It would be wrong to say that Saudi Arabia is turning against the United States. The relationship matters too much for that. In some respects, it may even have grown closer.

The two countries signed a Strategic Defense Agreement in November 2025 and, only last month, Washington submitted their civilian nuclear cooperation agreement to Congress for review. America remains indispensable to Saudi Arabia, probably in ways that no other country quite is.

But indispensability is not quite the same thing as trust.

In The Honourable Schoolboy, following Bill Haydon’s exposure as the mole at the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the CIA freezes out the Circus, cutting British intelligence off from its American counterpart. Britain is still an ally. The relationship still exists. What has changed is the degree of American trust in it.

The circumstances could hardly be more different, but the underlying anxiety must be recognisable in cafes and social clubs in Riyadh.

I first started thinking about Saudi-US relations at a dinner at the Frontline Club in Paddington, given by a Saudi author shortly before the last American election. The United States dominated the conversation. There was no sense at all of a country preparing to abandon Washington. What came through was something more interesting: the kind of frustration you only really have with a partnership that matters.

Right now, the sharpest frustration is over security, and particularly the Houthis.

After their latest missile and drone attacks at the weekend, images of black smoke rising near Riyadh’s airport travelled around the world. For the Saudis, the argument over American security guarantees was no longer an abstraction.

One commentator accused the Saudis of having earlier targeted the runway at Sanaa International Airport in Yemen as a Houthi delegation returned from Tehran, where it had attended Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral, one of the largest in history.

But the problem is bigger than the missiles themselves.

In a startling offensive this month, the Houthis have swept through Saudi-backed positions along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, taking Mokha and the island of Perim in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The reverses have exposed weaknesses among Riyadh’s Yemeni allies and made one of the world’s great maritime chokepoints suddenly look much more vulnerable.

From Riyadh, the complaint is pretty simple. Saudi territory and infrastructure are under threat, but Washington is reluctant to use its military power in the way the Saudis would like.

According to Axios, citing two American officials, Mohammed bin Salman telephoned President Trump twice as Houthi forces advanced around Bab el-Mandeb, asking for American strikes. Trump said no. Washington has instead continued to provide intelligence and targeting support while avoiding direct military intervention.

Saudi Arabia has spent years looking for a clearer American commitment. The 2025 agreement was an important step. But events have now exposed the difference between America helping Saudi Arabia defend itself and America being prepared to fight on its behalf.

That helps explain why Riyadh has been building other layers of insurance.

In August, Saudi Arabia signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement with Turkey and Pakistan, under which an armed attack on one is deemed an attack on all three. On Saturday, Turkey’s foreign minister said Ankara was prepared to help meet Saudi military needs arising from the Houthi attacks.

None of this makes Turkey or Pakistan a substitute for the United States. In a way, that is the point. Saudi Arabia is assembling alternatives at the margins because it cannot afford an alternative at the centre.

What Riyadh wants at the moment is for Iranian-backed threats to be contained. What it doesn’t want is for Saudi territory to become the place where Washington and Tehran fight their war.

“Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict,” Graham Greene observed in The Quiet American. That is the trouble with strategies conceived in capitals. Eventually, somebody has to live where they take place.

Saudi Arabia therefore wants something understandable, but not especially easy to provide: American protection without Saudi security becoming secondary to American policy towards Iran, if that makes sense.

Then there is Gaza.Gaza has already opened a gap between Washington and Riyadh, and it appears to have considerably more pull among ordinary Saudis than arguments about defence agreements or semiconductor controls.

Saudi Arabia has publicly ruled out establishing diplomatic relations with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state. It contradicted President Trump when he suggested in February 2025 that this condition had disappeared, and joined other Arab governments in rejecting his proposal to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.

There was a time when Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner seemed to embody almost everything about the relationship. He had personal access to Mohammed bin Salman, shared an intensely transactional view of diplomacy—still does—and held out the tantalising possibility that Saudi Arabia might, just might, follow its restive Gulf neighbours into the Abraham Accords, under which several Arab states normalised relations with Israel without first securing a resolution of the Palestinian question.

