Foreign policy since the end of the Persian Gulf War

Saudi Arabia owed a tremendous debt to the countries whose forces had defeated Iraq, particularly to the United States. The kingdom repaid this debt in part by purchasing large quantities of weapons from American firms and by supporting the U.S.-led peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. In the aftermath of the war, however, the kingdom also sought to cultivate closer relations with other regional powers, particularly with Iran.

Saudi Arabia played a behind-the-scenes role in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations by persuading Syria to attend the October 1991 Madrid Conference, which opened the postwar peace dialogue in the region; Saudi Arabia held observer status at the conference and was active in an effort to soften Syria’s position against Israel, though with little avail. Following the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993, the government overcame its anger at PLO chairman Yasser Arafat for having supported Iraq during the Persian Gulf War and pledged large sums of money to support the development of the Palestinian Authority. In 1994 the Saudis, encouraged by the United States, led the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in withdrawing from a long-standing Arab League boycott of companies either directly or indirectly doing business with Israel.

With Iraq seemingly chastened by the Persian Gulf War, Saudi worries over regional security turned to Iran, which, since the Islamic revolution, had purportedly sought to export the revolution to other countries in the region with significant Shiʿi populations, such as Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. In strongly opposing Iran, the Saudi government also followed the U.S. policy of “dual containment” (i.e., isolating both Iran and Iraq), in which the United States sought to depict Iran as a “rogue” state that supported terrorism.

By 1996, however, Saudi Arabia’s sense of obligation to the United States for its support during the war had begun to wane. Saudi leaders, particularly the newly powerful Abdullah, began to develop closer relations with Iran. Abdullah, keen to put a distance between his policies and the unpopular pro-Western policies of Fahd, apparently assessed that the United States would continue to support the Saud family, despite U.S. antipathy toward Iran, and so turned his attention to improving regional relations. Soon dignitaries from Iran and Saudi Arabia were exchanging visits, and the two countries’ leaders were cooperating in several matters. The kingdom also resolved several long-standing border disputes; these actions included significantly reshaping its border with Yemen.

In the end, however, the greatest hurdle to U.S.-Saudi relations came from within the kingdom—from the Saudi citizens who participated in the September 11 attacks and other acts of terrorism against the United States. The perception of many Americans was that the royal family, through its long and close relations with the Wahhābī sect, had laid the groundwork for the growth of militant groups like al-Qaeda and that after the attacks had done little to help track the militants or ward off future atrocities. That viewpoint was reinforced when in 2003 the Saudi government refused to support or to participate in the Iraq War between U.S.-led forces and Iraq, an action seen by some as an attempt by the royal family to placate the kingdom’s Islamist radicals. That same year Saudi and U.S. government officials agreed to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Saudi soil. In December 2005 Saudi Arabia formally joined the World Trade Organization.

Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia deteriorated in the first decade of the 21st century after having improved in the 1990s. The removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein, hostile to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, in 2003, opened up a new arena for competition between the two countries. Saudis feared that an elected Iraqi government would be a natural Iranian ally, given Iraq’s substantial Shiʿi majority. Saudi officials also expressed fears that Iran’s nuclear energy program concealed a covert effort to develop nuclear weapons.

The outbreak in 2011 of popular protests against many of the entrenched governments of the Middle East, called the Arab Spring, presented Saudi foreign policy with new challenges. In general, the Saudi government sought to use its wealth and influence to restrain revolutionary change. In 2011 it led a deployment of GCC troops to Bahrain to help suppress mass protests there. It also dispensed financial aid to shore up monarchies facing protests in Jordan, Morocco, and Oman. Saudi Arabia did, however, give its support to rebellions against the unfriendly regimes of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.

In 2015 Saudi Arabia made its most forceful military intervention in a regional crisis to date when it led a coalition force in air strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, with the aim of buttressing the government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The air strikes failed to produce a decisive result, though, and the intervention—which Saudi military planners seem to have envisioned as lasting only a few months—stretched into a multiyear campaign. The prolonged attacks came at a heavy cost for Yemen. Air strikes often killed civilians and disrupted vital services, dramatically worsening Yemen’s already dire humanitarian situation. Saudi Arabia’s seeming unwillingness to adjust its tactics attracted international criticism and condemnation, and in 2016 a panel of UN experts reported to the Security Council that some of Saudi Arabia’s actions in Yemen may have amounted to war crimes.