Mohamad Bazzi (@BazziNYU), a Lebanese-American journalist, is the former Middle East bureau chief for Newsday. He is currently teaching journalism at New York University, and writing a book on the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

In March 2009, the Obama administration’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, met with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah at his palace in Riyadh. Brennan requested on President Barack Obama’s behalf that the kingdom reach out to then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Brennan asked the Saudis to appoint an ambassador to Baghdad, and to invite the Iraqi leader to Riyadh. Abdullah refused, saying that al-Maliki had “opened the door for Iranian influence in Iraq” and had lied to him.

“I don’t trust this man,” Abdullah said, according to a classified U.S. cable disclosed by WikiLeaks. “He is an Iranian agent.”


Since his death on Friday at age 90 and his succession by his half-brother Salman, Abdullah has been praised as a cautious reformer and shrewd politician who shaped Saudi policy for nearly 20 years, after his predecessor had a stroke and Abdullah ruled as crown prince in the king’s name. Abdullah introduced modest political reforms, shaped a muscular foreign policy and oversaw economic expansion fueled by periods of booming oil prices. But Abdullah also presided over a proxy war with Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, Iran—a series of battles in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain—that have defined the Middle East since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. He also oversaw Saudi attempts to choke off revolutionary momentum in the region since the Arab uprisings of 2011. The House of Saud was the primary regional force that propped up Bahrain’s Sunni minority regime after popular protests in 2011 and backed Egypt’s military when it ousted the elected president in July 2013.

As the conversation with Brennan shows—along with other private discussions released by WikiLeaks—the conflict with Iran has defined Saudi foreign policy over the past decade and has been cast as a Sunni-Shiite sectarian battle, even when the conflict is about political power or control of resources. 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.

Today, Abdullah’s successor, Salman bin Abdul Aziz, inherits the Saudi policy of containing Iran and its allies, of countering revolutionary sentiment in the region and of maintaining a sometimes tense relationship with the United States. And the stakes appear to be higher than ever for Salman with the apparent takeover of Yemen—which sits on Saudi Arabia’s southern border—by the Iranian-allied Shiite Houthi movement. While Iranian support of the Houthis is not as clear-cut as is Tehran’s support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it’s also likely that the Iran-obsessed House of Saud will see the hand of Tehran threatening it in yet a new way.

No one should doubt that King Salman is as focused on the perceived threat from Iran as his half-brother was. In a conversation a little over a week ago with six visiting U.S. senators, the new ruler emphasized the threat from a nuclear-armed Iran, one of those present, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), told POLITICO. Addressing the nation hours after he became king on Friday, Salman pledged to maintain the status quo. “We will continue adhering to the correct policies which Saudi Arabia has followed since its establishment,” he said in a speech broadcast on state television. “The Arab and Islamic nations are in dire need of solidarity and cohesion.”

What that means is that, absent any change in U.S. policy toward Riyadh—which we’re not likely to get under either a Democratic or a Republican president—or a nuclear deal with Iran that assuages Saudi concerns over Tehran's ambitions, the Iran-Saudi proxy war in the region is only going to get more intense.

There is some hope. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria threatens both Saudi and Iranian interests. Thus, U.S. and Western policymakers can reduce tensions and blunt some elements of the proxy war by pushing Saudi and Iranian leaders to cooperate, at least in the short term, against the Islamic State. Tehran and Riyadh must be persuaded that they now share common interests in defeating the Islamic State and maintaining a stable regime in Baghdad that can transcend sectarian conflicts. Of course, that means the Iranians and Saudis must overcome decades of hostility and mistrust.

***

Today’s Middle East was shaped by several proxy wars that unfolded over the past decade, mainly after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In Iraq, neighboring Sunni regimes backed Sunni militants, while Iran supported the Shiite-led government and Shiite militias. When various Middle Eastern regimes realized that the United States would lose its war in Iraq, they began maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American withdrawal. Saudi Arabia, which viewed Iraq as a bulwark against Iranian influence, tried to destabilize the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

The House of Saud rests its legitimacy—and its claim of leadership over the wider Muslim world—on the fact that the kingdom is the home of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, where the religion was founded. Like his predecessors, King Salman has taken the title of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” a reminder of his rule over Islam’s most sacred shrines. The Sauds, and the Wahhabi clerics who support them, construe political legitimacy on the medieval Islamic concept that Muslims owe obedience to their ruler, as long as he can properly apply Islamic law. This view does not tolerate public dissent. The Sauds also want to associate Islam with its original Arab identity, even though Arabs have been a minority within the religion for centuries.

