Saudi Arabia’s Deterrence Options Against Iran.
Of all the challenges to Saudi Vision 2030 — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) high-stakes plan for life after oil — arguably none is greater than Iran’s threat to Saudi national security. To succeed, MBS must protect the kingdom, which will require not only fortifying its defenses against further Iranian and Houthi attacks but also establishing a level of deterrence against Tehran.
Riyadh has three main deterrence options, which are by no means mutually exclusive: 1) diplomacy; 2) external protection; and 3) more effective military capabilities. The diplomatic option, while highly imperfect, is probably Saudi Arabia’s best bet at present to preserve the calm. But to sustain the peace for the long term, there is no substitute for Saudi Arabia developing more effective military capabilities, especially since the option of external protection seems less than probable.
Security Is Paramount
Security is integral to Saudi Arabia’s economic restructuring, especially on such a massive scale. Should the kingdom suffer another major conventional strike, like the one in September 2019, when Iran fired 25 drones and cruise missiles against Saudi oil processing facilities in Abqaiq (the largest oil processing and stabilization center in the world) and Khurais, or should the Iran-backed Houthis resume their kinetic attacks against Saudi civilian targets, Vision 2030 could be dealt a heavy blow.2 The September 2019 attack represented the single largest daily oil supply disruption in history, with 5.7 million barrels of Saudi crude production lost.
Until its war in Yemen in 2015, Saudi Arabia was living in a relatively permissive security environment. To be sure, there were always tensions with Iran, and the threat of domestic or regional violent extremism was omnipresent. But the former never escalated to a military crisis, and the latter had been relatively contained since 2003, when the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden unleashed his Saudi henchmen on the kingdom and unsuccessfully tried to depose the House of Saud. Even at the height of the Islamic State threat in 2014, Saudi Arabia was relatively secure.
Saudi Arabia’s security situation began to deteriorate when the Houthis, a Yemeni rebel group supported by Tehran, overthrew the central government in Sanaa in September 2014 and later seized much of Yemen. Even though Yemen had been a thorn in the side of Saudi Arabia for several decades, this time the Saudis assessed that the Houthi takeover presented a more immediate threat to their national security given the militia’s direct and growing links to Iran. Iran arms the Houthis with sophisticated weapons, including drones and missiles, and in return, the Houthis allow Iran to extend its clout into the Red Sea, a vital link in a network of global waterways of great importance to the world economy.
Having seen how Tehran had institutionalized its influence in places like Lebanon and Iraq through local Shi’a proxies, the Saudis feared a similar Iranian outpost next door. To prevent that from happening, MBS launched a war against the Houthis, initially with the help of an Arab coalition from the Middle East and parts of North Africa. But he underestimated and ultimately failed to break his opponent, which remains in control of the bulk of Yemen’s northern highlands as well as the capital city of Sanaa. A mutually hurting military stalemate between the Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces led to a truce in April 2022 under the auspices of the United Nations.7 While the agreement expired in October 2022 after being extended twice, the cease-fire has largely held. Yet, notwithstanding this, the Houthis still have their heavy arms, which means that they continue to pose a security threat to Saudi Arabia.
Diplomacy
Deterrence through diplomacy is as old a concept as the history of war among nations. It is a cheap tool, or at least much less costly than war, and, if properly utilized, it can be highly effective. The idea is simple: by talking with your adversary and attempting to manage or resolve your differences with them through bargaining and mutual concessions, you avoid war. Of course, the trick is how both parties get to a fair and sustainable “yes.” Diplomacy is also used to communicate to an adversary various information, including a state’s capacity and resolve to fight if pushed to it. Expert international relations scholarship suggests that deterrence can be achieved by conveying the information that a state is willing to fight over a disputed issue or issues.
The Egypt-Israel war dynamic in the 1970s is a perfect example of the successful role of diplomacy in promoting peace. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat knew that countering the security threat from Israel and recovering the Sinai Peninsula, which Egypt had lost to Israel in the 1967 war, was not achievable solely through military means (nor through U.S. mediation alone). So, on Nov. 19, 1977, to the shock of both Israelis and Arabs, he went to Jerusalem, met with Israel’s leaders, and boldly declared “no more war” in the Israeli Knesset to reassure the Jewish state of Egypt’s peaceful intentions.10 Sadat’s gamble, for which he paid soon after with his life, facilitated an Egyptian-Israeli land-for-peace deal that culminated in a formal peace treaty in 1979.
Can Saudi Arabia achieve lasting peace with Iran through a historic gesture like Sadat’s? This scenario should not be ruled out, but it is unlikely because the differences with the Egypt-Israel case are significant. Egypt and Israel felt mutually threatened and suffered a great deal from multiple wars they had fought. Each side genuinely feared aggression by the other, and both wanted an end to armed conflict. So, when Egyptian and Israeli leaders negotiated at Camp David with U.S. mediation, the conversations naturally were dominated by hard security matters.
