Abdullah presided over the proxy war with Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, Iran—a series of battles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon—that has shaped the Middle East since the Bush Administration invaded Iraq, in 2003. In that conflict, Prince Saud represented a cautious but effective Saudi foreign policy that relied on the United States to guarantee the kingdom’s security, and worked through proxies and checkbook diplomacy to advance its interests. In a statement on his death, President Obama praised the prince for his “thoughtful perspective, charisma and poise, and diplomatic skill.”
Since he ascended to the throne after Abdullah’s death, the new King Salman, a seventy-nine-year-old who was initially seen as a caretaker, has pursued a more aggressive approach. While Prince Saud and Abdullah mainly worked behind the scenes to assert Saudi power, Salman and his advisers are more willing to undertake military adventures and directly confront Iran. In late March, the new monarch launched a war against Houthi rebels in Yemen and appointed his thirty-year-old son, who is both the defense minister and the deputy Crown Prince, to oversee the campaign. So far, the war is popular in Saudi Arabia, but, as it drags on and civilian casualties mount, Saudi rulers will find it more difficult to justify why one of the richest Arab states is leading a war against the poorest. Salman also increased Saudi support for Sunni rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian-backed regime in Syria—another signal that the kingdom is no longer as reliant on the United States and is taking a more assertive role to counter what it views as Iran’s growing regional influence.
On Tuesday, the United States and five other world powers reached an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program for more than a decade, in return for lifting international sanctions, despite Saudi Arabia’s concerns that a resurgent Tehran could expand its regional ambitions. Once the agreement goes into effect, Iran will be allowed to reënter the global financial system, increase its oil exports, and access more than a hundred billion dollars in frozen assets. The Saudi regime issued a terse statement welcoming any compromise that would prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Saudi-owned media, however, was far more critical and hyperbolic. One cartoon published in a Saudi newspaper owned by a branch of the ruling family showed a white-bearded Iranian cleric with a menacing grin turning the spigot on an oil pipeline labeled “nuclear deal.” The spigot poured dollar bills into the mouth of a masked man whose forehead is stamped “Terrorism.”
Prince Saud was the third son of King Faisal, a longtime Saudi foreign minister who ascended to the throne in 1964. When Faisal was assassinated, in 1975, the newly installed King Khalid chose Prince Saud to replace his father as foreign minister. (Faisal had kept the ministry throughout his reign as king.) U.S. officials were eager to work with Prince Saud, noting that he spoke English fluently and had an economics degree from Princeton University. “Saud is ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-American’ to the extent those terms have much meaning here,” a U.S. diplomatic cable from Riyadh noted in April, 1975. “He understands Europe and the U.S. and sees Saudi Arabia’s interests served by continuation of its traditional ties with them.”
Prince Saud took office at a time when the Arab world was still coping with the legacy of Arab nationalism and its leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who overthrew the British-backed king in Egypt, in 1952. Nasser wanted to topple the other Arab monarchies, especially the House of Saud, and for nearly two decades he led a struggle over the future of the Arab world, between the so-called “progressive” republican regimes and the conservative monarchies. This conflict shaped the House of Saud’s foreign policy, which Prince Saud inherited from his father, of containing populist and revolutionary sentiment wherever possible and supporting Islamic radicals and authoritarian regimes.
In his decades as foreign minister, he helped negotiate an end to the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon; shaped the kingdom’s response to the Palestinian uprisings against Israel in 1987 and 2000; helped mend Saudi relations with the United States after the September 11th terrorist attacks, in which fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis; and warned the Bush Administration against its invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2002, Prince Saud launched King Abdullah’s Arab peace initiative, which offered Israel peace with all Arab states in exchange for its withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands. The plan went nowhere, and Saud later called the failure to create a Palestinian state the biggest disappointment of his career.
Since the nineteen-thirties, the House of Saud has managed a fraught pair of alliances: one with Wahhabi clerics who vilify America and the West, and whose ultra-conservative teachings are the official form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia, and the other with the United States, as a major global oil supplier and its most important ally in the Arab world. Successive U.S. Administrations supported the Sauds and provided military assistance whenever aggressive neighbors, like Iraq, threatened the kingdom. In 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, Washington sent half a million troops to Saudi Arabia and used it as a base from which to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The American military presence on Saudi soil enraged Islamic radicals, who decried the Sauds’ decision to allow “infidel” Western forces into Islam’s birthplace. Osama bin Laden was among those who turned against the ruling family in 1990, accusing it of straying from Islam.