While the Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, Iran has challenged that leadership for decades and especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran’s potential influence over a sizable and sometimes-restive Shiite population concentrated in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province. In Bahrain, another American ally in the Gulf, the Shiite majority is chafing under Sunni rulers who also fear Iran’s reach.

More broadly, since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the traditional centers of power in the Arab world—Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states—have been nervous about the growing influence of Iran: its nuclear ambitions, its sway over the Iraqi government, its support for the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas and its alliance with Syria. Hezbollah’s strong performance against a far superior Israeli military during their summer 2006 war electrified the Arab world, and it offered a stark contrast to Arab rulers appeasing the United States.

When popular protests swept the Arab world in early 2011, Bashar Assad was confident that he had nothing to fear because he had continued his father’s foreign policy: He did not depend on U.S. tutelage like the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. Assad and his allies in the “axis of resistance” boasted that they were the true representatives of the majority of people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, who for decades had been stifled under regimes that “sold out” to the United States. But soon after the peaceful demonstrations in Syria turned violent, in response to Assad’s ruthless crackdown, the leader of what Assad called the “axis of accommodation,” Saudi Arabia, began sending money and weapons to the rebels. The Syrian uprising did not start out as a sectarian battle, but it quickly took on religious dimensions and descended into civil war.

The conflict is now part of a larger struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of which increasingly see their rivalry as a winner-take-all conflict: If the Shiite Hezbollah gains an upper hand in Lebanon, then the Sunnis of Lebanon—and by extension, their Saudi patrons—lose a round to Iran. If a Shiite-led government solidifies its control of Iraq, then Iran will have won another round. So the House of Saud rushes to shore up its allies in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and wherever else it fears Iran’s influence.

The trove of classified U.S. government cables released by WikiLeaks laid bare the fears of the Saudi regime and other Sunni Arab rulers over Iran’s ascendance, and especially its nuclear program. The Arab leaders were largely silent in public, 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”—as Saddam Hussein had tried two decades earlier. By 2006, Sunni Arab leaders were clamoring for the United States or Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, no matter the consequences.

In the most notorious example, one cable detailed a series of meetings in April 2008 between King Abdullah, senior Saudi princes and top U.S. officials who were in Riyadh to discuss American policy in Iraq. Saudi leaders were livid over Iranian influence in Iraq. The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, repeated “the King’s frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”

King Abdullah, al-Jubeir scolded one American diplomat, “told you to cut off the head of the snake.”

***

Despite his reported health problems, there is no reason to doubt that Salman will continue this policy. As governor of Riyadh for nearly 50 years, Salman oversaw the expansion of the Saudi capital from a backwater of 200,000 people into a metropolis of nearly 7 million. He was appointed Saudi defense minister in 2011 and named crown prince a year later. One U.S. embassy cable from 2007, disclosed by WikiLeaks, described Salman as “often the referee in family disputes” among the insular and sometimes feuding senior members of the House of Saud. The cable reported that Salman had told one of his half-brothers, who had been passed over due to changes in the line of succession, to “shut up and get back to work.”

The 79-year-old Salman moved quickly after his ascension as king to clarify the line of succession, appointing not only his heir but also a second-in-line to the throne. In recent months, Salman had taken on a larger public role, chairing cabinet meetings, hosting foreign leaders and standing in for Abdullah at a summit meeting of Persian Gulf leaders in Qatar. But Salman himself is in poor health, having suffered at least one stroke that left him partially paralyzed in one arm. Considering his age and health troubles, he might not be king for long.

The appointed heir is Prince Muqrin, 69, who has served as head of Saudi intelligence and in other senior positions. He was installed last year by Abdullah into the newly created post of deputy crown prince, making him second in line to the throne. After Abdullah's death, Salman and the Allegiance Council—a group of senior princes created by Abdullah in 2007 to help choose the crown prince and settle questions of succession—quickly elevated Muqrin as crown prince, avoiding a succession battle within the House of Saud at a time of regional crisis and instability in the global oil markets.

