Saudi-Iran Deal: Why does it seem like all the countries in the Middle East are getting along now?

Joshua Keating

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The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran — one a Sunni power long close to the United States, the other a Shiite power with close links to Russia and China — has long been one of the defining characteristics of geopolitics in the Middle East, as well as one of the main drivers of the bloody wars in Syria and Yemen. Five years ago, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, was trying to convince Americans that Iran’s supreme leader “makes Hitler looks good.” In 2019, the Middle East’s cold war threatened to become hot when a swarm of Iranian drones attacked Saudi oil refineries, knocking half of the kingdom’s oil output offline.

So it was somewhat jarring to see the two countries’ top security officials shaking hands last week after signing an agreement to reestablish diplomatic relations and tamp down regional tensions. Perhaps more jarring for those used to the United States being this region’s most influential outside power, it was not President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken presiding over the handshake but China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, at a ceremony in Beijing.

The deal has caused unease in both Washington and Jerusalem, and critics of the Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu governments have blamed these leaders for allowing it to happen.

Without question, a true Iran-Saudi rapprochement would be a game-changer in the region. Whether or not that’s what this really is remains to be seen. But this event didn’t happen in isolation. Throughout the Middle East in recent years, longtime foes on opposite sides of deep political and sectarian divides are reopening lines of communication. Israel has opened diplomatic relations with several Arab nations; a ceasefire is holding in Yemen; and longtime foes of Syria’s dictator are welcoming him back into the fold.

As Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told Grid, for several countries, there seems to be a sense that “engaging and investing is a strategy that is much more likely to change the behavior of problematic actors than aggression and isolation.”

The question is how long this moment will last.

Iran and Saudi Arabia, back from the brink

While the roots of the conflict run deep, the current period of Iran-Saudi tension dates to 2016, when Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi Embassy in Tehran in retaliation for the execution of a popular Saudi Shiite cleric. The enmity between them involves religious differences but also Iran’s practice of backing religious proxy movements and political parties that pose a threat to the region’s autocratic governments and monarchies, of which Saudi Arabia is the most prominent example.

The two countries’ decision to reengage now may have less to do with any change in their fundamental religious and political differences than sheer exhaustion after years of conflict. Iran is in a state of severe economic distress, and with talks with the United States over a potential return to the 2016 nuclear agreement on hold, there’s little prospect on the horizon for sanctions relief. The country is also still facing a months-old nationwide protest movement. It’s not a moment when the Iranian regime can afford a costly and high-risk foreign policy.

The Saudis, meanwhile, may have had their eyes on Washington as much as on Tehran. Biden may not have made the crown prince, widely known as MBS, a “pariah,” as he once promised and as many human rights advocates had hoped, but unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump, he is not particularly interested in building a regional coalition to crush the Iranian regime. MBS has also shown signs of looking to extricate the kingdom from the long and mostly fruitless war in Yemen, which has become — among other things — a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Under these conditions, it may make more sense for the Saudis to reach at least a temporary accord with Tehran. And for Iran to avoid more conflict — even with a long-standing enemy.

Analysts of the region have generally reacted with caution, noting that this could be more of a temporary truce than a major geopolitical shift.

“Iran and Saudi Arabia, for the last 44 years since the Iranian Revolution, have had a pattern of periods of deep intense conflict followed by a détente,” Nader Hashemi, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, told Grid.

Though last week’s handshake took many by surprise, other recent regional developments have been building up to it. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s neighbor and close ally, restored diplomatic relations with Iran last year. And in 2021, the Saudis patched things up with neighboring Qatar after imposing an embargo on it for three years, in part over Qatar’s friendly relations with Iran.

Another sign of waning regional tensions: Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE recently made large financial contributions to Turkey, which was struggling with high inflation even before February’s devastating earthquake. Both kingdoms had long been at odds with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government over its support for Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab Spring protests. Erdogan, locked in a tough reelection fight, will certainly welcome the money.

