Podcast: Jonathan Schachter on What Saudi Arabia’s Deal with Iran Means for Israel and America

The foreign-policy analyst on how the China-brokered deal came about and what signals the Saudis are sending.


A man in Tehran holds a newspaper reporting the China-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore ties, signed in Beijing the previous day, on March, 11 2023. ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images.
A man in Tehran holds a newspaper reporting the China-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore ties, signed in Beijing the previous day, on March, 11 2023. ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images.
Observation
March 17 2023
About the authors

Jonathan Schachter is a senior fellow with Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. He specializes in international security, strategy and diplomacy.

A weekly podcast, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund, offering up the best thinking on Jewish thought and culture.

Podcast: Jonathan Schachter
 
News broke last week that China had mediated a restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afterwards, analysts of the Middle East wondered what that means for the quiet relations that Israel and Saudi Arabia had been building recently, thanks primarily to their joint opposition to Iran. Had Israeli domestic politics or the return of Benjamin Netanyahu turned Saudi Arabia away? Did the American withdrawal from the Middle East over the last decade create a vacuum that China saw an opportunity to fill? How, if it all, did this relate to reports of recent liberalization in Saudi society, or the ongoing protests in Iran? Would this deal breathe new strength into the latter regime at the very moment that it has acquired new fighter jets from Russia and grows closer to breakout nuclear capacity?

Jonathan Schachter, one such American observer of the Middle East, thinks that the Iran-Saudi deal is, in significant measure, a diplomatic signal directed at President Biden and the United States. In conversation here with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, he looks at that deal in light of a set of Saudi announcements that were released just one day before. Those announcements hint at what might induce Saudi Arabia to formalize its relations with Israel and even more deeply root itself in the American-led, Western alliance structure. He believes that the Saudis are sending America a question: do you, the United States, want to see us go in the direction of our Thursday announcement, or do you want us to go in the direction of our Friday one?

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

 

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