In the Mideast, the Enemy of My Enemy Can Still Be My Enemy

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In April 2008, Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki flew to Riyadh to meet with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. It did not go well.

Mottaki was seeking better relations with his country’s chief regional rival. Instead he got a lecture from the king about Tehran’s interference in Palestinian affairs. But “these are Muslims,” Mottaki responded, according to U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks. “No, Arabs,” replied the king. “You as Persians have no business meddling in Arab affairs.” The king said Mottaki had one year to improve ties.

Abdullah didn’t wait that long to make his next move. Moments later he told a delegation of visiting U.S. officials that the Iranians couldn’t be trusted and implored them, in the words of a senior adviser, to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and hitting it with economic sanctions, according to the same classified U.S. diplomatic summary of the meeting, which was published in 2012. President Obama did nothing of the sort. And the Saudi royals would have to wait almost a decade until they got a more amenable American president. Indeed, Abdullah wouldn’t live to see the shift.

When Donald Trump was running for office in 2016, you wouldn’t have guessed it would be him. Trump the candidate railed against foreign entanglements, costly interventions in other nations’ affairs, and what he called America’s “endless wars,” which at that time included 13 years of occupation in Iraq and 15 in Afghanistan.

Trump the president, however, has inserted the U.S. into the confrontation that’s shaping the Middle East. The conflict is woven out of intricate enmities of race, religion, history, and—of course—petroleum: On one side are Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, with the surprising addition of Israel; and, on the other, Iran and its allies Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Saudis and Israelis blame the situation on Iran’s decades-long ambitions to dominate the region, just as the Persian Empire did centuries ago. Tehran blames it on what it calls the B-Team: Trump national security adviser John Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the son of the current ruler, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who succeeded his half-brother Abdullah in 2015—and United Arab Emirates’ Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed.

Trump’s anti-interventionist leanings have been undermined by his closest allies in the Middle East and by White House courtiers like Bolton—whom the president has reportedly ridiculed for viewing warfare as the cure-all to nearly any foreign policy dilemma. That’s left the U.S. with an aggressive Middle East policy largely designed around the singular goal of backing Saudi Arabia and Israel in suppressing and pressuring Iran.

U.S.-Iranian animosity, of course, goes back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that overthrew the Washington-backed Shah of Iran. Iranian influence in the region would expand to the proportions that now alarm Israel and the Gulf Arabs after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Muslim minority government. Under Saddam, Iraq had been a regional counterbalance to Iran. The two countries fought an almost eight-year war that saw hundreds of thousands of casualties. With the fall of Saddam, power shifted to Iraq’s Shiite majority, which has been open to influence from Iran, the region’s Shiite superpower.

The Iranian presence has become so pervasive in Iraq that the U.S. is now citing it as a major security threat—and a reason to leave the country. Threats from pro-Iranian militia groups in Iraq forced the closure of the U.S. Consulate in the oil-rich southern city of Basra last year. This month the U.S. ordered all non-emergency personnel out of its embassy in the capital, Baghdad. As King Abdullah said in 2008, according to WikiLeaks: “Some say the U.S. invasion handed Iraq to Iran on a silver platter.”

When a civil war broke out in Syria during the Arab Spring in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad turned to Iran and Russia for help. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and slowly retook most of the country. His bloody victory made Iran an even bigger power broker in the region. Maintaining Assad in power was key for Iranian policy. Syria had always been the pipeline for Iran to ship arms and support to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.

No country was more alarmed than Netanyahu’s Israel when Trump—reverting to his noninterventionist nature— ordered all U.S. troops out of Syria last year. The Israelis lobbied the Trump administration heavily in the wake of the withdrawal announcement, according to people familiar with the matter. The reason: They wanted the U.S. to keep an eye on Iran’s activities there and maintain a deterrent force in the country. While Trump hasn’t revoked his order, the U.S. continues operations at Al-Tanf, the military base in Syria that Netanyahu was concerned would be abandoned.

Israel fears that Iran is adding to its presence in Lebanon with a growing military capacity in Syria and support for groups including Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu is determined to prevent Iran from opening another front against Israel. The Israeli military has mounted dozens of recent attacks against Iranian weapons convoys and military bases in Syria. (All this took place after an extraordinary, but brief, intervention by Iran, Turkey, the U.S., Russia, and a Saudi-led coalition against the caliphate set up by Islamic State.)