U.S. steps back, China steps in

In Washington, reaction to the deal broke down along partisan lines.

“Renewed Iran-Saudi ties as a result of Chinese mediation is a lose, lose, lose for American interests.” Mark Dubowitz of the neoconservative think tank, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote. The Biden administration downplayed the Chinese role; National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said, “We support any efforts to de-escalate tensions there and in the region.”

Relations between the Biden administration and the Saudis remain pretty sour despite the president’s attempt to mend fences on a trip to Riyadh last year, and the choice to conduct these negotiations under Chinese auspices seems at least partially intended to send a message to Washington that the U.S. is no longer as relevant as it once was.

As for China, the deal was a win-win: an opportunity to play the role of what Foreign Minister Wang Yi called a “reliable mediator” and implicitly call the United States’ reliability into question. Wang indicated that China wants to play a greater political role in the region from which it now imports more than half its oil, and the country is reportedly planning a summit of Arab and Iranian leaders in Beijing this year. In this conflict, China has some things to offer as a mediator that the U.S. cannot — namely, diplomatic relations with both sides. (For that matter, Netanyahu has been pushing for closer Israeli-Chinese ties as well.)

Still, most analysts say it would be a surprise to see China push to play a significant diplomatic role in messy conflicts such as Yemen or Israel-Palestine, and it has a long way to go to match America’s political and military presence in the region.

“How many aircraft carriers does China have in the Middle East? The answer is none,” said Nimrod Novik, former foreign policy adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. “For all the talk of withdrawal, the U.S. is still here.”

Agitation in Israel

The timing of this deal couldn’t be worse for Benjamin Netanyahu’s embattled government, which is also dealing with escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence and massive protests against a planned judicial overhaul. One of the crowning achievements of Netanyahu’s tenure has been the Abraham Accords, a series of diplomatic normalization deals with Arab governments including the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, that had long refused to recognize Israel and championed the Palestinian cause. Though Saudi Arabia has not signed yet, there are high hopes in Israel that it might soon.

One of the major motivations behind these deals was the desire to build a united front to counter Iran, the mutual enemy of both Israel and Saudi Arabia and the region’s other Sunni-led governments. Now that those countries seem to be making peace with Iran, Netanyahu’s domestic opponents have been predictably quick to pounce. Former foreign minister and opposition leader Yair Lapid called the Saudi-Iran deal a “complete and dangerous failure of the Israeli government’s foreign policy.”

Novik, sees this as a somewhat myopic reaction. “It’s not just us,” he told Grid. “Not everything that happens in the Middle East is about Israel. We have to be humble.”

While the deal “flies in the face of anybody who thought that Saudi Arabia will serve as a launchpad for an Israeli strike against Iran,” according to Novik, he suggested it may actually make it easier for the Saudis to establish relations with Israel, since it wouldn’t be seen as a build up to a regional war.

In any event, it’s not as if Saudi Arabia and Iran will suddenly become close allies. Hashemi told Grid that “Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy is still much closer to Israel, in terms of its view of the region, than it is to Iran, even though Saudi Arabia is about to have diplomatic relations with Iran, but it doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel.”

The Yemen test

Yemen may prove to be the Saudi-Iran deal’s most significant test because it’s the place where the animosity between the two nations has played out to the most devastating effect.

A Saudi-led coalition has been fighting since 2015 on behalf of Yemen’s internationally recognized government in a war against the Iran-aligned Houthi rebel movement. Eight years later, the Houthis still control much of the country, including the capital, and more than 377,000 people have died, 60 percent of them due to indirect causes like food insecurity and lack of healthcare. Both sides have been accused of serious human rights abuses and war crimes.

A ceasefire that went into effect in February 2022 expired last October, but widespread fighting has not resumed, and diplomatic talks are continuing. MBS was Saudi Arabia’s defense minister when the intervention started, and he was long considered the architect of the war. But as the country’s leader, he has recently appeared to be trying to find a way to extricate his country from a conflict that has become a costly quagmire.

