The Détente That Never Was: Iran and Saudi Arabia Return to Open Rivalry as the War Strips Away the Beijing Truce

Three and a half years after the Beijing agreement, the war has stripped away the diplomatic surface of Iran-Saudi relations. The two states are back where they have stood for most of the past four decades, as rivals for leadership of the Muslim world on opposite sides of the Sunni-Shia divide. Beijing bought a truce, and the truce did not touch the issues that drive the rivalry. Since July, Saudi forces have joined U.S. strikes that killed Iranian officers in Iraq, the Houthis and Iraqi militias have struck Saudi oil sites and cities, and Riyadh has assembled a defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan aimed at Iran and its allies. The alleged Houthi attempt to strike Mecca carried the confrontation into the religious domain, and Tehran’s hardline press now names Aramco as the pressure point that would bring President Trump to terms. We assess that a negotiated end to the U.S.-Iran war would probably bring another round of Saudi-Iranian contacts, but that any thaw would be a truce between wars and unlikely to survive the next crisis in Yemen, in Iraq or around the holy cities. This special report draws on daily Iranian press monitoring and regional intelligence summaries from July through September 2026.

The Beijing Moment and Its Limits

On March 10, 2023, Ali Shamkhani and Saudi national security adviser Musaed al-Aiban signed an agreement in Beijing to restore the diplomatic relations the two countries had cut in January 2016. They pledged to reopen embassies within two months, to respect each other’s sovereignty, to stay out of each other’s internal affairs and to revive a 2001 security accord and a 1998 general cooperation agreement. Iran reopened its embassy in Riyadh in June 2023, and Saudi Arabia reopened its embassy in Tehran that August. President Ebrahim Raisi attended the Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh in November 2023. In April 2025 Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman carried a letter from King Salman to Ali Khamenei in Tehran.

Many Western and regional analysts greeted Beijing as a turning point. They wrote of a new era of de-escalation in the Gulf, of China’s arrival as a power broker in the Middle East and of a region tired of sectarian proxy wars. Some argued that Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 transformation required a quiet neighborhood and that a sanctioned Iran needed the same. The report accepts both premises but rejects the conclusion drawn from them.

The agreement was thin by design. It contained no mechanism on Yemen, no commitment on the Iraqi militias, no reference to Hezbollah and nothing on the nuclear file. Each government had concluded, for its own reasons, that open confrontation was too costly at that moment. Riyadh bought time and some protection for its oil installations after the 2019 Abqaiq attack. Tehran eased part of its regional isolation and slowed the momentum toward Saudi-Israeli normalization. Neither side conceded anything on the issues that drive the rivalry.

The pattern was familiar. The restoration of relations after the 1991 Gulf War, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s brief visit to Riyadh in 2009 and the Baghdad talks of 2021 each produced a period of normal business on the surface. Each ended when the underlying competition reasserted itself in Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon or Iraq, and above all over the question of who speaks for Islam. We reviewed the ambiguity of the renewed relationship shortly after it began in Iran-Saudi Relations: Ambiguity Persists Despite Diplomatic Renewal.

The War Tests the Agreement

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28, 2026, exposed the limits of Beijing within weeks. Saudi Arabia hosts U.S. forces, and Iran treated those forces as legitimate targets. On March 27 Iran fired six ballistic missiles and 29 drones at Prince Sultan Air Base, injuring at least 15 U.S. troops. Tehran described its attacks as aimed at the United States. For Riyadh, they were attacks on Saudi soil.

The escalation accelerated in the summer. On July 24 the Houthis fired missiles and drones at Saudi oil infrastructure at Yanbu and Jizan, and Saudi forces struck launch sites in al-Jawf and Marib the next day. Yanbu matters because it is the kingdom’s main export route around Hormuz. By hitting it, the Houthis served Iran’s interest in leaving Riyadh no alternative to a strait under Iranian control.

On July 28 the conflict crossed a threshold. U.S. and Saudi forces carried out acknowledged joint precision strikes on militia logistics and weapons sites across Iraq. CENTCOM described them as a response to more than 30 IRGC-directed drone attacks in 72 hours against U.S. forces and Saudi energy infrastructure. Iranian state-linked reporting said at least four IRGC Quds Force officers were killed in Diyala. For the first time in this war, Saudi Arabia was a direct party to strikes that killed Iranian officers. Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba threatened retaliation against both the United States and Saudi Arabia, and Nujaba later promised to answer missile with missile. Saudi officials then told allies that Saudi, U.S. and regional intelligence pointed to coordinated attacks on energy sites, ports and airports by Iraqi militias from the north and the Houthis from the south, under IRGC supervision.

