March 17, 2023
Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed March 10 to reestablish diplomatic relations and reopen embassies seven years after the Saudis severed ties when Iran allowed mobs to ransack and burn down the Saudi embassy in Tehran.
The deal, struck in Beijing, represents a diplomatic victory for the Chinese as the Arab states of the Persian Gulf Arab perceive the United States slowly withdrawing from the Middle East.
Internationally, analysts were debating just how important the Chinese role was. Most figures in Iran were saying it meant China was replacing the United States as the major power in the Middle East. Some others around the world agreed, but many said its importance was being exaggerated. Furthermore, many analysts said the actual resumption of relations between Tehran and Riyadh didn’t mean the vast bank of problems between the two countries had been solved, pointing out that Iran and Saudi Arabia had relations for a third of a century before they were broken but that relations were sour throughout that time.
The two countries released a joint communique with China. Video showed Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, with his Saudi opposite number, Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban, and Wang Yi, China’s most senior diplomat.
The joint statement calls for reestablishing ties and reopening embassies “within a maximum period of two months.” It wasn’t known what the Saudis would use as an embassy given that the grounds of the old embassy are now just a vacant lot after the wreckage of the embassy was removed.
Chinese President Xi Jinping was awarded a third five-year term as president just hours before the Iran-Saudi announcement, so it wasn’t likely that he played a major role in the agreement. However, Shamkhani said China became involved a few weeks earlier when President Raisi visited Beijing. He didn’t say who took the initiative in bringing China into the picture.
But China has had a public relations problem with Iran since last December when Xi visited the Persian Gulf Arab states and signed a communique calling on Iran to hold talks with the UAE over three disputed islands. The Islamic Republic insists there is nothing to talk about because the islands are exclusively Iranian.
That gave China cause for trying to make Tehran happy, and may have been the reason China decided to try to get involved in the Iran-Saudi spat.
There was no word on what concessions either country gave the other to allow for relations to be resumed after seven years. Iran has been publicly very eager to resume ties, but the Saudis had been playing hard-to-get.
However, The Wall Street Journal quoted Iranian, Saudi and American officials saying, “As part of the deal, Iran pledged to halt attacks against Saudi Arabia, including from Houthi rebels it backs in Yemen.”
Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Journal, “For Iran it’s about escaping diplomatic isolation. For China, it’s about deepening their engagement in the region and showing it’s not just an energy consumer. And for Saudis it’s about the Americans.”
But the Journal concluded, “Re-establishing diplomatic relations isn’t likely to immediately lessen the longstanding security and sectarian tensions that have divided Riyadh and Tehran for decades and fueled their competition for regional dominance.”
US officials said the next two months, until the official reopening of the embassies, would be critical in gauging how serious Tehran is in honoring the agreement. That was also the major theme in the Saudi media after the agreement was signed.
“This is not a regime that typically does honor its word, so we hope that they do,” White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “We’d like to see this war in Yemen end, and that this arrangement that they have might help lead us to that outcome.”
Kirby added: “This is not about China. We support any effort to de-escalate tensions in the region. We think that’s in our interests, and it’s something that we worked on through our own effective combination of deterrence and diplomacy.”
China has stepped up its relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran in recent years as it became a major buyer of Middle East oil, but its ambitions had long appeared commercial, with little interest in involving itself in the region’s messy disputes.
Beijing has provided a lifeline to sanctions-hit Iran, becoming its only remaining major crude buyer since the US pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. But Beijing has also sought closer ties with Saudi Arabia, for which it is the biggest trade partner and a top oil buyer. Riyadh has also started importing sensitive missile technology from the Chinese military.
Tehran had been increasingly worried Beijing’s growing ties with Saudi Arabia could leave it further isolated. For that reason, Tehran may have been more open to any Chinese suggestions that it modify its policies on Yemen.
Shamkhani issued a statement that read like gobbledy-gook: “Removing misunderstandings and the future-oriented views in relations between Tehran and Riyadh will definitely lead to improving regional stability and security, as well as increasing cooperation among Persian Gulf nations and the world of Islam for managing current challenges.”
The Saudis’ Tehran embassy and Mashhad consulate were attacked in January 2016 days after Saudi Arabia executed a prominent Shiite cleric, Nimr an-Nimr, triggering considerable anger in Iran over Saudi discrimination against Shiites.
In the years since, tensions have risen dramatically. Iran has been blamed for a series of attacks in that time, including one that targeted the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry in 2019. The attack by missiles and drones did startlingly little damage and only interrupted Saudi oil output for days, but seriously damaged Arab-Iranian relations for years.
