Quantitative Baseline
- Display score: 2/5
- Continuous score: 35.5
- Confidence: PARTIAL
- Data year: 2026
- Sources: Fragile States Index, Curated dataset, World Bank WDI
| Metric | Tier | Raw | Normalized | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nuclear weapons status | DOMINANT | none | 20.0 | Curated dataset | 2026 |
| Fragile States Index | PRIMARY | 65.3 | 54.7 | Fragile States Index | 2023 |
| Military expenditure (% GDP) | PRIMARY | 7.298 | 98.4 | World Bank WDI | 2024 |
| Alliance membership | PRIMARY | 0 | 0.0 | Curated dataset | 2026 |
Saudi Arabia’s security score is the clearest example in this profile of how spending and resilience are not the same thing. The kingdom spends heavily on defense and has strong reasons to do so, but it remains non-nuclear, geographically exposed, and outside the most formalized alliance structures in the system.
That is why the security score stays low even with very high military expenditure. The model rewards hard guarantees and hard deterrents, not just procurement. Saudi Arabia has regional importance and can defend itself far better than many peers, but it still faces missile threats, maritime exposure around Hormuz and the Red Sea, and the constant question of how reliable outside backing would be in a genuine crisis.
In practice, security is the factor that keeps Saudi Arabia from reading like a simple petro-superpower. It is a major state with real coercive weight, yet it still operates in a neighborhood where proximity, rivalry, and infrastructure vulnerability compress its room for error.
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