From swing producer to swing state: Saudi hedging strategy and the pursuit of strategic autonomy in a multipolar era

This study analyses Saudi Arabia’s evolving foreign policy amid intensifying US–China competition and growing systemic uncertainty. Historically, Saudi Arabia’s influence derived from its role in stabilising global oil markets and its close alignment with the United States. Today, however, the energy transition, the US shale revolution and intensifying US–China rivalry have collectively reshaped the strategic landscape, creating new pressures and opportunities for Riyadh. The study argues that Saudi Arabia’s contemporary strategy is best understood as institutionalised strategic hedging: retaining core security ties with the United States while expanding economic, technological and selective security cooperation with China and other emerging partners. Drawing on hedging theory and middle-power literatures, the study highlights the interaction between external structural pressures and domestic regime-survival imperatives under Vision 2030. It demonstrates that external diversification is not a temporary adjustment but a politically consequential strategy designed to secure economic transformation, reduce vulnerability and preserve strategic autonomy. More broadly, the Saudi case illustrates how resource-rich middle powers can leverage competitive interdependence to institutionalise hedging as a durable foreign policy orientation in an increasingly fragmented global order.