Conclusion

Based on an overview of the past decades’ fundamental developments in the international relations of Saudi Arabia’s global, regional, and subregional environment as well as an analysis of the Kingdom’s relative material and nonmaterial capabilities, the study classified Saudi Arabia as a regional power in a dynamic environment. The scrutiny of its material capabilities revealed that Saudi Arabia’s military power has increased over the last decades both in absolute and relative terms. This is partially the result of large investments in the modernization of the Saudi armed forces and efforts to improve their overall fitness for battle. Besides, Saudi relative military power increased also thanks to revolutions, civil wars, and foreign invasions that weakened considerably the capabilities of other regional powers. Particularly noteworthy in this context are the collapse of Iraq’s military power following the U.S.–British invasion of 2003, the gradual decrease in Iran’s conventional military capabilities since the revolution of 1979, and the continuous weakening and preoccupation of the Syrian armed forces since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. However, the analysis also showed that Saudi Arabia remains vulnerable to the conventional and unconventional military capabilities of other states in its subregional and regional environment. The analysis further revealed that the Kingdom has been able to partially compensate this vulnerability by making use of its economic and financial capabilities. The study showed that the Kingdom’s enormous oil exports, the mostly large oil revenues, and its influence in OPEC were and remain a source of considerable power. For decades, the Kingdom has been conducting its oil policy in such a way as to secure outside protection or at least weapons procurements through quid pro quo relationships with militarily powerful oil importing states. In addition, the Saudi leadership has repeatedly used oil as both a positive and negative incentive to influence the policies of oil importing states. Furthermore, its very significant oil revenues gave the Kingdom the ability to use financial aid as a means to influence the policy behavior inter alia of Arab states. The study further identified substate and transboundary identities rivaling national identity as a potential threat for domestic stability and a channel of external influence on the Kingdom’s domestic affairs. While tribal identities have over the past decades lost significance in favor of a national Saudi identity, particularly among younger generations, religious, sectarian, and Arab identities continue to be strongly felt by the Saudi population. This fact has repeatedly opened up opportunities for external parties to instigate or amplify domestic turmoil in the Kingdom by way of instrumentalizing transnational and conflicting identities. In the past, Nasserite Egypt and Baathist Iraq sought to incite domestic revolts against the Saudi monarchy by spreading their radical Arab nationalist ideologies in the Kingdom. After 1979, Revolutionary Iran made attempts to stir up a Shiite revolution against the Al Saud monarchy; longstanding anti-Shiite discrimination and the subsequent development of a deprived, parallel society with a Shiite rather than a national identity among some Shiites in the Kingdom served as a perfect gateway for Iranian activities. In 2011, the identification of many Saudi Shiites with their Bahraini brothers in

faith was an important cause for revolts in the Saudi Eastern Province. Transnational extremist Sunni identity has also been cause of grave concern to the Saudi leadership. The participation of Saudi citizens in the jihad in places such as Afghanistan – in the 1980s heavily supported by the Saudi leadership – Chechnya, or more recently Iraq and Syria have led to a radicalization of parts of the Saudi society, which has repeatedly erupted in the form of violent attacks against the Saudi leadership’s fundamental interests. Besides, the popular appeal, including in the Kingdom, of the Sunni pan-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood greatly concerns the Saudi leadership. This became obvious inter alia in Riyadh’s support of the Egyptian military coup in July 2013 and the branding of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in March 2014. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia has also been able to draw considerable power from the trans-nationality of Islamic identity. Ever since the conquest of Makkah and Medina by Ibn Saud in the mid-1920s, the Saudi leadership has been occupying a pivotal position within the Islamic world from which it derives significant soft power. The custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques served inter alia as a source of motivation for the Saudi leadership to act as a mediator in conflicts in the Arab and Islamic world. At the same time, the custodianship also provided the Kingdom with credibility as a mediator. The study identified four main Saudi foreign policy objectives: (a) the preservation of regime stability and domestic calm; (b) the defense of the Saudi territory against outside aggression; (c) the protection of a Saudi sphere of influence on the Arabian Peninsula; and (d) the preservation of the role as the leader of the Muslim world. According to the analysis, the following secondary foreign policy interests derive from the aforementioned core interests: (e) economic prosperity guaranteed through the stability of both global oil markets and oil export routes in the Kingdom’s subregional and regional environment; (f ) the advocacy for Arab and Muslim solidarity; (g) the maintenance of a close alliance with the United States; (h) and the containment and rollback of Revolutionary Iran’s influence in the Gulf subregion and in the Middle East at large. The Saudi leadership regularly faces the dilemma that its foreign policy objectives call for contradictory actions. A review of Saudi foreign policy over the past decades reveals that the regime addresses this challenge by applying an omnibalancing strategy; it dynamically adjusts its policies in such a way as to guarantee to the largest extent all its foreign and domestic policy interests. Section 2.6 argued that Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy is generally reactive in nature and does not follow any visible grand strategies. Due to the Kingdom’s international economic and political significance and the lack of an institutional knowledge base in the foreign ministry, the small circle of foreign policy decision makers, usually headed by the King, and knowledgeable advisors are faced with and often overextended by an enormous workload. The decision makers’ capacity limit as well as the Saudi leadership’s general custom to take important policy decisions based on consensus within the royal family’s inner circle and usually only after consultation of the senior ulama contribute to a generally slow decision making process. In the absence of meaningful advance planning, Saudi

