The Real Motivation Behind Iran’s Deal With Saudi Arabia

The agreement is about far more than just normalizing ties with Riyadh.

By Saeid Golkar, a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Kasra Aarabi, the Iran program lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

The China-brokered agreement between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia announced last month generated huge buzz, with some observers going as far as proclaiming it a victory for international security.

But much of the analysis has missed a key point: For Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the deal is about far more than normalizing ties with the Saudi government in Riyadh. Instead, it is about further facilitating, along with China and Russia, the rise of a new anti-Western global order and excluding the United States from a new regional arrangement.

Indeed, from the view of Khamenei and the IRGC, restoring ties with Saudi Arabia is the least important aspect of the deal. What’s most important is that it’s one more milestone toward achieving the regime’s grand ambitions—this time with powerful friends. The 83-year-old supreme leader, like his predecessor, believes a clash of civilizations has long existed between the so-called Islamic world and the West. The long-term project of the Islamic Revolution has been to restore an Islamic civilization, with Iran’s Shiite Islamists at the helm.

In the modern era, the United States and the liberal international order it leads have always been seen as the ultimate obstacle—the Great Satan—standing in the way of achieving that goal. And for the Islamic Republic’s 44 years of existence, the regime has concentrated all its resources on shaking the very core of the West’s legitimacy. In recent years, this aim has come to bind Khamenei with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping—each unlikely bedfellows.

Whether or not China and Russia are fully invested in this ideological troika, it is clear Iran’s regime is all in. Khamenei sees an Islamic civilization led by Iran, a Russo-Slavic civilization led by Russia, and a Confucius-communist civilization led by China all at war with Western civilization—and he thinks now is the best chance they’ve had in decades to uproot the West.

Khamenei’s close circle and the IRGC genuinely believe the U.S.-led liberal world order is collapsing and a new anti-Western order led by China, Russia, and Iran is taking shape. As recent as November 2022, Khamenei outlined a vision of a new order based on “the isolation of the United States, the transfer of power to Asia, [and] the expansion of the [anti-West] resistance front” led by the Islamic Republic.

This is the lens through which Khamenei supports Putin’s war in Ukraine—and why he has gone all in on providing military support to Russia. It’s also how Tehran views the China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal. Hard-line regime officials in Iran have confirmed this. After the deal was signed, Yahya Rahim Safavi, senior IRGC commander and military advisor to Khamenei, asserted that the post-U.S. era in the region has begun and the deal was “China’s second biggest blow to the U.S.”

The deal’s lack of substance is not a concern to the Islamic Republic. Of course, regime propagandists are in selling mode, promoting the deal as a declaration of peace and an opportunity to apply pressure to remove sanctions on Khamenei’s regime.

In reality, however, the two states have simply agreed to restore diplomatic relations in the coming months, after Riyadh severed ties in January 2016 following the ransacking of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran by the IRGC’s paramilitary forces. From the view of Khamenei and the IRGC, the return to the pre-2016 status quo is another reason to proclaim victory as they believe it preserves their regional dominance with virtually no cost.

As far as the IRGC is concerned, there will be no practical change to its strategy, militancy, or support for its proxies and militia groups. Vehement hostility towards Saudi Arabia is ingrained in the IRGC’s ideology, with anti-Saudi doctrines that portray the Saudi royal family as “apostates” with “Jewish origins” incorporated into the IRGC’s formal program of indoctrination.

Riyadh is fully aware of this—it knows the true identity and motivations of the IRGC beyond the smiling face of Ali Shamkhani (Tehran’s lead negotiator). However, for the Saudis, the deal is very simply understood. It gives them the ability to pursue their primary goals, which are about building the economic strength of their country and carrying forward the social reforms sweeping the country under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, with what they will see as enhanced protection against Iranian direct or proxy attack. But they will likely have few illusions about the dependability of any Iran regime commitments or the durability of the agreement.

Against this backdrop, the excitement the China-brokered deal has generated about a lasting peace in Yemen is overstretched. At best, in the very short term, the IRGC will tactically delay its militancy against its lesser enemy, Saudi Arabia, to dedicate more attention to expelling its greater enemy, the United States, from the Middle East—and thus finalizing the collapse of the U.S.-led order, in its view.

