Why China-brokered Saudi Arabia-Iran deal is only a masquerading achievement

So, it turns out that China brokered a deal between implacable foes Saudi Arabia and Iran and it seems everyone is quite enthused about this. Alas, this isn’t a deal that has potential to translate into anything tangible and may very well be classic foreign policy: activity masquerading as achievement. To understand why this is, we need to understand the history of this dispute and how it affects each country’s approach today. The past  For most of the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s the Iranians and Saudis were close allies. They both had the same protector - the US. They both opposed socialism, they both used their oil resources to get fabulously wealthy and ploughed back much of that wealth into their own populations. Through this period it was Iran not Saudi Arabia that was the primary US ally in the region. While the Saudis at best got second grade arms, in limited quantities, the Iranians had their pick of the finest and most modern US weapons in any quantity they desired.       The problem was, the Shah of Iran thought that wealth alone equalled modernity and tried to forcibly modernise his country’s attitudes and outlook. The Saudis didn’t make that mistake. Through the 60s and 70s several Saudi kings advised the Shah against this kind of rapid modernisation but their advice fell on deaf ears. In 1979, a combination of factors: conservative opposition offended by modernisation, a dramatic drop in oil prices, the false promises of opportunistic Ayatollahs, fatigue with the Shah, and the Shah’s own refusal to sanction mass murder of his people ended his dynasty and drove him to exile. The new Iranian regime took it upon itself to fan revolution across the Muslim world. For them it was a twofold reason to do so. The first was to inherit Iran’s undisputed regional supremacy it had enjoyed for the preceding 30 years, but also to do it in a way that did not seem “granted by America” but through the “moral force of Islam”. Clearly the gulf monarchies weren’t going to stand for this. Till a bare nine years prior they had dealt with another radical upstart Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt who had similarly used “secular, socialist, republican” rhetoric to whip up disaffection in his neighbours and they had dealt with that by becoming even more fundamentalist Sunni and cracking down on secularism and socialism.   The Iranian revolution was different and struck at the very core of this Islamisation as it had wrapped itself in the flag of Islam - not Shiism but Islam as whole. So the gulf monarchies decided to play divide and rule, and  reopened the old Shia-Sunni wounds in order to weaken any “Islamic” revolution the Iranians had hoped to incite along sectarian lines. This action reaction cycle led to the weaponization of Shia communities across the gulf and beyond. Conveniently for the Iranians, the Shias were in a majority in those exact provinces of Saudi Arabia that had all the oil (as well as in Iraq, Bahrain and parts of Yemen all ruled by Sunnis) and obviously got weaponized. The Gulf Monarchies for their part retaliated by encouraging and then funding Saddam Hussein’s invasion and bloody eight year long war with Iran. This action - reaction cycle also had devastating consequences in Lebanon and Pakistan.   It was in the midst of this war that Iran first considered going nuclear. The devastating losses they suffered combined with the total western apathy to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons as well as the regime’s own clumsy alienation of every single ally it had (the US through the embassy hostages, the USSR through the Afghan war, the Arab states through tormenting revolution) meant that it now needed a nuclear weapon. The Iranian programme proceeded in hiccups, accelerating when a threat was felt and slowing down when the leadership’s threat perception reduced. However that duality ended when America began its global regime change operations. At that point, not having nuclear weapons was suicide - and the Iranian leadership would end up meeting the same fate as Milosevic, Saddam & Qaddafi.     The present You now begin to see the problem that faces this Saudi-Iranian deal. While both have agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations and talk, there’s too much that each party has invested against the other. In short peace will require expensive write-offs and for the other side to offer adequate compensation for such write-offs.   Let’s examine each of the points raised above. Today Shias are weaponized across the board. In order to soothe ties - Iran will have to end up either abandoning Shias or reverting to unfavourable status-quos in all these geographies. Take Lebanon for example where the Shias are quite probably in an absolute majority now, and yet have the smallest share of the sectarian political pie. Selling them out or forcing them to compromise would essentially mean the loss of a tangible and potent asset in exchange for esoteric promises of equality and peace. As a rule “esoteric for tangible” peace deals never work. This same question plays out everywhere - Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, pakistan.   Second, even if the Arab states promise some kind of esoteric  “equality” for Shias, how will it work? Will Saudi Arabia or Bahrain give political power to their Shia minorities - something they deny even their Sunni majorities? What will the knock down effects be on their Sunni youth who also seek greater political freedoms?   Similarly, how will Iran deal with its resistive and increasingly vocal youth absent an external enemy, absent guerrilla campaigns to be fought in Yemen and Lebanon and Syria, and absent economic growth? Will the Arab states invest in economic growth in a country like Iran when said investments could easily be used to fund further insurrection against them a few years down the line if the Iranian regime feels at threat?   Arab states today - including Saudi Arabia are heavily dependent on Israeli intelligence sharing and technological expertise and investments either direct or indirect. Much of this has come about due to a common enemy - Iran. Can Iran’s regime survive abandoning its opposition to Israel? Finally the biggest threat that Iran fears is regime change by the West. That is why it started developing the nuclear bomb in the first place. Will a regional peace with the Arabs eliminate the threat of a Western regime change operation? Clearly not. And yet in order to make up with the Saudis and Israel they’ll have to give up the bomb and leave themselves without any defence against the West.   Conclusion  As you can see, there are too many structural limits on how far any Saudi-Iranian rapprochement can go. The dead ends are now etched in stone and neither side has the financial or military ability to compensate the other. The Chinese can at best provide finances, but not the political heft to make a tangible peace. Indeed as we’re seeing from Sri Lanka to Pakistan to Africa - Chinese finances are a poisoned chalice.   In the final analysis it is safe to say that this “watershed” agreement is anything but. It’s a bit like Biden’s disastrous visit to Saudi Arabia that achieved nothing. It merely satisfies China’s need to show the world that it can negotiate a peace (but nothing more). It satisfies the Saudi need to show America that it is dispensable and that the Saudis have other options. It also satisfies the Iranian need to show the west that it is not isolated and can break that isolation at a time and in a manner of its choosing. That’s all - nothing more, nothing less. The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .