Located between three continents, the Middle East region has been the ultimate epicentre of “grand strategy” for millennia – drawing in competing external powers but also playing them off against each other. The region's importance was compounded in modernity when it came to fuel the world economy through its vast oil resources, and whose foreign domination also came to invite an ideological backlash, especially via political Islam. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – home to Islam's holy cities and to (Sunni) political Islam's Wahhabi incarnation, home to the world's largest hydrocarbon reserves, and home to an insecure neighbourhood – has been and continues to be the most influential actor and location in this story.

Most of the International Relations literature tends to focus on the latter, seeing non-great power-actors like Saudi Arabia mostly as focal points or recipients of the great powers’ grand strategies. Whilst this chapter partly also addresses these, it nevertheless focuses on Saudi agency. It seeks to identify and unpack key spheres and elements of Saudi Arabia's own grand strategy across time. A strong emphasis is placed on the Kingdom's strategic relations to the great powers of the day. This is because the type and extent of a state's relations to the great powers arguably shape the structures of its wider grand strategy. These structures bring forth opportunities and constraints within which all other relations take place.

The chapter thereby integrates the case of Saudi Arabia with the very notion of grand strategy, by focusing especially on the concept of the “pivot state” as an analytical framework. Encompassing the three elements of military, economic and ideational strategic spheres, the goal is to map the actual and potential flexibilities and shifts in Saudi Arabia's grand strategic orientation along these three types of realms. It examines these specifically over three turning points – pivots – in Saudi Arabia's past and present interaction with the great powers of the day: early-20th-century Britain, of 20th and 21st-century America, and of 21st-century China in particular.