American analysis: How does the West view Saudi Arabia's negotiations with the Houthis and Iran?
English - Saturday 26 August 2023 الساعة 05:47 pm
Sana'a, NewsYemen, exclusive:
At a time when the region has witnessed, during the past few weeks, a UN and US move to revive the negotiations for a political settlement in Yemen, the Houthi group announced, on Tuesday, a new round of negotiations between it and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with Omani mediation, which stalled as a result of the escalating Houthi conditions throughout the course of the negotiation in the past months.
The Houthi group's announcement of this new round of negotiations coincided with the visit of the Omani mediation delegation with the head and members of the Houthi negotiating team to Sana'a, a visit whose results were not announced by the group or the Omani party.
Here is a Newsyemen translation of the article:
This visit also coincided with the visit of Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian to Riyadh earlier this week, in light of news of an upcoming visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Tehran, according to a comment published by the American magazine "Newsweek" in which it said that Prince Mohammed agreed to meet Iranian call.
In its issue of Thursday, August 24, Newsweek magazine published an analytical article by journalist Tom O'Conner, deputy editor-in-chief for the Middle East, China, Russia and North Korea, entitled "With Iran's help, the Saudi crown prince seeks to end the war and change the kingdom."
As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pushes through an ambitious set of reforms aimed at cementing the kingdom's role as a leading international player, the ambitious and powerful prince is also revamping his foreign policy to engage diplomatically with his biggest rival, Iran, in an effort to achieve the regional stability needed to implement his plan. Vision 2030.
But even as the China-brokered deal continues to bring Riyadh and Tehran together in new ways, serious challenges remain in the path of the two parties. The most daunting task facing the man who could rule Saudi Arabia for decades is to pull his country out of a vicious civil war across the border in Yemen, while resolving lingering security threats that could be devastating to his agenda and political legacy.
Ali Al-Shihabi, a Saudi political expert who previously headed the Arab Research Foundation and now serves on the advisory board of the “NEOM” project, one of the giant future projects that are being implemented in line with Vision 2030, told Newsweek, “Saudi Arabia is working to extract itself from Yemen and support any agreement reached by the Yemenis among themselves.
"The kingdom has no illusions as to how easy it will be to accomplish this, and it will have to watch its southern border vigilantly if more threats of instability in Yemen overtake it," Shihabi added. To that end, Shihabi said, Riyadh seeks de-escalation with Tehran as a "strategic interest," an endeavor now bolstered by Beijing's role as a co-signatory of their high-level agreement last March to restore diplomatic relations.
"Time will tell," he added. "Saudi Arabia will work to establish trade and investment relations with Iran to give Iran a greater stake in regional stability, but it will continue to watch Iran very carefully to see if it honors its commitments on stability or not."
The economic factor is important for both sides, as insecurity has proven costly for Iran and for Saudi Arabia's hopes of increasing its influence on the world stage.
Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor-in-chief of Amwaj Media, a London-based news website that focuses on Iran, Iraq and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, told Newsweek, "The vulnerabilities are clear, as are the risks." "Mohammed bin Salman needs security to attract investments, and Iran wants economic gains from providing it for security."
Shaabani, whose media platform has closely followed the inner workings of the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia that took many years, indicated how the kingdom felt the disruptive effects of the near and immediate conflict, noting the targeting of Saudi Arabia in recent years with missiles launched by the Houthi group - Iran's arm, and the strike In particular, the devastating drone attack against the Abqaiq and Khuraisa oil facilities in September 2019, an operation that was directly attributed to Iran despite Tehran's denials.
And while the regional rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran has spilled over into a number of countries, including Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, the war in Yemen has proven to be a particularly volatile front. Once the then deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, began his rise to power with his appointment as defense minister, Saudi Arabia launched a direct intervention in March 2015 in an effort to end Houthi control of Sanaa. However, they still firmly control the Yemeni capital to this day.
And just three months after the Riyadh-led intervention, which was backed by Washington and a number of Arab countries, then-US President Barack Obama announced a landmark nuclear deal with Iran, along with other world powers. The deal collapsed three years later when US President Donald Trump withdrew from it and reimposed severe sanctions on Tehran, a move that sparked a new wave of regional unrest linked to Iran.
While President Joe Biden has sought a negotiated return to the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), formal dialogue has since broken down, and the White House has said those efforts are no longer a priority for the administration.
“Part of the difficulties that Iran and Saudi Arabia face relates to the extent to which Iran can provide support on the security front, especially considering the lack of response by the Houthis, and on the other side, what can Saudi Arabia actually offer on the economic front,” said Shabani. Taking into account the massive US sanctions regime and the upcoming US presidential elections.
Saudi Arabia also lacks "real influence" with the Houthis, according to Omar Karim, an associate fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh and a doctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
However, he told Newsweek, it is "worth noting that since the Saudi-Iranian penetration, there has not been any missile attack or drone attack by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia. This is essential from the Saudi point of view, which is keen to ensure that the conflict in Yemen remains in Yemen."
