Saudi Arabia cut off diplomatic and trade ties with Iran
in retaliation for the provocative ransacking of the Saudi
Embassy in Tehran by what appeared to be a government-directed
mob. The escalation follows the execution by Saudi Arabia
on Jan. 2 of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric
and a Saudi national, who was sentenced to death last year
for leading peaceful protests among the Shia in the Saudi
Eastern Province, the Kingdom's main oil-producing region.
This development threatens to unleash
the most serious Saudi-Iran confrontation in the already destabilized
Middle East, while inflaming the sectarian tensions between
the region's Sunni and Shia to extreme levels of violence.
Domestic considerations in both countries contributed to the escalation — a show of force by an insecure leadership in Riyadh to stamp out signs of domestic unrest; a coming parliamentary election in Iran in February where the hardliners are determined to upstage moderates led by President Hassan Rouhani. But it's the spiraling rivalry for regional dominance between the two powers in the Gulf that fuels the conflict.
Domestic considerations in both countries contributed to the escalation — a show of force by an insecure leadership in Riyadh to stamp out signs of domestic unrest; a coming parliamentary election in Iran in February where the hardliners are determined to upstage moderates led by President Hassan Rouhani. But it's the spiraling rivalry for regional dominance between the two powers in the Gulf that fuels the conflict.
While a direct military confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran appears unlikely, both having too much to lose from the war, and Iran, emerging from its international isolation, would be loath to scuttle this process, it is on the regional battlefields of Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where Tehran and Riyadh are waging bloody wars by proxy, that the impact of the latest escalation will be felt. The oil market will be another battlefield with Russia as collateral damage.
Russia may not seem to be part of this
confrontation, but in reality it is now pretty much ensnared in it.
Riyadh's latest escalatory moves are as much a signal to Moscow as
they are to Tehran. And the message is clear — stay neutral or
stay out of the region. Unfortunately, Russia has not been neutral
in the great Sunni-Shia divide.
By plunging into the civil war
in Syria, Moscow has allowed itself to be entangled in the Shia
alliance with Iran, Assad's regime in Syria, Lebanon's Hezbollah,
the sectarian Shia government in Iraq and armed Shia militias
on Iran's payroll. Russia, whose Muslim population is predominantly Sunni,
now finds itself bombing Sunni Arabs and Turks in Syria while
protecting foreign Shia militias who are no less extremist than the Sunni
jihadists Russia is fighting.
This is not a good position to be in, given
that the vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East are Sunni.
That the Kremlin argues that it does not distinguish between Sunni
and Shia in its "war on terror" in Syria speaks
volumes about the quality of its decision-making.
Russia's strongest asset in the Middle East
in the post-Soviet period has been its impartiality and its ability
to stay on good terms with almost all players, while avoiding
becoming beholden to their narrow agendas. This accorded Russia
the enviable status of an honest broker with all the freedom
of maneuver it wanted, while the United States had boxed itself
into a rigid anti-Iran alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
That changed in 2015. U.S. President Barack
Obama's reluctance to do "stupid sh..t" has now turned
the United States into a free agent in the Middle East, while
Russia is joined at the hip with Iran and Assad in a sectarian
Shia alliance. While the United States is playing its own game in the
Middle East to reduce its dependence and footprint, Russia is
increasingly being played by others with no regard to Russia's
national interests. It now owns Assad's bloody mess in Syria and is
a target for Sunni jihadists to an extent that it was not
a year ago.
The political
talks between Assad's government and the Syrian opposition due
to start in two weeks in Geneva could be the first casualty
of the Saudi-Iranian confrontation. The Saudis are furious with
the way Russia and Iran managed to steer the Vienna talks
into broader international acceptance of Assad's prolonged stay
in the transition process. They are intent on derailing Moscow's
efforts to shape its outcome in Assad's favor by blocking
the participation of armed Islamist groups like Ahrar al-Sham
and Jaysh al-Islam whose leader Zahran Alloush, a Saudi ally, was
killed in an air strike on Dec. 25.
Riyadh
will be watching whether Moscow will deliver Assad's acceptance of the
transition process in line with the Geneva Communique of 2013
with a complete transfer of power to the transitional authority.
The Saudis need a settlement that would limit Iran's influence
in Syria and give Syrian Sunnis their due share of power.
Barring such an outcome — which Russian is unlikely
to deliver — the Geneva talks will be blocked and Saudi
Arabia and Turkey will proceed to bleed Russia and Iran
in an endless proxy war in Syria.
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