foreign policy is usually a chain of ad hoc reactions to present crises and emerging foreign policy opportunities as well as measures to cultivate strategic alliances. The section further scrutinized the role of mediation in Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy. The analysis revealed a set of motivations (defensive, offensive, and altruistic motives according to Zartman and Touval’s classification) behind Saudi Arabia’s frequent attempts to mediate in conflicts in the Middle East. First, Saudi foreign policy follows the principle of security through stability. Intra-or interstate conflicts in Saudi Arabia’s subregional or regional environment have the potential of negatively affecting Riyadh’s economic and security interests, e.g., by destabilizing trade routes, dividing the Arab world into hostile camps, involving the Kingdom militarily, strengthening political, ideological, and religious radicalism, having spillover effects on Saudi territory, or allowing third parties at odds with Saudi Arabia, such as post-revolution Iran, to expand their influence in the region. Hence, the Saudi leadership has a great interest in the termination of most conflicts in its environment. Second, the Saudi leadership has repeatedly used conflict mediation as a means to improve bilateral relations with the United States. This for example was one of several motivations behind the announcement of the 2002 Abdullah Plan. Third, the Saudi government’s leadership role in the Arab and Islamic world establishes a responsibility and a necessity to act as a mediator in intra-Arab and intra-Muslim conflicts. Fourth, conflict mediation serves the Saudi leadership as a channel of influence with the conflict parties. Thus, conflict mediation increases the Kingdom’s political power. Fifth, an important motivation behind several Saudi mediation efforts has been a genuine religious sense of responsibility felt by key Saudi decision makers. Lastly, Saudi mediation policy is to a certain degree also a reflection of traditional Saudi and general Arab tribal culture going back to the pre-Islamic era. Nonetheless, although an important one, conflict mediation is only one of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy instruments. Despite its long tradition as a mediator in intra-Arab and intra-Islamic relations, the Saudi leadership has, when it served its foreign policy interests, also repeatedly taken sides in conflicts granting political, financial, or at times even military support to one of the conflicting parties. The subsequent chapters were devoted to the analysis of four prominent examples of Saudi Arabia’s mediation policy: Saudi Arabia’s role in the ArabIsraeli conflict and ensuing peace process (Chapter 3), the Saudi-sponsored 2007 Makkah Accord (Chapter 4), Saudi Arabia’s role as a mediator in the Lebanese civil war (Chapter 5), and the GCC Initiative in Yemen in 2011 (Chapter 6). Chapter 3 revealed that although not acting as a mediator in the strict sense (according to Princen’s terminology, Saudi Arabia’s role is somewhere between that of a disputant – having direct interests in the conflict issues – and a principal mediator; additionally, Saudi Arabia has not directly negotiated with Israel), the Saudi leadership has for decades been working towards a holistic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Kingdom has done so both by trying to get the United States to put pressure on the Israeli government to change its policy and