Riyadh Builds a Sunni Shield

Riyadh’s answer was the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed with Turkey and Pakistan on August 7. It declares that an armed attack on one member is an attack on all. Turkish and Saudi officials stress that the pact is defensive and non-sectarian. Its membership suggests otherwise. It joins the leading Sunni Arab state, the leading Sunni military power in NATO and the only Sunni state with nuclear weapons against a threat that runs from Shia militias in Iraq to the Zaydi Houthis in Yemen, all of them backed by Tehran. The pact sits alongside a 14-country maritime coalition for the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab announced in late July.

The Houthis tested it at once. They struck the Aramco facility at Jizan on August 8 and launched a missile and drone attack on Mocha on August 9, after an earlier strike on the radar at Najran airport. Behind the scenes, Washington urged Riyadh not to retaliate while Oman mediated Saudi-Houthi talks.

The Iranian press dismissed the pact, with one notable exception. In a guest note, Alireza Salari Sharif, a former secretary-general of the Economic Cooperation Organization and former ambassador to Switzerland, wrote that Saudi Arabia had turned to Pakistan because Iranian pressure at Hormuz and the siege of Yemen had left its shipping exposed. In effect, he conceded that Iranian coercion had produced the countervailing alliance.

From the Pipeline to the Holy City

September brought the confrontation onto Saudi territory and into the religious domain. A drone launched from Maysan province in southern Iraq hit the East-West Pipeline. Baghdad confirmed the launch area and dismissed the regional military commander, according to Reuters. The pipeline restarted on September 22 at a reduced rate, and damage to three pumping stations will take six to eight weeks to repair. We covered the pipeline attack in Every Bypass Under Fire.

In mid-September the Houthis fired at Khamis Mushait, Abha and Taif. Riyadh then said that one attack had targeted Mecca, calling it the second such attempt since July 2017 and a red line. The Houthis called the claim a lie. The OIC, the GCC and Qatar condemned the attack, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said strikes on Saudi Arabia from the south and from Iraq were unacceptable. Doha’s response is covered in Red Lines and Quiet Rooms. The Houthis later told U.S. officials in Muscat that they would not attack commercial ships, with the exception of Saudi vessels.

Whatever the truth of the Mecca claim, it moved the dispute onto the most sensitive ground between the two states. The Saudi monarchy’s legitimacy rests on its custodianship of the two holy mosques. Tehran has contested that role since 1987, when Saudi security forces clashed with Iranian pilgrims during a Hajj demonstration and hundreds died. It did so again in 2015, when more than 400 Iranians were among the victims of the crush at Mina. The 2016 break followed the execution of the Saudi Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr and the storming of the Saudi embassy in Tehran. The report observes that every rupture in the relationship has had a religious trigger or a religious amplifier.

Open Hostility Through Intermediaries

By the last week of September the two states were fighting openly through intermediaries. The chiefs of staff of the Mecca pact met in Riyadh on September 25 and 26 and committed to intelligence sharing, military coordination and collective defense, according to the Saudi Press Agency. Hours later, Saudi air defenses intercepted missiles aimed at Khamis Mushait and drones headed for Riyadh. Britain has provided an RAF Voyager aircraft and air-defense personnel, and Greece is also supporting Saudi air defense. Saudi and Yemeni government-aligned forces have opened a campaign against Houthi supply lines. Geolocated damage to the al-Dalil bridge in Ibb supports part of a Houthi claim of 27 Saudi airstrikes on September 26, according to CTP/ISW. Yemeni government forces also claim that four Iranian drone and missile specialists were killed near Taiz. That claim has not been verified.

At the UN General Assembly, Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said Iran had attacked the kingdom directly and appealed for international help. He also called for a return to prewar operations in Hormuz without transit fees and backed Baghdad’s effort to bring militia weapons under state control.

The Iranian hardline press answered on September 28. Kayhan’s satirical column mocked the kingdom as Trump’s cash cow and accused Riyadh of playing the victim after lending itself to the attack on Iran. The paper’s lead article named Aramco infrastructure and the petrodollar arteries as the targets that would bring Trump to his senses, and its front-page commentary charged that the war was being waged from the land and facilities of the Gulf monarchies. Jomhouri Eslami told those monarchies it was time to reconsider their policy. The day’s wider coverage is in The Hidden Layer and the September 28 Iranian Press Monitor.

Asr-e Qanoon devoted its full front page to the theme under the headline “Riyadh’s Hypocrisy.” The image shows Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his knees, hands pressed together, before a towering Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper attributes to Israel’s Channel 14 a claim that Saudi Arabia keeps asking Israel for help against the Houthis. The report reads the image as preparation for the next phase. It recasts any Saudi move toward the Abraham Accords as a betrayal of Islam and targets Saudi standing in the wider Muslim world. Israel is the variable that could turn the renewed rivalry into a lasting strategic realignment, and Tehran is already shaping how that shift would be received.