Kushner has hardly disappeared from Middle Eastern diplomacy. But what is striking is how far events have travelled from that moment.

Saudi normalisation with Israel, once treated in Washington as the great prize simply waiting to be collected, is now tangled up with Gaza, Palestinian statehood and deeper Saudi questions about the regional order America is offering.

Even so, Riyadh will not want Palestine to swallow the rest of its relationship with America. It wants American defence, technology, civilian nuclear cooperation and investment to proceed on their own merits.

Washington is making that harder.

Trump has tied the civilian nuclear agreement to Saudi recognition of Israel, even as he has submitted the agreement to Congress. So two questions Riyadh might rather keep separate—access to American nuclear technology and the future of Palestine—have been joined together in Washington.

What a difference a war makes.

When Trump arrived in a sword-waving, jubilant Riyadh in 2025, he spoke grandly of a Middle East “defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism.” The Saudis could hardly disagree with the sentiment.

Now an old proverb is being applied to Trump: a madman throws a stone into a well, and a hundred wise men cannot get it out.

Meanwhile, Vision 2030 requires Saudi Arabia to become much more than an oil producer. Artificial intelligence and advanced computing are central to that ambition. Here again, America is both the partner Saudi Arabia most wants and the source of the restrictions most likely to irritate it.

Washington sees safeguards. Riyadh, I suspect, sees another reminder that access to all things American tends to arrive with American conditions attached.

China offers something different. Saudi official figures put bilateral trade at more than $100 billion a year. China is not a substitute for America so much as room to manoeuvre.

That distinction matters.

Riyadh is not abandoning Washington. It is becoming increasingly reluctant to depend on Washington alone: American defence and technology where useful; Chinese trade, investment and diplomacy where useful; and Saudi freedom of action wherever possible.

And this is where the inequality in the American relationship becomes difficult to ignore.

Washington wants assurances about what Saudi Arabia will do—with China, with Israel, with sensitive American technology. Riyadh still wants assurances about what Washington will do when the kingdom is attacked.

For years, those questions could more or less be kept apart. The renewed Houthi threat brings them together, appropriately enough, at Bab el-Mandeb—the Gate of Tears.

The name is ancient. The anxieties are new.

But geopolitical abstractions are only part of the story. Anxiety has a life of its own.

A well-travelled friend insists to me that the façade of stability will be maintained. But, he says, some wealthy Saudi families are already moving money quietly towards Singapore, Europe and the Americas.

“Even Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and other places,” he adds. “Family continuity is everything. They have lived through historic change and seen it happen around them.”

It is an anecdote, not evidence of an exodus. But it captures something that statistics and communiqués often miss: the instinct to hedge when confidence begins to fray.

Palestine matters. Gaza matters.

And then there is Mecca.

Last week’s Saudi claim that a Houthi drone was heading towards Mecca belongs in a different category from an attack on an oil installation, port or airfield. It revived memories of an earlier Saudi allegation that a Houthi ballistic missile had been directed towards the holy city.The Houthis deny targeting Mecca. But the Saudi allegation itself tells you why the episode carries such weight

Mecca is not simply another piece of Saudi territory. It is the direction towards which Muslims pray and the destination of the pilgrimage. For the Saudi state, guardianship of the holy places is inseparable from the kingdom’s identity.

It’s easy enough, sitting in Washington or London, to talk about alliances, commitments, capabilities and deterrence. It feels rather different when the question is whether the drone above your head is travelling towards the city at the centre of your faith.

That, perhaps, is why the present Saudi mood towards America is better understood not as estrangement, but as doubt.

Which brings us back to The Honourable Schoolboy.

What Washington may need to restore is not the relationship itself, but confidence in what that relationship will actually deliver. Credibility of that kind is rebuilt through results, not declarations.

There is an irony in all this. Saudi Arabia may now want to become less dependent on the United States precisely because it still needs the United States to be dependable.

That is not quite a divorce.

It is what happens when one party to a long marriage quietly decides that one insurance policy may no longer be enough.

Peter Bach lives in London.

@CP