Mohammed bin Salman made a bet on strengthening ties with Iran, and now, the entire Gulf is paying for it. In 2023, he personally led a China-brokered normalisation deal with Tehran that reopened embassies, launched direct flights, and sent trade delegations back and forth, putting two decades of hostilities behind them. MBS wanted to be seen as the man who tamed and could control Iran. Two years later, Iranian drones are attacking Saudi oil refineries, energy exports in the region have collapsed, tourism is dead, and the business-friendly image that he helped build is gone.
This war came directly out of a relationship that MBS built with a regime that was always going to use every scrap of access he gave them against him. Every channel he opened gave Iranian intelligence a clearer look at where Saudi Arabia was most exposed, and when Tehran decided to strike, they already had the map.
The Normalisation That Armed Tehran
The normalisation was MBS’s project from start to finish, not the foreign ministry’s and not the security establishments. Senior Saudi intelligence officials warned him that Tehran’s intentions had not changed, that reopening embassies would give Iran’s operatives a front-row seat to Saudi military posture and economic infrastructure. MBS waved them off because he wanted the diplomatic win more than the honest assessment of what it would cost.
Over the next two years, Iranian diplomats and trade officials travelled to and moved freely through the kingdom. Energy talks gave them specific knowledge of oil infrastructure, pipeline routing, and port logistics, all of it shared with the leaders in Tehran. So, when Iran launched strikes across the Gulf in February and March, the targeting was not random. The strike on the SAMREF refinery in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia’s primary oil export lifeline pushing 3.8 million barrels a day, was not an accident. You do not stumble onto a target like that. Tehran hit it because MBS had spent two years giving them the access to know where it was and how much it mattered.
The Whole Region Is Paying His Tab
If this were only a Saudi problem, it would still be damning, but the damage has spread across the Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz is shut, meaning 20 percent of the world’s oil supply is stuck. Kuwait absorbed 28 drone strikes on its oil facilities in one day. Abu Dhabi’s Habshan gas complex caught fire. Bahrain and Qatar also sustained hits. Formula One was cancelled in Saudi and Bahrain, airlines suspended routes, and the US State Department told Americans to leave.
The conferences, the concerts, the investment summits have been torched in weeks by a war that MBS’s own choices helped set in motion. His Vision 2030 was built on the promise that the Gulf was stable enough to attract the world’s money, and he was selling that stability with one hand while handing Iran the tools to destroy it with the other.
The Double Game That Collapsed on Him
What makes this worse is that MBS was not just naïve about Iran but was actively lying to his people and the world about them. In late January 2026, weeks before the US-Israeli strikes, he called Iranian President Pezeshkian and gave him his word that Saudi territory and airspace would not be used against Iran. At the exact same time, he was lobbying Trump to launch the attack on Iran even though he just promised Tehran that attack would never come from Saudi soil.
Both sides figured it out, and when they did, MBS had nowhere to go. He could not play Iran’s friend because he had been pushing for their destruction behind closed doors. He could not claim to be America’s wartime partner because he had promised Tehran neutrality, and he could not mediate because neither side trusted him. He had locked every door from the inside, which is not bad luck but catastrophic judgement from a man who convinced himself he could fool both sides at the same time.
A Pattern That Should Worry Everyone
None of this should surprise anyone who has watched MBS operate. He launched a war in Yemen in 2015 that was sold to the people as a quick operation and led to the killing of tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians and a failure to reach any of the war goals. He led a blockade of Qatar in 2017 and ended up quietly backing down. He ordered the Khashoggi killing in 2018 and turned his and the kingdom’s image overnight. The pattern is always the same: a big move without a plan or thought for what comes next, and then deafening silence when it backfires.
The Iran normalisation was supposed to be his biggest win yet, and it has produced the biggest fallout. A reputation built on stability that took decades to build has been shattered in just weeks because one man decided he could handle the Iranian regime by charming the snake. But now, 400 million people are living with the fallout and damage while MBS offers the region nothing but silence.