Why the Gap Does Not Close

The optimists of 2023 read the rivalry as a security dilemma that diplomacy could manage. The report argues that it is also a contest over religious authority, and that no diplomatic formula can settle it. The Islamic Republic defines itself as the vanguard of Muslim resistance and the protector of Shia communities, including those in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and in Bahrain. The Saudi monarchy defines itself as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites and the leader of the Sunni world. Each state’s claim to legitimacy negates the other’s. Four decades of history show a steady pattern, with a thaw when both sides are weak or distracted and a return to confrontation whenever the regional balance shifts.

Every structural driver of the rivalry was present in 2023, and each has grown stronger since. Iran’s network of allied forces surrounds the kingdom, from the Houthis on its southern border to the militias in Iraq. Saudi security still depends on the United States, and Tehran sees U.S. bases on Saudi soil as part of the war against it. Normalization with Israel, frozen after October 2023, remains a long-term Saudi option that Tehran regards as an existential threat. None of these issues appeared in the Beijing text, because neither side was prepared to negotiate on them.

China’s role also deserves a sober reading. Beijing brokered a document and a photograph. It has shown neither the will nor the means to enforce the agreement, restrain the Houthis or protect Saudi energy infrastructure. When the war came, Riyadh turned to Washington, Ankara, Islamabad, London and Athens. China was not among them.

What Comes Next

The Iranian government has not abandoned the language of Beijing. In late September President Masoud Pezeshkian praised possible Saudi bridge-building and offered Iranian help on Yemen, according to Al Jazeera. The report reads this as the diplomatic channel doing its job, which is to keep a line open for a ceasefire deal with Washington that Saudi Arabia can help or hinder. It does not reflect the balance of opinion in Tehran, where the hardline press is preparing readers for strikes on Saudi targets if talks with Washington collapse.

A negotiated end to the U.S.-Iran war would probably bring another round of Saudi-Iranian contacts, perhaps with Chinese, Omani, Qatari or Pakistani mediation, and another wave of commentary about a new chapter. The report judges that it would be a truce between wars.

Key Points

The 2023 Beijing agreement produced a truce, not a reconciliation. It restored embassies and hotlines but left Iran’s allied networks, the religious contest and Saudi dependence on the United States untouched (high confidence).
Since July, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in open hostility, fought mostly through proxies. Saudi participation in the July 28 strikes in Iraq, which reportedly killed IRGC Quds Force officers, marked the first time in this war that Riyadh was a direct party to strikes that killed Iranian personnel (high confidence).
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Turkey and Pakistan, now active at the chiefs-of-staff level and backed by British and Greek air-defense support, is a Sunni security shield aimed at Iran and its allies, whatever its official description (moderate to high confidence).
The alleged Houthi attempt on Mecca, which the Houthis deny, moved the rivalry onto religious ground and revived the Hajj grievances of 1987 and 2015. The hardline Iranian press now treats Saudi Arabia as a co-belligerent and Aramco as a legitimate target (high confidence on the press line; the Mecca claim itself is unverified).
Pezeshkian’s conciliatory language keeps a diplomatic channel open but does not reflect the balance of opinion in Tehran. Any postwar thaw is likely to be another tactical truce, as reversible as the last (moderate confidence).

What to Watch

Any Iranian or proxy strike on Aramco facilities, especially at Yanbu or on the East-West Pipeline during its repairs.
Any further incident near Mecca or Medina.
Whether the Mecca pact develops into a standing command with forward-deployed forces.
The course of the Saudi campaign against Houthi supply lines and its reach toward Bab al-Mandab.
Saudi moves toward normalization with Israel, and how the Iranian press frames them.
The treatment of Iranian pilgrims at the next Hajj.

This special report is based on an analysis dated September 28, 2026, compiled from daily Iranian press monitoring and regional intelligence summaries from July through September 2026. Sources include Kayhan, Asr-e Qanoon and Jomhouri Eslami (September 28 editions), the Saudi Press Agency, Reuters, CTP/ISW, The Peninsula/AFP, the UK Ministry of Defence, Al Riyadh, Al Jazeera and AP. The Mecca attack is carried as a Saudi claim that the Houthis deny. Iranian casualty figures from the July 28 strikes come from Iranian state-linked reporting, and the Yemeni government’s claim that Iranian specialists were killed near Taiz is unverified. Houthi strike counts are carried only to the extent geolocated damage supports them. The one verbatim quote is Asr-e Qanoon’s front-page headline; all other statements are paraphrased.