To mitigate the risk of conflict escalation, Karim envisions a possible path forward, one that entails a power-sharing agreement in which the Houthi group remains dominant, particularly in northern Yemen, but with Saudi allies retaining influence.
However, any agreement must guarantee the agreement of the various Yemeni factions, which formed shifting alliances and rivalries throughout the conflict, as well as both Riyadh and Tehran, whose nascent détente may depend on the fate of the conflict. This is of particular importance to Crown Prince Mohammed.
Karim said: For the Saudi crown prince, it is clear that in order to follow this path of economic and social transformation, Saudi Arabia cannot afford any major and prolonged conflict with Iran.
He added, "Although the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has begun to diversify its sources of revenue, its total budget still depends on the revenues generated from the energy sector, which indicates that these revenues are still the backbone of the Saudi economy, and any recurrence of an attack like what happened." Abqaiq or Khuraisa, which stopped Saudi oil production, would be indefensible."
This point was echoed by Yasmine Farouk, a researcher in the Middle East Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Yasmin argues that the two attacks in 2019 showed how such tensions with Iran could derail the achievement of Vision 2030 goals by reducing and even cutting off Saudi Arabia's oil revenues, and increasing the risks foreign investors face in Vision 2030 projects such as NEOM and tourism, Maritime transport, infrastructure projects, energy and logistics.
She also referred to the "complete shift" in Saudi foreign policy that began a year ago in response to the fallout from the assassination of the exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, to which the United States linked Crown Prince Mohammed directly, something the prince and the Saudi government have always denied.
Farouk said, "The royal palace has made adjustments in the team that advises on foreign policy, and has begun a phase of regional de-escalation, including with Iran," noting that Saudi Arabia's approach to the war in Yemen "has evolved significantly," as it did not Riyadh is "disguising that its current goal is to find a sustainable way out" of this conflict. "Riyadh today will surely settle for less than that, but it cannot allow the Houthis to declare a clear victory or to meet all of their financial and political demands," she said.
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House in London, said that even as the crown prince makes "a priority to avoid conflict in Yemen," efforts to "a cease-fire and a comprehensive peace will take longer than expected." It was envisaged to achieve them." “This shows that the path towards this will be difficult for the kingdom,” said Vakil, as “Yemen will always be a source of risk for long-term escalation for the kingdom, which will require it to continue managing and favoritism, not only with Sana’a and Tehran, but also with tribes all over Yemen".
She added, "Riyadh's goal in the medium and long term is to separate the Houthis from Tehran, but to achieve this, it must first ensure a cease-fire and build sustainable relations with the Houthis and across the country." This, according to the researcher, also requires maintaining the Kingdom's continuous contact with the same force that it has long portrayed as the main source of its security misfortunes.
Vakil said, "After being subjected to Iranian attacks from Yemen and its oil facilities, the Saudi leadership realized the relationship between regional security and economic prosperity," noting that the Kingdom needs to end the war in Yemen and stop any missiles and drones flying in its skies, in order for Vision 2030 to succeed, and that both the two matters "require dialogue and mediation with Tehran."
The next steps to capitalize on the rare spirit of diplomacy and goodwill between Iran and Saudi Arabia that have emerged since the restoration of ties are likely to be crucial to Crown Prince Mohammed's efforts to redefine his international image, which has hitherto been closely associated with the conflict in Yemen.
And while Sarhang Hamasaid, director of Middle East programs at the US Institute of Peace, said that "it will be difficult" for Prince Mohammed, he outlined a course for the young prince to extract victory from his experience in Yemen.
Hamasaid said, "If Iran appears, through diplomatic engagement, to at least slow down its regional advance, if attacks on Saudi Arabia from Yemen stop, and if the kingdom can advance its ambitious agenda for investments, modernization, and regional leadership, and on the Yemeni side if The Houthis did not fully dominate and succeeded in creating space for other Yemeni forces to be part of the government. These may be positive points that Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince can offer, locally, regionally and internationally.
He added that Saudi Arabia had to draw lessons from the impact of conflict in the Middle East nearly two decades after the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent withdrawal that began in 2011, the year the region was further shaken by the Arab Spring protest movement and the beginnings of what would become the armed Islamic State. (ISIS).
And since the military solutions did not succeed, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, during the reign of Crown Prince Mohammed, is betting on the diplomatic track "to protect its southern borders and stop the attacks, because the aspirations of modernization, Vision 2030 and all these giant projects that require huge investments from the Kingdom itself and from outside investors, What is required is a stable Saudi Arabia, and a stable Middle East that is not threatened by drones and missiles,” according to Hamasaid, who also believes that the solution in Yemen and the Arab region requires “a mixture of positive incentives not to deplete resources and to help achieve stability, while recognizing some degree of reality.” That confrontation did not help, and that diplomatic engagement might lead to a different outcome.”
