According to Courier International, this profound change in calculus was forged in the fires of 2019, when devastating missile attacks attributed to Iran or its proxies struck key Saudi oil infrastructure. The lack of a decisive US military response served as a stark realization for Riyadh: the American security umbrella was not guaranteed. This pivotal moment forced Saudi leadership to abandon its policy of confrontation and seek a modus vivendi with its powerful neighbor. This process culminated in the landmark normalization of diplomatic relations between China and the United States in 2023.
Today, with the stability of the Iranian regime under question, the Saudi perspective has solidified into a pragmatic, if uneasy, endorsement of the status quo. Pro-government media outlets in the Kingdom now articulate a view that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Writing in the influential pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, veteran Saudi journalist Abderrahmane Al-Rached described Khamenei as a "spiritual figure," calling the idea of his assassination "pure madness." Hassan Al-Mustafa, a specialist in Arab-Iranian relations, argued in Arab News that "Khamenei is necessary to save Iran from chaos," positing that he is the only figure capable of making bold strategic decisions—such as a potential nuclear deal with the West—that would bind both hardliners and moderates within Iran's complex power structure.
Underpinning this new doctrine is a deep-seated regional trauma: the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. The memory of Saddam Hussein's fall, which led not to prosperity but to state collapse, a bloody civil war, and years of terror, haunts strategic thinkers in Riyadh. They fear a similar, or even worse, outcome in the larger, more ethnically diverse Iran. Egyptian-American intellectual Mamoun Fandy, a regular columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat, directly poses the question of whether the collapse of the Iranian regime would repeat the disastrous repercussions seen in Iraq.
The primary fear is the violent fragmentation of the state. Analysts warn of a power vacuum that could be filled by "sub-state forces," such as armed Balochi or Kurdish factions, unleashing endemic violence. An even greater danger, they argue, would be the autonomization of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which could devolve into a formidable militia to seize control. As Fandy cautions, a sudden collapse of the central state in Tehran risks turning the "Middle East into a laboratory for redefining the notions of state, sovereignty, and security for the next twenty years." For Saudi Arabia, the devil they know in Tehran has become preferable to the catastrophic chaos they cannot control.
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