On March 10, Riyadh and Tehran announced that, with Beijing’s mediation, they had agreed to restore diplomatic relations—raising expectations of a détente in their heated rivalry for influence in the region. But no such calming of tensions has occurred, observes Steven A. Cook. Instead, Iran has stepped up attacks against Israel, U.S. forces in Syria, and shipping in the Persian Gulf. And then there is the proxy war in Yemen, from which the Saudis are seeking to extract themselves:
There is a cease-fire, ships can offload aid and goods at ports that were previously blocked, and the airport in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, is open. That is all good news, but these developments predate the Saudi-Iranian-Chinese agreement. There are peace talks, but an end to the conflict in Yemen remains elusive largely because the [Iran-backed] Houthis have been intransigent. Perhaps that will change, and perhaps it will be the result of the new dialogue between the Saudi and Iranian governments, but so far it is hard to argue that Yemen’s trajectory has improved markedly as a result of the agreement.
The situation elsewhere in the Middle East hardly seems better. Just three weeks after the Saudis and Iranians came to terms, Iranian proxies attacked U.S. forces in Syria, killing a U.S. contractor and injuring several U.S. soldiers.
The big story about the Iran-Saudi-China deal is not the development of a more stable, pacific Middle East in which regional actors take matters into their own hands to forge a better future. It is actually more straightforward than that: the Saudis lost, and normalization of diplomatic relations with Iran is just cover for that setback. . . . Now, having taken Riyadh off the table, Tehran is working to undermine what is left of the region’s anti-Iran regional coalition—a policy that includes going on the offensive against Israel and the United States.
Read more on Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/12/saudi-iran-rapprochement-normalization-deal-china-de-escalation-yemen-syria/