Saudi Arabia vs. Iran: The New Cold War Proxy Conflict

Introduction

Debates over the rightful succession to Muhammad have spawned centuries of ideological and physical battles between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Although not the only source of conflict in the Middle East and Western Asia, the Sunni/Shia divide has undergirded political turmoil throughout the region. Cleavages between Sunni and Shia parallel other geopolitical problems, both within individual nation-states and between them.

A current manifestation of this centuries-old clash is the proxy war taking place between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Referred to as a "new Cold War," these proxy wars carry tremendous geopolitical implications beyond the immediately affected regions (Saxena & Dews, 2014). As Saxena and Dews (2014) point out, there is far more to the proxy wars than the Sunni-Shia ideological divide alone. Religious fervor and fanaticism certainly fuel commitment to various groups and causes; yet conventional political realism is more likely what motivates Iran and Saudi Arabia. Quite simply, regional instability creates power vacuums, and Iran and Saudi Arabia are the two dominant Muslim powers. Just as the United States and the Soviet Union were the two political poles during the Cold War, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the two poles in this new Cold War.

That cold war is now heating up, threatening to escalate into a more direct confrontation between nation-states. Lebanon — long considered a barometer of the region and internally divided along Sunni and Shia lines — has been destabilized by the resignation of its Prime Minister. While some of the Iran-Saudi proxy conflicts appear to be regional sectarian disputes, the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri was overtly and directly connected to the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran (Malley, 2017). Indeed, Fraihat (2017) argues that all recent conflicts in the Middle East — "whether in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or Yemen" — share a "common factor" in the "rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia" (p. 1).

The rivalry manifests in sectarian violence — for example, in Yemen, where Shia Houthi rebels are engaged in an ongoing conflict. On the surface, the conflict appears to concern only the Houthis and Yemen. However, when sources of funding and clerical alliances are traced, it becomes clear that Tehran backs Shia rebel groups precisely like the Houthis and Hezbollah. When such rebel groups become firmly established in official positions of power within nation-states — as Hezbollah has in Lebanon — the conflict could potentially draw in the entire world.

Whenever instability emerges within the boundaries of an official nation-state, as with the recent resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister, the resulting power vacuum enables Iran and Saudi Arabia to move in and establish dominance. This pattern has persisted since the Arab Spring, during which both Iran and Saudi Arabia have attempted to exploit power vacuums throughout the region by funding proxy conflicts in newly destabilized areas (Fraihat, 2017). The hot spots include Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are acting in politically and economically expedient ways to serve their own interests. These two nations are both causing and capitalizing on regional destabilization. The central hypothesis of this paper is that special interest groups within each nation have been funding non-state actors to achieve political goals. Using various instruments of power — diplomatic, informational, military, and economic — Saudi Arabia and Iran are attempting to build new regional alliances. Given the global implications of the conflict, including the disaster in Syria and the pending destabilization of Lebanon, improved international diplomacy strategies are imperative (Cotter, 2017). A further hypothesis advanced here is that Saudi Arabia and Iran are actively subverting the very concept and structure of the nation-state in order to achieve their goals.