Saudi-Iran diplomatic rivalry is John Kiriakou’s account of the long hostility between the two regional powers and its unexpected 2023 thaw. He says Saudi Arabia has had terrible relations with Iran going back even before the 1979 revolution, rooted in Iran being the world’s largest Shia Muslim country against a Sunni Saudi monarchy whose king holds the title “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” Mecca and Medina.[1][2] The rupture deepened in 1979/1980, when Iranian gunmen seized the Kaaba in Mecca at gunpoint and killed a number of people before Saudi special forces retook it by force — more than a thousand people were killed in the takeover and the ensuing Saudi military response — after which Saudi Arabia broke diplomatic relations with Iran for years.[3][4] Kiriakou also notes that Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province has a large Shia minority that the Sunni Saudi government suppresses, executing many Shia Saudis to keep the province calm; most of the kingdom’s Shia population lives there, precisely where the oil is, and the government cracks down hardest in the province — including banning commemorations of Hassan and Hussein — out of fear that local Shia could fall under Iranian influence.[5][6]
Wahhabism and religious policing
Kiriakou traces Saudi Arabia’s official fundamentalism to Wahhabism, a strict interpretation of the Quran developed in the 18th century by the thinker Abdul Wahhab and adopted by major Saudi tribes including the Sauds, Rasheeds and Qahtanis; he notes Qatar is the only other Wahhabi state on earth.[7] During his 1991 posting to Saudi Arabia, a senior Saudi foreign ministry official corrected him for calling the kingdom “fundamentalist,” telling him the term was almost redundant — “we’re all fundamentalists here,” the official said, calling Saudi Arabia the most fundamentalist Muslim country on earth as a matter of course, a claim Kiriakou says held true until the Taliban took power in Afghanistan.[8] That fundamentalism is enforced by the mutawa, religious police under the Ministry of Virtue and Vice, who strike women with bamboo canes for exposing skin and can have them arrested for prostitution.[9] Kiriakou recounts one case in which the mutawa pulled the U.S. deputy chief of mission to Saudi Arabia from his car after he kissed his wife, a nurse, on the cheek in public — beating him with a cane badly enough to require stitches and arresting them both, her on a prostitution charge.[10] Serving as human rights officer at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, Kiriakou also personally witnessed a public execution by beheading of a Filipino man caught with drugs.[11]
China brokers a surprise rapprochement
Kiriakou says China brokered the 2023 restoration of Saudi-Iranian diplomatic relations, catching the United States off guard in what Washington had long considered its own sphere of influence.[12] He notes that only in the six months before that normalization had Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE begun a parallel push to normalize relations in the region.[2]