One major question is whether last week’s agreement included unpublicized pledges by Iran to cut off supplies to the Houthis.

The Iran-Saudi deal doesn’t address the underlying conflict behind the fighting in Yemen. And few expect the ceasefire to turn into a formal peace agreement any time soon. The Houthis have not always taken direct marching orders from Tehran and are likely well-armed enough to keep fighting on their own if they so choose. Yemen will remain a divided country in desperate humanitarian need. But at the very least, the deal makes it less likely we’ll see a return to the full-scale violence that has shattered the country for nearly a decade.

Assad comes back into the fold

Another sign of the move from confrontation to reconciliation in the Middle East is to be found in Syria, a longtime ally of Iran and an enemy of Saudi Arabia. Now, the Saudis and the UAE have been making moves to bring President Bashar al-Assad in from the cold. This is a dramatic reversal: For many years, the Saudis and Emiratis backed rebel groups fighting to overthrow Assad, who clung to power thanks to significant support from Iran and Russia.

Most dramatically, Assad visited the UAE last year, his first visit to another Arab country since the Syrian civil war began more than a decade ago. Last month, Assad hosted the UAE’s foreign minister in Damascus. Oman, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt have all resumed some level of engagement with Syria as well. Talks are reportedly underway aimed at bringing Syria back into the Arab League, the regional body from which it was suspended after Assad’s brutal crackdown on protests in 2011. Turkey’s Erdogan has also suggested he might meet with Assad, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The U.S. government, the other major onetime source of support for the Syrian opposition, has taken a fairly hands-off approach to this development, says Lister. “The U.S. says that it opposes the normalization of the Assad regime, but the administration has done absolutely nothing to stop it,” he said.

Given the credible allegations of war crimes against Assad’s regime, including the industrial-scale use of torture and rape as well as the use of chemical weapons against civilians, any efforts to normalize the Syrian dictator will be highly controversial. And one significant limit on how far this normalization can go is that U.S. sanctions still prohibit any dealings with the Syrian regime.

While the level of violence in Syria has diminished significantly, it’s still an active conflict, with around 30 percent of the country under the control of opposition groups. Some of those groups have been supported directly by the countries now sitting down with Assad. Efforts to broker any sort of political settlement have borne little fruit.

The Syrian dictator’s regional rivals may have concluded that there’s little prospect of him going anywhere, so they might as well deal with him — and in the process, perhaps woo him a bit away from Iran’s orbit. But there’s a long way to go before this reengagement becomes anything more than symbolic.

Explosions to come?

Any number of developments could derail this moment of détente. Not least of these is Iran’s inching ever closer to having the capability to build a nuclear weapon, the very nightmare scenario these other countries have long warned about.

As Lister asked, “If Iran is 10 days away from having sufficiently enriched stockpiles to make several nuclear weapons, are we truly going to see complete regional de-escalation? Or is everything going to explode, and all the various diplomatic steps we’ve heard about over the last couple of years will just fizzle away? I think that’s much more likely.”

Hashemi also warns against the tendency to look at the region’s conflicts as a “chess game, where we’re only concerned about what the ruling elites are saying to each other.” While most of these countries aren’t democracies, the views of their populations are a factor as well. Iran’s recent public protests are clearly one factor that drove it to seek to end its regional isolation; one condition of the deal is reportedly that Saudi Arabia agreed to tone down critical coverage of the Iranian regime on a Saudi-funded Farsi-language TV network that Tehran has blamed for stoking the protests. The Arab public’s concern over the fate of the Palestinians — which clearly eclipses the concerns of their governments — is also a limiting factor on the degree to which those governments could ever effectively ally with Israel in a coalition against Iran. Twelve years after the Arab Spring, the region’s autocratic governments are still in place — but perhaps not as confident as they once were.

As Hashemi put it, “The real divide in the Middle East is not between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It’s between ruling elites and the populations they control.”