On Friday, senior officials from Tehran and Riyadh announced the restoration of diplomatic ties between their respective countries. The agreement appears to signal a Saudi pivot away from the U.S. It is also a way for China, which brokered the deal, to assert itself as a a major powerbroker in the Middle East. But Bobby Ghosh cautions against reading too much into this development:
[T]he presence of full-fledged ambassadors in Tehran and Riyadh did little to ameliorate antagonism in the past. As for regional security, the greatest threat to the Gulf is posed by Iran’s attacks—mostly through proxies in Yemen and Iraq—on Saudi targets. The fox can hardly be trusted to cooperate in the security of the henhouse.
For the agreement to have any substance, the Iranians would have to call off their surrogates in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been bogged down in a conflict with the Tehran-backed Houthi militia. That the announcement in Beijing wasn’t preceded, or even accompanied, by an openly stated Iranian promise to this effect is a measure of Riyadh’s desperation to extract itself from the quagmire. It is conceivable that secret assurances have been given, but the Saudis will know not to trust the word of the party holding the catspaw.
The Saudis will also be keenly aware of the direct threat from Iran, whether through its nuclear ambitions (its uranium-enrichment program is now within a whisker of weapons-grade output), its production of ballistic missiles of progressively longer range, and its reported purchase of state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets. That is why Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom’s de-facto ruler, is now seeking a U.S. security guarantee and access to more American weapons, in exchange for normalization of relations with Israel.
Read more on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-11/saudi-iran-agreement-is-less-than-meets-the-eye?leadSource=uverify%20wall