It’s been almost two months since the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani brought the Middle East to the brink of a war. While Iran quickly retaliated by striking at a US base in Iraq, it was nowhere near the end of the conflict and tensions have remained high in the region ever since.

No surprise then that US Secretary Mike Pompeo was on a Middle East visit last week to discuss the regional situation with key allies, most notably with a two-day stay in Saudi Arabia. This was his first trip to the country after the killing of Soleimani, a foe which both Riyadh and Washington equally hated.

Tehran: a Common Enemy for Washington and Riyadh

After coming into power, Trump has brought Washington even closer to Riyadh, with both bonding strongly over their mutual distrust of Tehran. In fact, the US President’s first visit after assuming office was also to the Kingdom while Secretary Pompeo has been to Saudi Arabia twice already since December. 

This time, too, Iran featured top of the agenda for Pompeo where he discussed threats posed by the Islamic Republic and ensured his hosts of full American support. The State Department press release afterwards said, “the United States stands with Saudi Arabia in the face of these threats, as reflected in our greater military presence in Saudi Arabia.” 

Though hardly ever friends, tensions between Riyadh and Tehran have amplified multi-fold in the aftermath of drone attacks on the Abqaiq oil facility of Saudi Aramco, which the former quickly blamed on the latter.

US Has Beefed Up Military Presence in the Region

Soon after, the Kingdom sought support from the United States in the form of increased military presence, a request Washington quickly listened to by agreeing to send 3,000 soldiers. Iran expressed its apprehensions. Again in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, the US immediately deployed another 3,500 troops across the region which has made Iran even more uneasy as it increasingly gets surrounded.  

Sending a Message to Iran

In essence, the purpose of the trip was to send a message to Iran, which was heard loud and clear when Secretary Pompeo stopped at the Prince Sultan Airbase that hosts some 2,500 US troops and two American Patriot missile batteries to deter any attack from Tehran. 

“I visited #PrinceSultanAirBase to highlight the long-standing USA-KSA security partnership & to reaffirm America’s determination to stand with #SaudiArabia in the face of Iranian aggression,” Pompeo tweeted.   

Discussions on Yemen

The US-Saudi talks also featured Yemen as the conflict in the war-torn country shows no sign of stopping despite the recent Riyadh Agreement that seemed to offer a glimpse of hope for peace. Unsurprisingly, Iran was mentioned on that front too as Ambassador Abizaid traced the rockets used by Houthis to Tehran. 

“We’ve just recently interdicted two dhows down there filled with Iranian-produced equipment that is being used by the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia.  So I think it’s really important for us to understand who is the aggressor in the region, and it’s no doubt it’s the Iranians,” he was quoted as saying on Feb 20 in a press briefing. 

“…a lot of people don’t understand there’s been an awful lot of missile strikes that have been supplied by missiles, supplied by the IRGC Qods Force launched from Yemen, 400 strikes, as a matter of fact, on – about – on Saudi Arabia,” the ambassador continued.

New Sanctions Against Iranian Officials

The tough talk against Tehran wasn’t just limited to the secretary or the ambassador. Back in Washington, Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook echoed the same position and announced the imposition of sanctions against five officials of the Islamic Republic, including the Ahmed Jannati, Secretary General of the Guardian Council — the body responsible for vetting candidates running for elections. 

“Iran’s ongoing transfer of weapons to the Houthis violates multiple UN Security Council resolutions. These successful operations by the United States are exposing Iran’s duplicity in Yemen. While the regime claims that it supports a diplomatic solution to the conflict, its actions prove otherwise,” Hook said. 

While the continuous rise in tensions between the US and Iran has put the region at risk, Saudi Arabia has been smart to cash in on the situation by beefing up its defenses, often at the cost of Washington, which in turn has been rather unconditional in its support towards the Kingdom. The latest visit by Pompeo reaffirmed exactly that.

Confronting Saudi Arabian Human Rights Abuses

The talks also involved human rights abuses by the Kingdom, such as the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi or the alleged hacking of Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos by Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman.