Amid all this, the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has only grown. In Yemen, a civil war that started during the Arab Spring devolved into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2015, when the Saudis and allied Gulf States intervened against Shiite Houthi rebels, who are armed and backed by Iran, in the north of the country. Saudi-led bombardment has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine, leading the European Union to call it “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”

Successive U.S. presidents have cozied up to the oil-rich Saudis, whose kings are the custodians of Islam’s most important holy sites. Since the establishment of the rule of the ayatollahs and Shiite theologians in 1979, Iran has sought to paint itself not only as a spiritual alternative to Sunni hegemony but also as the main anti-imperialist bulwark in the region. It views itself as a buffer against U.S. aggression and interference and as the defender of the cause of the Palestinians against Israel. Wrapping themselves in their regime’s revolutionary zeal, Iranian officials often point out how Saudi Arabia is guided by cash and fealty to Washington.

As Trump settled into his presidency, his administration curried favor with the heir to the Saudi throne, Prince Mohammed, widely referred to as MBS. The Saudi fixation with Iran under MBS has become so intense that analysts now wonder if Saudi Arabia will break the ultimate taboo in the Islamic world: establish relations with Israel.

The Iranian threat has had a silver lining for Israel in the form of warming ties with the Arab Gulf States. While Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are unlikely to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel until there’s a peace agreement with the Palestinians, the former enemies are cooperating on security and intelligence to counter Iran’s attempts to extend its influence. Arab countries see Israel as “an indispensable ally” in their efforts to fight Iran and the terrorist organization Islamic State, Netanyahu told Brazil’s Globo TV in January, calling it “a revolution in relations with the Arab world.”

Israel’s government and opposition are largely united behind a policy of containment against Iran. One potential source of discord is the 2015 nuclear deal crafted by the Obama administration, which Netanyahu fiercely opposed. While Israeli policymakers unanimously thought the agreement was a bad deal, some thought that once it was signed, it was better to keep it alive than to enter a gray area where the accord is semi-on and semi-off. In response to Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal, Iran this month accelerated the rate at which it’s enriching low-grade uranium fourfold and threatened to abandon the deal that prevented it from reaching the levels of enrichment that could allow it to produce a nuclear weapon.

While Israel sees Iran as an existential threat, the Saudi-Iranian rivalry is something more hoary: a chasm of misunderstanding and mistrust between the two societies, which despite geographic proximity are divided by language, religion, and ethnicity. Iran, as a non-Arab Muslim nation, has traditionally been viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion by Saudis. While some Saudis look upon Iran’s Shiite interpretation of Islam as heretical, on the Iranian side there’s a sense of cultural superiority because Persia is much older than Saudi Arabia as a nation-state. Indeed, Iranians are proud of their own, albeit limited, version of democracy. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has touted his country’s political system while taunting its neighbor for exporting terrorism based on Wahhabism, the Islamic doctrine espoused by the Saudi state. Middle-class Iranians mock Saudi Arabia for its showboating princes, lack of any sort of representative democracy, and for its treatment of women. Recently, the Saudis have tamped down any official rhetoric on Shiite heterodoxy in an attempt to improve ties with the Shiite Arabs who dominate Iraq’s politics. The moderation also has a domestic security angle: Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite population, mostly in its Eastern province. For that matter, Iran has a large Arab minority in its Khuzestan region.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have other, more pecuniary reasons to fear Iran. Unlike other Gulf States, which are almost entirely dependent on energy income and run as large, inefficient welfare states, Iran has a large, diverse, and relatively developed economy—despite years of U.S. sanctions aimed at crippling it. Iran produces its own automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and defense equipment. Its population, 81 million, rivals Turkey’s and is on average better educated. In the 2018 United Nations Human Development Index, Iran is first behind the top-tier countries, ranked 60th. Turkey ranks 64th.

But Trump’s sanctions are having a devastating effect on Iran’s economy. The currency crashed, sending prices of imports and inflation skyrocketing. About 70% of small factories began to close late last year because of raw material and hard-currency shortages, the state news agency IRNA reported. Trump believes his “maximum pressure” will eventually force Iran back to the negotiating table and has said repeatedly that Iran will “call” him when it’s ready to talk. But U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s list of 12 demands on Iran would amount to total capitulation, forcing it to cede not only its nuclear program but also all of the foreign policy gains it’s made in the region. The Iranians are defiant, believing they can wait out a change in U.S. leadership.

In the meantime, Iran’s capacity to wreak havoc on U.S. and allied interests in the Middle East can’t be underestimated, nor can the possibility of an escalation to military conflict. The U.S. has blamed Iranian proxies for recent attacks on pipelines in Saudi Arabia and on tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, the strait is a crucial chokepoint for the international oil trade. In mid-May, Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Adel al-Jubeir, summoned the media for a press conference in the middle of the night. “The kingdom of Saudi Arabia doesn’t want a war,” he said. “But we won’t stand with our hands bound in light of the continued Iranian attack, and Iran needs to realize that. The ball is in Iran’s court.” —With Golnar Motevalli, Ladane Nasseri, Michael Arnold, and Vivian Nereim

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net

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