Muqrin is the youngest surviving son of dynasty founder Abdulaziz al-Saud, who left behind a hereditary system where the throne is passed from older son to younger son (the king had at least 35 surviving sons when he died in 1953). With the old generation of Abdulaziz’s sons dying off, the kingdom has had no clear plan to hand power to the “new” generation of royals—Abdulaziz’s grandsons, of which there are at least 30 who could be in line for the throne. If Muqrin becomes king, his crown prince would have to come from the third generation of royals. Muqrin does not have strong enough support within the royal family to appoint one of his sons to the post. (One theory held that Abdullah positioned Muqrin as second in line so that he would be beholden to Abdullah’s sons, one of whom could become king once the generational shift takes place.)

But Salman and the Allegiance Council moved to head off that intergenerational battle by appointing Mohammed bin Nayef, 55, the powerful interior minister who has close ties to U.S. intelligence officials, as deputy crown prince. Although a succession battle is still possible after Muqrin, Mohammed—as second in line to the throne—now has the strongest claim as the potential heir from among Abdulaziz’s grandsons.

And so the proxy war will almost certainly continue, because the Sauds value self-preservation above all else, and new threats are appearing on all sides. Internally, of course, the Saudi regime appears to be stable. After a wave of popular uprisings throughout 2011 forced out longtime dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and, eventually, Yemen, the Sauds were worried about the revolts spreading to the kingdom.

The House of Saud quickly resorted to one of its time-honored methods of shoring up internal support: generous handouts. Shortly after the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt were toppled, King Abdullah set aside $130 billion to buy domestic peace. He 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. He also budgeted $70 billion to build a half-million housing units for low-income Saudis over five years. And he granted about $200 million to organizations controlled by the Wahhabi establishment, including the religious 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.

The Saudi regime became more nervous when the revolutions spread to Yemen, on its southern border, and Bahrain, a Shiite-majority country ruled by a Sunni dictatorship only 16 miles from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where most of the kingdom’s oil reserves lie and where 15 percent 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 a bid to build a stronger bulwark against Iran.

Aside from dealing with Iran and coping with worsening conflict in its two neighbors, Iraq and Yemen, the kingdom must absorb the economic shock of plummeting oil prices. In early January, Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell below $50 a barrel for the first time since May 2009—a drop caused in part by Saudi Arabia’s refusal to cut high production levels. At the last OPEC meeting on Nov. 27, the Saudis led the charge to prevent the cartel from cutting production, which would have driven prices up. Instead, the kingdom is trying to retain its market share and to drive out U.S. shale oil, which requires higher prices to remain competitive.

Saudi Arabia’s oil policy is even more opaque than its foreign policy, but there are signs that the kingdom has been using oil as a weapon to punish Iran, and Russia, for their support of Assad’s brutal regime in Syria. Since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, regional and world powers have played out a series of proxy battles there. As Saudi and Qatar armed many of the Syrian rebels, the Iranian regime—and to a lesser extent, Russia—have provided the weapons and funding to keep Assad in power. Facing Western sanctions and economic isolation, both Iran and Russia are dependent on oil prices remaining above $100 a barrel to meet their budget commitments.

In recent weeks, Iranian leaders ratcheted up their rhetoric blaming Saudi Arabia for plunging oil prices, which have fallen 60 percent from their peak last June. “Those that have planned to decrease prices against other countries will regret this decision,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a speech on Jan. 13. “If Iran suffers from the drop in oil prices, know that other oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will suffer more than Iran.” A month earlier, Rouhani described dropping oil prices as “a political conspiracy by certain countries against the interest of the region and the Islamic world.”

So far, Saudi leaders have been able to withstand the economic shock by increasing oil production to make up for falling prices, or by accessing some of the kingdom’s $750 billion stashed in foreign reserves. The Saudi interior ministry recently released a 2015 budget that outlines expenditures of about $230 billion and revenues of $191 billion—the kingdom’s first projected deficit in seven years. Before his death, Abdullah authorized the ministry to cover the deficit out of the foreign reserves.

***

For years, the Bush administration argued that it invaded Iraq to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, a region that had long been ruled by kings and despots. But as the insurgency grew and the country descended further into chaos, Iraq failed to become a beacon for fledging democracy movements in neighboring states. Instead, young Muslim men began looking to Iraq for something else: as a proving ground for their militant ideology. In Saudi Arabia, they were nurtured in the kingdom’s mosques and schools, and by radical clerics who preached the righteousness of this newest jihad.

