Why Saudi Arabia Killed Project Freedom
Project Freedom lasted less than 48 hours. Trump announced it on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon — a plan to escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz under U.S. military protection — and by Tuesday he had suspended it, citing “great progress” in Pakistani-mediated negotiations with Iran. The diplomatic cover was thin. The operational reality was simpler: Saudi Arabia pulled the plug.
According to two U.S. officials who spoke to NBC News, Riyadh informed Washington that U.S. aircraft would not be permitted to operate from Prince Sultan Air Base southeast of Riyadh, nor fly through Saudi airspace to support the escort mission. Kuwait followed. With those two pieces of geography removed, the defensive air umbrella that Project Freedom required to function could not be constructed. Fighter jets, refueling tankers, and support aircraft all depend on ABO — access, basing, and overflight — from regional partners. In this part of the world, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are the critical basing nodes, Kuwait the critical overflight corridor, Oman essential for both overflight and naval logistics. The operation needed all of them. It got none.
Saudi Arabia’s formal position on why it withheld support has been carefully managed. A Saudi source told NBC that “the problem with that premise is that things are happening quickly in real time,” suggesting the kingdom’s objection was procedural — surprise at the uncoordinated announcement — rather than substantive. Riyadh, the source added, remains “very supportive of the diplomatic efforts” by Pakistan to broker a U.S.-Iran agreement. The White House, for its part, insisted that regional allies had been notified in advance. A Middle Eastern diplomat contradicted that claim, saying Oman was not consulted until after the announcement was already public.
The procedural explanation is almost certainly incomplete. The deeper logic of Saudi Arabia’s position involves risk calculus that has been accumulating for years and crystallized under the pressures of the current war.
The first element is abandonment anxiety. Saudi leaders have direct experience of what happens when Iranian missiles land on Saudi infrastructure and Washington’s response falls short of what Riyadh considers adequate. The 2019 Aramco strikes were the defining case: drones and cruise missiles hit the largest oil processing facility in the world, and the U.S. did not strike back. During the current war, Iranian missiles struck Saudi soil while the kingdom absorbed damage and waited. The pattern has taught Riyadh a specific lesson — that the American commitment to defend Gulf states against Iranian retaliation is conditional, not automatic, and may be further constrained by Trump’s preference for a negotiated exit over escalation. If Project Freedom provoked Iranian strikes on Gulf infrastructure, the question of whether Washington would respond with force on Saudi Arabia’s behalf had no guaranteed answer.
The second element is the economics of non-belligerency. Saudi Arabia has continued exporting roughly five million barrels per day via its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, bypassing the Strait entirely. The UAE has maintained roughly half its pre-war export volumes through the Fujairah pipeline. Both countries have achieved a workable insulation from the strait’s closure precisely because they are not parties to the conflict. Participating in Project Freedom — even in the passive form of providing airspace — would have handed Tehran a rationale to target that insulation directly and to treat Riyadh as a co-belligerent.
The third element is the broader strategic reorientation that Mohammed bin Salman has been executing since at least the 2023 China-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization. MBS has spent the post-Abraham Accords period systematically reducing the kingdom’s dependence on any single patron. The 2025 U.S.-Saudi defense framework fell short of the formal security guarantees Riyadh wanted. China’s economic footprint in the kingdom has grown. Pakistani and Turkish defense relationships have deepened. Vision 2030 requires foreign investment and regional stability — neither of which is compatible with being drawn into a U.S.-Iran confrontation at Washington’s unilateral initiative and on Washington’s timetable.
What Saudi Arabia did was not a break with the United States. The kingdom still hosts U.S. forces, still coordinates with CENTCOM on regional air defense, and Prince Sultan Air Base remains operational for other purposes. What it refused was to be conscripted into a specific operation it had not agreed to, announced without consultation, with unpredictable Iranian escalation risk attached. That is a different and more precise kind of signal than a rupture.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf, now serving as Tehran’s lead negotiator in the peace talks, characterized the outcome with evident satisfaction: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed.” The mockery is cheap but the underlying observation is sound. Project Freedom assumed that Gulf partners would accept operational risk on Washington’s behalf at a moment when Washington had not clearly articulated what it would do if Iran responded by hitting Riyadh or Kuwait City instead of U.S. ships.
The episode reveals a structural constraint on U.S. military options in the Gulf that the administration’s public posture has consistently underplayed. The physical geography of the strait — the distances, the air defense requirements, the need for land-based overflight — means that U.S. freedom of action in the Hormuz corridor is substantially dependent on Gulf state cooperation. When that cooperation is withheld, even temporarily, operations that look achievable on a map become logistically untenable. The destroyers that transited the strait on Thursday under fire did so without the broader operational architecture that Project Freedom was supposed to provide.
That is the military dimension. The political dimension is that Saudi Arabia has now demonstrated, publicly and consequentially, that MBS will use available leverage at a moment of his choosing rather than simply absorbing Washington’s decisions. Whether that demonstration was primarily directed at Tehran, at Washington, or at both simultaneously is a question worth watching through the next round of Pakistani-mediated talks.