Saudi Arabia and Iran struggle for Supremacy in the Middle East

The struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia has insinuated itself into nearly every regional issue, fracturing international alliances and sustaining wars across the region, while raising fears of a direct conflict between the two powers. Meanwhile, the region is rife with ongoing conflicts, and the long-simmering dispute between Israel and Palestine continues to flare up periodically.

Over the past decade, the struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for dominance in the Middle East has insinuated itself into nearly every regional issue, fracturing international alliances and sustaining wars across the region, while raising fears of a direct conflict between the two powers that could involve the U.S. Now both sides seem to be seeking a diplomatic offramp to confrontation, amid a broader shift toward lowering tensions across the region.    Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict Saudi Arabia ramped up its regional adventurism after Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful son of King Salman known as MBS, was appointed crown prince in 2017. From the Syrian civil war to the Saudi-led war in Yemen, that has meant proxy conflicts with Iran-backed regimes and nonstate armed groups that have on several occasions veered dangerously close to direct hostilities between the two rivals. A precision missile and drone strike on Saudi oil facilities in 2019 was widely blamed on Iran. And the Trump administration’s confrontational approach to Tehran brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war in January 2020, with direct implications for Riyadh. President Joe Biden has now reengaged diplomatically with Iran in an effort to revive the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal that the Trump administration withdrew from. Though those talks have now stalled, they coincide with broader moves across the Middle East to mend ties that had been frayed by the region’s various arenas of conflict and competition. Biden has also promised to make respect for human rights a central pillar of his foreign policy. The potential implications for U.S. partners in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, are significant, although to date Biden has not radically changed Washington’s policies in the region. Last year he even visited the kingdom and met with MBS, despite having promised to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state, in an effort to rally Washington’s Gulf partners to the U.S. side in its standoff with Russia over the war in Ukraine. But tensions have once again spiked over Riyadh’s alignment with Moscow to keep global oil prices high, despite pressure from Washington to increase production.

A man holds up a poster of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as others wave the country’s flag during a demonstration at the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 4, 2022 (AP photo by Vahid Salemi).

With a recent cease-fire having lapsed, the ongoing civil war in Yemen is set to continue fueling one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Syria’s 11-year civil war has now entered an extended endgame that, though less bloody, remains every bit as volatile. Libya has seen a respite in its civil war since a cease-fire was implemented in October 2020 and a transitional government named in March 2021, but its political transition to elections has now hit an increasingly tense impasse. Above all, the absence of fighting in these countries by no means guarantees the establishment of lasting peace.

Meanwhile, the current flare-up of violence between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in the West Bank, like the most recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, serves as a reminder that the conflict between Israel and Palestine cannot be simply wished away by regional powers and the United States. Like everything else in the region, this conflict has become entangled in the larger Saudi-Iran power struggle, with Saudi-allied leaders willing to remain silent on the Palestinian issue in return for Israeli support in containing Iran. The U.S.-brokered diplomatic normalization deals Israel signed in the final months of the Trump administration with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain simply formalized a strategic realignment that had until then been an open secret in the region. The question now is whether Saudi Arabia will follow suit. But normalization with Israel without a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict no longer seems as tenable a position as it did before with the return of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the head of a government that includes far-right parties certain to alienate Israel’s newfound partners in the Gulf.