Saudi society provided not only recruits, but also one of the largest streams of funding for Sunni militant groups throughout the world. For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials tried to pressure their allies in Saudi Arabia and other “moderate” Arab regimes to crack down on financing for Islamic militants. But as the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks revealed, the Saudis were reluctant to shut off the flow of cash—millions of dollars a year, often raised during the holy periods of Hajj and Ramadan. “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a December 2009 cable addressed to U.S. diplomats in the region. Eight years after Sept. 11, she noted that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Just as the American and Saudi-backed jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s became a seminal event in the spread of militant Islam, the chaos in Iraq nurtured a new generation of Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia. “Everyone knows that Saudis are going to fight in Iraq,” Mohsen al-Awajy, a lawyer who spent years negotiating between the Saudi government and homegrown militants, told me in the summer of 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion. “This is a very fertile area to breed mujahideen and send them all over the world. Saudis go to the areas of jihad.”

The danger for any regime that derives its legitimacy from an austere Islamic identity is that there will always be those who think the regime is too soft in protecting the faith. Since the 1930s, the ruling family has managed a tenuous pair of alliances: one as a political partner with Wahhabi clerics who vilify America and the West, and the other as an ally and major oil supplier to the United States.

Saudi Arabia, which sits on one-fifth of the world’s known oil reserves, is the second-largest foreign oil provider to the United States. The kingdom uses its leverage within OPEC to keep prices and production at levels that satisfy Washington. In return for ensuring a steady global supply of oil, successive U.S. administrations supported the Saud family and provided military assistance whenever aggressive neighbors like Iraq have threatened the kingdom. In 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, the United States sent half a million troops to Saudi Arabia and used it as a base from which to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. About 5,000 U.S. troops remained in the kingdom at the Prince Sultan Air Base, and the high-tech command center served as headquarters for U.S. airstrikes on Afghanistan in 2001.

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, and accused the House of Saud of straying from Islam.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, reformers attempted to open a debate about whether some tenets of Wahhabism and the religious curriculum in Saudi schools promoted violence against non-Muslims. But the discussion was drowned out by a wave of national denial and anger among many Saudis that their society was being demonized by the United States. The government had long argued that Saudi militants learned false notions about Islam outside the kingdom, in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. That sense of denial spread from top princes to security officials and members of an unelected parliament.

Prince Nayef—a son of the founding monarch who served as the Saudi interior minister from 1975 until his death in June 2012—infamously peddled the conspiracy theory that the Sept. 11 attacks were a Jewish plot. “The Saudis are being framed, accused of things that they did not do,” he said at a news conference shortly after the attacks.

Predictably, Nayef’s comments were an embarrassment for the House of Saud, and other members of the ruling family tried to rein him in. But Nayef repeated the accusation in private meetings and again in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah in November 2002. Later he asked rhetorically, “Who benefitted from the events of 11 September? I think they [the Zionists] are behind these events.” Incredibly, the interview was translated into English and published online by a weekly news magazine in Saudi Arabia. (At the time, the Saudi regime was bankrolling a $10 million PR campaign to improve its image in the United States.) Other princes condemned Nayef, but he remained one of the four or five most powerful royals in the kingdom, and he was eventually named crown prince in 2011. He was also the father of Mohammed bin Nayef, who has just been named deputy crown prince by King Salman.

Some Saudis speculate that bin Laden specifically recruited 15 young Saudi men to be the majority of Sept. 11 hijackers as a way to drive a wedge between Washington and the Sauds. “Bin Laden wanted to damage Saudi-U.S. relations, and sadly he succeeded,” Abdulaziz al-Fayez, a member of the kingdom’s Shura Council, a virtually powerless “consultative parliament,” told me during a visit to Riyadh in June 2003. “Since Sept. 11, we have been treated badly by the American government and the American people.”

Of course, the United States bears a significant part of the blame for its dysfunctional relationship with Saudi Arabia. Most Washington policymakers value the stability of the Saud regime above all else, and they are willing to turn a blind eye to the ruling family’s excesses and its commitment to Wahhabi fanaticism.

With a new king who has inherited regional turmoil and a series of proxy battles with Iran, the Saudi regime has little incentive to change the status quo. But Washington does; without an earnest U.S. effort to alter the underlying dynamics in the region, particularly the relationship between Tehran and Riyadh, that status quo promises only one thing: more war.