After the 2003 Iraq invasion, leaders of Sunni Arab states made few public statements, afraid of antagonizing Iran or appearing too close to the unpopular Bush Administration. But, in private, they wanted someone else to take care of their “Iran problem,” and by 2007 they were clamoring for the United States or Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, no matter the consequences. One secret U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks detailed a series of meetings in April, 2008, between King Abdullah, Prince Saud, other senior Saudi princes, and top U.S. officials who were in Riyadh to discuss American policy in Iraq. Saudi leaders were furious over Iranian influence there, and their inability to counter it. The Saudi Ambassador to Washington at the time, Adel al-Jubeir (who was appointed to replace Prince Saud as foreign minister in April), repeated “the King’s frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”
The conflict with Iran has only intensified since the Arab uprisings of 2011, when the Sauds tried to choke off revolutionary momentum in the region. After the wave of popular protests forced out dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the House of Saud resorted to one of its time-honored methods of shoring up internal support: generous handouts. King Abdullah pledged to build half a million housing units for low-income Saudis; awarded two extra months of salary to all government employees, who make up a majority of the national workforce; and created more public-sector jobs. Abdullah also granted about two hundred million dollars to organizations controlled by the Wahhabi religious establishment, including the morality police. In turn, the kingdom’s highest religious council issued a fatwa proclaiming that Islam forbids street protests. The ruling family also played the Shiite card, declaring that the uprisings across the region were targeting Sunnis and being instigated by Iran.
Saudi leaders tended to view all Shiite politicians and factions in the Muslim world as agents of Iran—and they attached an Iranian connection, whether real or imagined, to virtually any regional security issue. When the revolutions spread to Yemen, on its southern border, and Bahrain, a Shiite-majority country ruled by a Sunni monarchy, only sixteen miles from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where most of the kingdom’s oil reserves lie and where a large segment of the population is Shiite, the Sauds accused Iran of supporting the Bahrain uprising and sent troops across the causeway to help crush the pro-democracy movement. The Gulf Cooperation Council, of which the Saudis are the leading power, began discussions on offering membership to Jordan and Morocco—two non-Gulf, non-oil-producing Sunni monarchies—in an effort to build a stronger bulwark against Iran.
The kingdom also had to absorb the economic shock of plummeting oil prices. In January, Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell below fifty dollars per barrel for the first time since May, 2009, a drop caused in part by Saudi Arabia’s refusal to cut high production levels. The global oil market will be even more saturated when Iran increases its production once sanctions are lifted. While Saudi officials insist that their foreign reserves, which peaked at about eight hundred billion dollars in mid-2014, allow them to withstand a long period of low oil prices, the kingdom has already spent sixty-five billion dollars of its reserves in the first five months of this year. When Salman ascended to the throne in January, he granted salary bonuses to all public employees and members of the military. Those bonuses most likely came out of the foreign reserves, since the kingdom was already projecting a 2015 budget deficit, the first in seven years.
The war in Yemen is also draining the Saudi budget, and it will become more costly as the conflict drags on. The Saudis and their Sunni Arab partners want to restore Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, a Sunni, to power. The Houthis, who belong to a sect of Shiite Islam called Zaydis, are allied with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a longtime dictator who was ousted from power after the Arab uprisings spread to Yemen. Once a Saudi client, Saleh was replaced by Hadi, in 2012, under a deal brokered by Riyadh. The Houthis are also allies of Iran, but while the Saudis were quick to label them as Iranian proxies, it was unclear how much support they actually received from Tehran before the Saudi intervention.
Prince Saud represented a generation of senior royals who wanted to exert Saudi power in the region and contain Iran, but ultimately they were satisfied with the status quo. Saudi Arabia’s new King Salman and his inner circle, who inherited unprecedented regional turmoil and a series of proxy battles with Iran, have decided to upend the regional order. For now, they appear to be creating a legacy of more war and instability.