“I don’t know that I’ve had a conversation with a senior Saudi leader that didn’t involve us trying to both make clear to them our expectations with respect to human rights and offering to provide assistance, right, trying to help them put in place the processes and systems so that they can deliver on the human rights obligations that I’m confident, that in nearly every case, the leadership wants to engage in,” Pompeo replied to a question.

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Stark was the reality of the actual decision-makers and operators of all but the Houthis in war-torn Yemen at the signing ceremony held in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Nov. 5. The figurehead Saudi-backed president of the internationally recognized Yemeni government Abd Rubbo Mansour Hadi was present as his government and UAE-backed Transitional Council of South Yemen signed a peace deal following months of intensive fighting for the control of Yemeni strategic cities and ports. Although the man looked incapacitated as the two strong men of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman (MBS) and the UAE Muhammad Bin Zayed (MBZ) Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, ran the show.

Personal Agendas Over Conflict

It is not clear how the peace deal orchestrated by the two most powerful players within the Saudi-led coalition in the four-year-old war on Yemen will help end the conflict that has generated one of the worst humanitarian disasters since World War II. While the two Gulf nations and their proxy militias have engaged in bitter fighting for territorial control, Houthi rebels and the Yemeni national army have scored major advances and victories in recent months. Last September alone, three Saudi-backed and coalition brigades fell to the Houthis and thousands of soldiers and proxy fighters surrendered in a humiliating defeat in the Jizan province close to the Yemeni borders with Saudi Arabia. It was then reported that MBS kept the humiliatingly embarrassing news away from his ailing father, King Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Following a series of military blows and a series of successful ballistic missile and suicide drown attacks against vital Saudi oil installations and airports, the United Arab Emirates drew down their troops in Yemen. Most recently, Sudan pulled out many of its forces fighting alongside the Saudis in the country amid signs of deep fractures in the Saudi-led coalition sunk deeper into the Yemeni quagmire for the fourth year running with no sign of a decisive victory yet. In August, the Yemeni separatist movement, backed by MBZ, which seeks self-rule in southern Yemen, targeted government forces as they seized their interim seat in the strategic port city of Aden. The bloody clashes sounded alarm bells in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, raised fears of further undermining the already fractured anti-Houthi alliance along with any chances for working out a negotiated settlement to the catastrophic war in Yemen which has drawn mounting international outrage and criticism.

Therefore, this week’s peace deal between the Yemeni government and the separatists seeking an autonomous rule in the south, seems more of an effort to unite forces and close ranks against their main enemy in Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthis who reign supreme in the capital Sanaa and other parts in the north. However, the Saudi Crown Prince described the agreement as a crucial step towards a political solution to end a power struggle and eventually Yemen’s bloody war. “This agreement will open a new period of stability in Yemen. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia stands with you,” the Saudi Crown Prince told the Yemeni signatories at the ceremony in Riyadh aired on state television.  Despite this optimistic rhetoric, MBS himself failed to explain how this agreement will effectively help end the war in Yemen at large; that is unless he was referring merely to the southern part of the country and the Saudi-Emirati power struggle there.

Main Points of the Peace Deal

The ‘loosely worded and open to interpretation’ agreement, if successfully implemented on the ground, states that all military and security forces will be incorporated into the defence and interior ministries, introducing a government reshuffle to include the separatists with equal representation, and their armed forces will be placed under government control. It does little more than solve two short-term problems; It prevents a war-within-a-war between the southern separatists and Hadi’s government, and provides more credibility to any future government negotiations with the Houthis.

The UN special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, congratulated the two sides on the deal. “The signing of this agreement is an important step for our collective efforts to advance a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Yemen,” he said in a statement. “Listening to southern stakeholders is important to the political efforts to achieve peace in the country.”

More realistically, the peace agreement will help the Saudis and Emiratis to refocus on fighting the Houthis on Saudi Arabia’s border, and minimize systematic, painful and embarrassing rebel missile and drone attacks on Saudi cities, airfields, military and oil installations which have remarkably increased both scale and damage-wise in recent months. This is due to seriously shake the Saudis self-confidence and their trust in the massive, mainly US-supplied arsenal that has cost the oil-rich Kingdom trillions of dollars and abysmally failed to shoot down cheap-to-buy Houthi killer drones.

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