Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict by Ibrahim Fraihat (review)

Deconstructing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran remains the focus of Ibrahim Fraihat's timely book Iran and Saudi Arabia. The over-four-decade rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh has had domestic, bilateral, regional, and international implications and has perpetuated conflicts throughout the Middle East. In recent years, tensions have spiraled into proxy battles in Syria and Yemen—two ongoing wars that pose humanitarian and conflict resolution challenges. Most recently, tensions have further intensified with Riyadh's support for United States president Donald Trump's maximum pressure campaign that saw a barrage of sanctions imposed on Iran's economy with the goal of forcing Iran to alter its interventionist regional policy. In return, Tehran has escalated detaining tankers in the Persian Gulf and sponsoring attacks on the Saudi oil facilities of Abqaiq and Khurais in September 2019. A war of words has further hardened public opinion suggesting the conflict has become intractable and cementing a zero-sum mentality in the minds of the respective leadership.

Fraihat builds upon previous contributions to the literature on this rivalry to propose a vital conflict resolution approach to manage competition. Fraihat's work is interdisciplinary and balanced, bringing together a variety of primary and secondary scholarship and a regionally based perspective on the subject. He correctly diagnoses that security is the principal driver of conflict and that defining and understanding both countries' respective security dilemma is essential to managing tensions. Riyadh sees Tehran as an expansionist and an interventionist regional power that has brought instability to the wider Middle East through its plans to "export the revolution" and its support for proxy and militia groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Conversely, Iran's threat perceptions are defined by the US and Israel rather than toward Saudi Arabia directly. Iran, however, has come to see Saudi support for American containment efforts against Iran as a growing threat.

This shared security dilemma has been mutually driven by escalation and leader driven instrumentalization of tensions. The author lays to bed the oft-used yet reductive sectarian interpretation of Iranian-Saudi tensions. He correctly sees the sectarian dimensions of Iranian-Saudi tensions as a byproduct rather than a driver of conflict where leaders in Tehran and Riyadh have exploited the sectarian divide to assert regional leadership at the expense of the other. Moreover, leaders in Riyadh and Tehran see the tensions as enhancing their domestic and regional legitimacy.

Interestingly, Fraihat believes the tensions that peaked after the 2003 Iraq war have currently reached a stalemate. Both Tehran and Riyadh today have domestic challenges and priorities that require more immediate attention. He also suggests that tensions have served wider US and Israeli interests. Controversially, the author argues that the regional threat from Iran has justified the US security-based relationship with the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the US military presence in the Gulf, and drawn-out, increased GCC-Israeli cooperation against Iran. Fraihat sees the regionalization of these tensions as an obstacle to conflict resolution.

In the subsequent chapters of the book, Fraihat lays out the pathways needed to address the aforementioned security imbalances. Effectively, he prescribes the creation of a crisis management system that through dialogue and a series of confidence-building measures (CBMs) would build steps toward rapprochement. Fraihat makes practical suggestions ranging from the creation of a conflict hotline, senior government exchanges, the establishment of technical coordination committees, and formal and informal CBMs as important de-escalatory measures. Through this process both parties can engage in processes that over time would dilute tensions and build incremental trust. The 2001 Riyadh-Tehran Security Pact that saw a commitment to combat terrorism, drug trafficking, and organized crime after years of negotiation and diplomacy is drawn upon to highlight a past example of success, albeit a limited one.

The author also suggests that for engagement to be successful it must be multifaceted and require not only formal high-level diplomatic discussions but also...