Iran has long denied launching the attack. It has also denied carrying out other assaults later attributed to the Islamic Republic. The denials have not helped Iran’s standing in the Arab world.
The main issue today between Iran and Saudi Arabia is Yemen. Houthis seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 and forced the internationally recognized government into exile in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led coalition armed with US weaponry and intelligence entered the war on the side of Yemen’s exiled government in March 2015. Years of inconclusive fighting has created a humanitarian disaster and pushed the Arab world’s poorest nation to the brink of famine.
The Islamic Republic has been the main, and possibly only, arms supplier for the Houthis. Saudi Arabia desperately wants to extract itself from the embarrassment of the Yemen war. For that, it needs the cooperation of Iran. So, the chances are high that Tehran made some concessions over Yemen to the Saudis, which Iran will try to obscure so as not to rile its ultra-hardliners.
For two years, Iraq sponsored talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia in an effort to get them to resume relations. They went nowhere. But Shamkhani said the talks in Beijing reached a conclusion after only five days of talks.
White House spokesman Kirby said Saudi Arabia had kept Washington informed of what was going on. He said the US supported the process to end the war in Yemen, indicating that was the central issue of the talks.
Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told CNN, “The fact that it has been agreed to in Beijing is very significant for China and its rise as a diplomatic and strategic player in the Gulf region. This does seem to recognize China’s unique role in being able to broker relations between Tehran and Riyadh, stepping into a position that had previously been occupied by European countries, if not the United States, and this will not be particularly pleasing to Washington.”
Sanam Vakil, a senior research fellow for the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House think-tank in London, said, “China’s role as a broker is striking, and could foreshadow a bolder diplomatic position. But we should be cautious in overstating Beijing’s intentions. This is more about China’s interests in the region. China has brought together two key actors – regional and economic actors – for the purpose of reducing regional tensions and facilitating greater economic engagement with both.”
The Wall Street Journal said that under the new agreement Saudi Arabia agreed to tone down critical coverage of Iran by Iran International, a broadcaster owned by a Saudi businessman, quoting officials from both Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Yuu Sun, an analyst at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, said it is important not to exaggerate the significance of the new agreement. Saudi-Iranian relations have been dominated for ages by the rival Saudi and Iranian claims to leadership of the Islamic world and the Saudi disdain for things Shiite. Resuming relations would not resolve those frictions, Sun said.
She also said China’s role was being exaggerated. “Saudi Arabia and Iran have been talking about rehabilitating their relations for some time. So, this is not something Beijing facilitated overnight…. This is not China bringing two countries together and solving their differences. This is China exploiting the opportunity of two countries who want to improve their relations to begin with.”
In Tehran, Ghasem Mohebali, a retired Iranian diplomat, dismissed the importance for Iran of the new agreement. “Our economic problems are the result of our relations with Europe and the United States, not our relations with China and Saudi Arabia. Iran cannot have permanent normal ties with any country without first solving its problems with the United States.”
Former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi was also dismissive. “This could have taken place earlier without the intervention of mediators. In that case, we would have owned nothing to anyone.”
But Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, a former commander of the Pasdaran who is now military adviser to the Supreme Leader, saw the picture quite differently. He said the new agreement was “a tectonic shift in the political field and the end to American hegemony in the region. The post-US era in the Persian Gulf region has just started.” But it should be noted that Iranian officials claim to have defeated the United States every few weeks or so.
It was unclear what the new agreement means for Washington. Though long viewed as guaranteeing Mideast energy security, regional leaders have grown increasingly wary of US intentions after its 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with the Islamic Republic. It has to do with growing doubts that the Americans care any longer about the Middle East after two frustrating decades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the White House bristled at the notion a Saudi-Iran agreement in Beijing suggests a rise of Chinese influence in the Mideast. “I would stridently push back on this idea that we’re stepping back in the Middle East – far from it,” Kirby said.
Mark Dubowitz, head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which opposes the Iran nuclear deal, said renewed Iran-Saudi ties via Chinese mediation “is a lose, lose, lose for American interests,” saying: “Beijing adores a vacuum.”
The US Navy and its allies have seized a number of weapons shipments recently that they describe as coming from Iran and heading to Yemen. Iran denies arming the Houthis, despite weapons seized mirroring others seen on the battlefield in the rebels’ hands. A United Nations arms embargo bars nations from sending weapons to the Houthis.