groups in the region, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis.  

While the Saudi aspect—if it exists—of the ceasefire deal may eventually be revealed, it is clear that the US and major powers in the Gulf have decided to militarily ring-fence Iran. While the regime change in Syria with tacit support from Turkey has broken the Iran-Russia supply-and-support link, Israel has crushed Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel, the US and the UK have jointly carried out air raids on the Yemen-based Houthis, another Iran-backed group, whose attacks on ships passing through the Red Sea have disrupted global trade. What would be next? A regime change in Iran? Perhaps that will be property tycoon-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff’s next assignment. 

(Dinesh Narayanan is a Delhi-based journalist and author of ‘The RSS And The Making Of The Deep Nation’.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author