Iran does not feel threatened by Saudi military capabilities or intentions. Indeed, Iranian leaders do not worry about the possibility of a Saudi attack against Iran, although they do worry about Saudi Arabia potentially providing a platform for U.S. and/or Israeli military operations against Iran (so a Saudi-Iranian diplomatic agreement that includes a commitment from the Saudis not to permit the use of their territory for third-party military operations would be valuable to the Iranians). Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, does feel threatened by Iran, for the simple fact that Iran has extensive military capabilities that it used offensively in September 2019, while its Houthi partners have launched hundreds of attacks from Yemen against Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh is not the party from which the Iranians really want to extract security concessions. The number-one security worry of the Iranians is and always has been America’s military power in the region, followed by Israel’s, not the capabilities of the Saudis. It is the U.S. footprint Iran wants to reduce and ideally remove from the region.
This profound discrepancy in threat perceptions and objectives between Saudi Arabia and Iran does not make for a productive security dialogue. In the absence of symmetry on the issues and some level of mutual vulnerability, it is hard to see meaningful breakthroughs in a Saudi-Iranian dialogue.
Until recently, Riyadh had not engaged in formal negotiations with Tehran to address its security concerns. The Saudis had long held the view that talking with an adversary with a proven record of aggression and bad intentions was futile. When asked in February 2020 whether Saudi Arabia would enter into talks with Iran, Saudi Foreign Affairs Minister Faisal bin Farhan provided the same answer as many of his predecessors: “Our message to Iran is to change its behavior first before anything is to be discussed. […] Until we can talk about the real sources of that instability, talk is going to be unproductive.”
But as it struggled to end its costly war in Yemen and as it watched the United States withdraw its combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce its military involvement across the region, Saudi Arabia’s calculus on negotiations with Iran began to shift. A sense of urgency was building up in Riyadh. The Houthi rebels were not only mounting an effective resistance against the Saudi war effort but also attacking Saudi cities and airports, gravely damaging the image of a country that wants to be viewed as safe for business and foreign direct investment.
In April 2021, Saudi officials began to engage in talks with their Iranian counterparts in Baghdad about a range of issues, including, most notably, Tehran’s military support for the Houthis. The two sides reportedly met for five rounds over two years, and in March 2023, they announced a Chinese-sponsored accord to normalize their diplomatic relations (Saudi Arabia had cut off ties with Iran in January 2016, after Iranian protestors stormed Saudi diplomatic facilities in Tehran over the Saudis’ execution of dissident Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr).
As of this writing, more than five months have passed since the Saudi-Iranian deal was signed, yet nobody knows what agreements, if any, Riyadh and Tehran have reached on security. There is language in the bilateral agreement on non-interference in the internal affairs of states in the region, but it is generic and non-binding. On Yemen, for example, it is not clear if Iran is legally committed to stopping its military aid to the Houthis, even though it allegedly agreed to halt covert weapons shipments to the Houthis as part of its diplomatic deal with Saudi Arabia. But in reality, it did not. In May 2023, U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking stated that Iran has continued to provide the Houthis with arms and drugs. The cease-fire to which the Houthis and Saudi Arabia agreed in April 2022 has held so far, but it could be broken at any moment if the Houthis decide to expand their territorial control. And even if Iran had a role in facilitating the truce, it is unclear if it can stop the Houthis from launching new attacks against Saudi civilian targets.
Saudi Arabia’s central demand from rapprochement with Iran is to stop further attacks against the kingdom, either directly or through regional surrogates. Iran, for its part, wants money from Saudi Arabia to alleviate its deep economic troubles. Indeed, Iran seeks Saudi and possibly Gulf Arab funds to support an economy that has been a source of widespread social unrest (the Saudis said they might invest in Iran but only under the right circumstances). Iran also wants Saudi Arabia to step back from funding anti-Iranian media networks and to readmit its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, into the Arab League, which Riyadh did.
While luring Tehran with normalization, economic investments, and diplomatic acceptance of the Assad government might bring temporary calm, it is unlikely to transform the strategic environment or eliminate Saudi fears of Iran. This Saudi strategy smacks more of appeasement than effective diplomacy. The success of Saudi deterrence cannot just be viewed as the absence of Iranian aggression. If the latter is avoided at the price of unilateral Saudi concessions and carrots, then it must be concluded that Saudi Arabia has built very little deterrence.
There are reasons to be less hopeful about the longevity of the current calm between Saudi Arabia and Iran. First, it is unlikely that Iran will sever its military links with the Houthis because that would deny it a strategic foothold on the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a critical global maritime chokepoint that controls access to the Red Sea. So long as the Houthis have Iranian weapons that can hit targets deep inside Saudi Arabia, Saudi security will be at risk.
Second, it is even more unlikely that Iran will stop seizing commercial tankers in Gulf waters because it sees its actions as a response to the United States occasionally confiscating cargos of Iranian oil.
Third, it is doubtful that Iran will quit supporting its militant allies in Lebanon and Iraq and suddenly respect the sovereignty of these countries. This would be vastly inconsistent with Iranian ideology and decades of foreign policy practice in the Arab world.