If anything, in the long run, the IRGC likely hopes the China-brokered deal will actually advance its militia doctrine and reinforce its strategy of plausible deniability for attacks waged by the Houthis against Riyadh. In other words, the deal strengthens the IRGC’s ability to claim it has “no control” over Houthi operations, despite being their main backer.

China’s Iran-Saudi Deal May Not Stick

Beijing will have a tough time balancing ties with Riyadh and Tehran.

ARGUMENT |

How China’s Saudi-Iran Deal Can Serve U.S. Interests

And why there’s less to Beijing’s diplomatic breakthrough than meets the eye.

ANALYSIS |

4 Key Takeaways From the China-Brokered Saudi-Iran Deal

Anyone who believes we’re on the cusp of a golden era between Tehran and Riyadh should lie down until the feeling passes.

EXPLAINER |

In fact, at the regional level, Khamenei’s regime is focused on using the China-brokered agreement to disrupt rather than facilitate peace—namely, sabotaging the U.S.-negotiated Abraham Accords. The IRGC has spent the past two years working tirelessly to prevent more Arab states from normalizing ties with Israel, which it refers to as a “cancerous tumor” that must be eradicated.

The Iranian regime believes the China-brokered deal kills two birds with one stone in this regard, by delaying more Arab states joining the Abraham Accords and undermining the value of the United States in the Middle East.

But here’s why all of this presents a major security challenge to the West, its allies, and the international system more broadly: If Khamenei and the IRGC believe a new world order is emerging, they’ll be intent on speeding up the collapse of the U.S.-led one. This may increase anti-Western escalations, recklessness, and strategic errors on their part, including on the nuclear and terrorism files. Their military support for Putin suggests it already has—and more worrying developments are already in the making.

The most immediate and pressing concern should be the expansion of military cooperation among Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran—which is geared toward undercutting the U.S.-led world order. Less than a week after the China-brokered deal was announced, China, Iran, and Russia undertook joint naval drills across the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman.

And although Xi will likely be reluctant to advance more provocative military ties with Khamenei, the same cannot be said of Putin. In the coming months and years, we will likely see closer on-the-ground cooperation between Tehran and Moscow beyond simply Ukraine. Given that both Khamenei and Putin have sought to use sub-Saharan Africa as a battleground to target Western interests, the possibility of IRGC Quds Force-Wagner Group coordination on the African continent is no longer far-fetched.

This would significantly alter the security dynamic in what is already regarded as the new hotbed of terrorism. A worst-case scenario could result in Moscow and Tehran coordinating non-state actor attacks against Western interests worldwide, with enough plausible deniability to avoid any consequences.

Beyond the military realm, the China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal has emboldened Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran’s shared ambitions to replace U.S.-oriented transnational entities and agreements with their own, such as by establishing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or replacing the U.S. dollar with the Chinese yuan and Russian ruble—a trend they will collectively push to expand.

Tehran itself has also been busy increasing its efforts to forge closer alliances with states it regards as part of this emerging anti-Western axis. Khamenei’s recent statements during a meeting with Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenko revealed how the Islamic Republic wants to lead efforts to undermine U.S. sanctions globally, with the supreme leader calling for a “joint assembly” of countries sanctioned by the West.

The IRGC has already cultivated a network of illicit financing routes across the globe, not least in South America, with reports revealing how Tehran evades U.S. and European oil sanctions and smuggles gold to and from Venezuela. The recent resurgence of the anti-U.S. left in South America has once again provided Khamenei’s regime the scope to expand its network on the continent beyond simply Venezuela—an opportunity the aging ayatollah has not wasted.

So although the China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal may at first glance seem like a positive step for regional stability and international security, a closer assessment of Khamenei and the IRGC’s motivations reveals a different reality. They are using it to inflict harm on the West, Arab-Israeli peace efforts, and the U.S.-led liberal international order. If there were any previous doubts, the deal confirms that a U.S. withdrawal from the region will create a vacuum that will be gradually filled by the anti-Western axis.

Contrary to what the isolationists say, the United States withdrawing from the Middle East won’t make problems disappear; it will in fact further undermine international security by empowering and enabling the very forces that are intent on challenging the liberal world order. The Biden administration has demonstrated with Ukraine how it can build and maintain coalitions of support with great skill. It now needs to do the same in the Middle East.

Saeid Golkar is a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Kasra Aarabi is the Iran program lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He is also a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and is undertaking a Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews, where his research focuses on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Twitter: @KasraAarabi