After years of mutual mistrust and jockeying for regional power, Saudi Arabia and Iran may be on their way to mending fences, analysts say.
Mutual concerns over the emergence of the so-called Islamic State group in the region and Iran’s impending nuclear deal with the West are providing stimulus for Riyadh and Tehran to head towards détente, analysts say.
“If there is a deal on the nuclear issue, then this will bring Iran back as a participant in the dynamics of the international community, which will force it to become more pragmatic and more moderate,” said , director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “And this is in Saudi Arabia’s interests because the more extreme Iran becomes, the more threatening it becomes.”
Saudi Arabia is a conservative Sunni Islamic kingdom, home to Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. As such, it regards itself as the rightful leader of the Islamic world.
Iran is a Shi’ite Islamic republic, which has sought to exert religious influence over Shia populations elsewhere in the region.
Some four decades ago, both countries were relatively politically aligned and had friendly relations with the West. But things changed after the 1979 revolution in Iran and the return of exiled Ayatollah Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini, who resented the Saudi kingdom’s relationship with the West.
“The Islamic Republic quickly started exporting the revolution in the Middle East,” said Khatib. “They were trying to get Shia populations in the region to accept the supreme leader’s [Khomeini’s] model of Islamic jurisprudence as the only acceptable political and religious model for [the] population.”
Saudi Arabia saw this as a challenge to its own influence as a regional actor in the Middle East.
“Iran’s concern about Saudi Arabia is similar to Saudi Arabia’s concern about Iran. Both these countries are using theocracy as a basis for increasing and expanding political influence,” Khatib added.
And in the end, the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran is about far more than religion, said , a senior international policy analyst at RAND and author of .
“The Saudis thought, especially during the Shah's regime, that the United States favored Iran in the region over Saudi Arabia, and there is a persistent Saudi fear to this day that the United States and Iran might work behind Saudi Arabia’s back and come to a secret agreement that leaves the Saudis in the cold,” said Nader.
"There is also a long ethnic component," said in terms of Arabs versus Persians. But really, what I think it comes down to more than anything else is more geostrategic differences."
Experts generally agree that whatever the crisis in the Middle East over the past thirty years—Israeli-Palestinian tensions, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf and Iraq Wars, Syria’s civil war, the rise of the Islamic State or the recent Houthi takeover in Yemen--there always seems to be a degree of Saudi and Iranian involvement, always on opposite sides.
"I think the involvement of Iran in Yemen and the fairly well-documented support for the Houthis really adds another element to this conflict and really reinforces this idea that Iran is if anything expanding its encroachment, meddling in the region and...slowly but suredly trying to encircle the Arab Gulf countries," Nazer said.
The rivalry is especially evident in present-day Iraq and Syria, said RAND's Nader.
“The conflicts in Iraq and Syria are being fueled by Iran and Saudi Arabia…Iran backs Shia militias in Iraq and it’s a big supporter of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon,” he added.
At the same time, he said, the Saudis support Sunni groups in Lebanon and they also are among some of the biggest backers of the Sunni-led insurgency in Syria.
“Today, both countries are suffering the blowback of their rivalry, particularly Iran,” says Nader. “For example, low oil prices that are in part attributed to Saudi policy on oil exports and are really further damaging Iran’s economy. And Saudi Arabia is facing tremendous insecurity over [the] Houthi Shia takeover of the Yemeni government.”
And for the first time, Iran and Saudi Arabia face a common enemy at their borders—the Islamic State, which, as the militant group has made clear, has long-term ambitions for the region as a “state project.”