Fourth, the dispute between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait on the one hand, and Iran on the other, over the offshore Durra natural gas field has the potential to escalate. The Kuwaitis have said they and the Saudis exclusively own the natural wealth in the Gulf’s maritime “Divided Area,” while the Iranians have claimed they have a stake in it and called a Saudi-Kuwaiti agreement signed last year to develop it “illegal.”
External Protection
Saudi Arabia is not oblivious to the limits of diplomacy with Iran, which is why it has not put all its eggs in one basket to achieve deterrence against its archrival. Saudi Arabia could obtain official security guarantees from an external ally to prevent Iran from attacking it again. The two candidates that could play that role are the United States and possibly China.
Despite its so-called mediation of the Saudi-Iranian normalization deal, however, China is unlikely to commit to taming Iran because it has no interest in having significant security responsibilities in the region (it was the Saudis and the Iranians who did the heavy lifting on the deal, and they turned to Beijing to provide a great power venue and serve as a soft guarantor). There is also nothing in the Saudi-Iranian accord that requires Beijing to play a policing or monitoring role should either side make transgressions.
China will not choose between Saudi Arabia and Iran, because it relies on both for substantial oil imports. China and Iran are also strategic partners (although it is unclear what the real terms of that partnership are). Therefore, it is hard to imagine China agreeing to formally ally with Saudi Arabia and provide it with protection against Iran. To meet its ends in the region, Beijing is more likely to keep utilizing economics and lately some measure of diplomacy.
Yet even if one assumes that China’s strategic calculus changes down the road, and the Chinese leadership considers extending a formal deterrent to Saudi Arabia to safeguard its long-term economic interests, the People’s Liberation Army will not have significant military capabilities, access, or basing in the region anytime soon to be able to play that guardianship role. China’s military strategy focuses on modernizing and developing capabilities for a high-end, short-duration fight in the Indo-Pacific, including technologically advanced missiles, stealth aircraft, naval vessels, submarines, and other hardware. While China can currently use these capabilities closer to home, it faces shortfalls in joint operations, tactics, sustainment, and deployment of these assets globally.
If Saudi Arabia’s chances of securing a credible defense pact from China are not good, the likelihood of getting it from the United States is not significantly better. But that is not for lack of trying. In return for potentially normalizing its ties with Israel, Saudi Arabia has asked for official security guarantees from Washington — which would amount to a formal extended deterrent — and help with establishing a domestic civilian nuclear program.
President Joe Biden is unsure about this quid pro quo, saying in a July 9, 2023, CNN interview that this discussion is premature. In his recent interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Biden was also hesitant about the Saudi deal when asked about it.
For a while, the Biden administration was reportedly willing to entertain Saudi Arabia’s demands. Biden had dispatched his chief diplomat and top national security aides to the kingdom in recent weeks and months to discuss that very proposal. Even Biden’s political opponents support the idea. “I believe the Republican Party, writ large, would be glad to work with President Biden to change the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham after he and several of his colleagues recently met with MBS in Saudi Arabia.
In theory, a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal could contribute to Middle East security and economic prosperity in the region, from which the United States and the world would benefit. But Biden, the commander-in-chief who decides on this issue (with ultimate Congressional authorization), made it sound like Washington is not willing anytime soon to pay the hefty price of an official defense pact with the kingdom to support a vision that only indirectly matters to the U.S. national interest. It is also hard to envision a scenario where the Pentagon and the broader U.S. national security community fully cooperate with the idea of obligating the United States to commit more military resources to the Middle East when the U.S. National Security Strategy and the U.S. National Defense Strategy are screaming for a greater U.S. focus on China’s potential seizure of Taiwan and Russia’s current war against Ukraine.
There are a few other concerns that are most probably on the minds of U.S. national security officials. First, if Iran avoids direct military action against Saudi Arabia (thanks to a U.S.-Saudi defense pact), but continues to operate in the gray zone and steps up its destabilizing activities against the kingdom through its regional proxies, how would Washington respond? More specifically, if the truce between Saudi Arabia and the pro-Iran Houthis breaks (and it’s possible it will as a result of Iran’s objection to Saudi-Israel normalization), and Saudi civilian targets are attacked again by the Houthis with Iranian weapons, would that trigger a U.S. military response against Iran, or against the Houthis? And more broadly, is the United States willing to go to war against Iran for Saudi Arabia? Washington will have no easy answers to these questions but Riyadh will expect them.
Second, a defense pact could deepen Saudi Arabia’s security dependency on Washington and impede necessary defense reforms. One of Washington’s wishes in relation to its Arab regional partners is for them to build their own military capabilities so they can better protect themselves and share the burden of regional security. If Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen is any indication, its war-fighting capabilities are suspect and in need of massive reforms. It is likely, though not inevitable, that a defense pact with Washington could delay, and even interrupt, those important reforms.
Third, a defense pact with Saudi Arabia could challenge security relations with Israel, Egypt, and the UAE. Washington would have to explain to these traditional regional partners, and to Taiwan and Ukraine, why they would be left out. It could extend similar security commitments to them, but all at the risk of U.S. military overstretch in the region and across the globe.
Source: Middle East Institute
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