What role, if any, do non-material sources of legitimacy such as ideology play in foreign policy shifts that accompany increased domestic repression? To answer this question, I compare the evolution of nationalist policies as a regime survival strategy in Saudi Arabia and Turkey since 2015. I argue that increasingly assertive foreign policies in both cases alongside more visible repression are legitimation strategies in response to ontological challenges faced by both the Saudi and Turkish regimes since respective protest movements in 2011 and 2013. Previous work on the causal effect of regime type on aggressive foreign policy has argued that those with revolutionary ideologies, such as Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi, are more likely to initiate military conflicts. Yet, states engaging in greater use of force abroad in recent years tend not to be regimes with cohesive ideologies of any sort. Rather than couching foreign aggression in the desire to export revolutionary ideologies such as Communism or pan-Arabism, a number of regimes have come to use foreign policy itself as a building block to define themselves in the absence of clear ideologies. At the time of their ascendance to power, Erdogan and Muhammad bin Salman were both touted by the West as modernizing reformers of ideologically and economically stagnant regimes: moving away from rigid ideologies of Wahhabism and Kemalism. This paper shows how, despite differences in regime type, the struggle to construct an overarching ideological legitimation has led to increased use of force abroad. In Saudi Arabia, this has manifest itself in increased foreign aggression in Bahrain and Yemen since the Arab Spring. After its own bouts of domestic legitimacy challenges in the form of protests, a coup attempt, and electoral losses, Turkey intervened against Kurdish forces in Syria and sent troops to Libya. In my research, I rely on systematic process tracing, archival research, as well as interviews with diplomats, activists, journalists, and policy analysts. I build from theories of ontological security and regime survival strategies to argue that the substance of a regime’s ideology is less important than its strength. Following the trajectory of the ideological weakening of the AKP and the Saudi monarchy in the years leading up to these pivotal events, I show that the foreign policy component in each case is a diversionary response to the underlying ontological and structural weakness of both regimes’ ruling ideologies.