by lobbying in the Arab and Islamic state community for a peace offer to Israel based on a far-reaching compromise. Since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Saudi influence was primarily economic, financial, diplomatic, and political; military involvement was only symbolic. The Kingdom’s policy has been mainly influenced by (1) identity/ideology, (2) religion, and (3) strategic considerations. As a consequence, the Saudi leadership’s policy followed several objectives: the realization of Palestinian national rights, the return of occupied Arab lands, and the restoration of Muslim control over the holy places in Jerusalem; the guarantee of regime stability; the preservation of strategic relations with the United States; the containment of Soviet penetration into the Arab world; the maintenance of Arab consensus dominated by moderate Arab forces; and (even before the 1973 October War) the attainment of a holistic peace settlement supported by an Arab consensus. This set of objectives explains seemingly contradictory Saudi policy actions: significant financial, diplomatic, and political support for the PLO and the front states; the support of the Egyptian-Syrian war preparations in 1973; the subsequent application of the oil weapon; the clandestine breach of the oil embargo against the United States; efforts to effectuate change in U.S. policy through positive incentives and well-intended warnings; the rejection of the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; the championing of the First Arab Peace Initiative in 1981/82; the support for the 1991 Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords; gradual steps towards normalization while rejecting direct dealings with Israel in the 1990s; the political and financial support of the Al Aqsa Intifada and the harsh criticism of U.S. support for Israel’s reaction to the Palestinian uprising; and the continuous championing of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative with its offer of a far-reaching compromise. The analysis revealed that in publicly promoting both the Fahd and the Abdullah Plans the Saudi leadership abandoned its usual strategy of resorting to behind-closed-doors diplomacy and took significant political risks. However, the study also showed that while Riyadh had a genuine interest in the peaceful termination of the Arab-Israeli conflict both Saudi peace initiatives were triggered and partially motivated by other developments: a change of the intra-Arab balance of power to the disadvantage of the Kingdom’s interests following the Egyptian-Israeli separate peace in 1979 and the deterioration of U.S.–Saudi relations after 9/11. Thus, the analysis showed that mostly defensive and humanitarian, and to a lesser degree offensive, interests motivated Saudi Arabia’s “mediation” activities, or rather unilateral peace offerings, in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Saudi leadership has for decades preferred a political process based on a compromise over violence against Israel. The broad, almost all-encompassing acceptance of the two Arab Peace Initiatives within the Arab and Islamic world is a great accomplishment of Saudi foreign policy. The 1982 peace plan was the renunciation of the Three No’s of Khartoum and paved the way for the political progress of the 1990s. The 2002 peace initiative went a step further and offered Israel a normalization of relations on the basis of a compromise that coincides

with established international law and the demands of legally binding UN Security Council resolutions. Although the Israeli government and many Israelis believe differently, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative seems to be the only realistic basis for a comprehensive, lasting, and fair peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The fact that the Arab Peace Initiative has not yet born fruits is less a failure of Saudi foreign policy than it is the consequence of a cycle of violence fuelled to a large degree by Israel’s disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force against Palestinians in response to the violence committed by a minority, who is holding the majority of Palestinians hostage and whose radicalization was largely caused, directly or indirectly, by Israel’s actions in the first place. Chapter 4 analyzed Saudi mediation efforts between the conflicting Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas leading to a short-term success in the form of the 2007 Makkah Agreement. The Saudi leadership initiated its mediation attempts in early February 2007 under the impression of an imminent all-out Palestinian civil war. The analysis revealed a set of interlinked motives behind Riyadh’s mediation efforts: First, the Saudi leadership had an interest in de-escalating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which had been heating up since Hamas’ election victory in January 2006. Therefore, Riyadh hoped to facilitate the inclusion of the more moderate Fatah and its existing political conduit to Israel in a Palestinian unity government. Second, the Saudi leadership had for decades supported the Fatah-dominated PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Hence, participation of Fatah in a unity government was of great interest to Riyadh. Third, the Saudi leadership hoped that a political cooperation with Fatah would de-radicalize Hamas and possibly enable Hamas’ inclusion into the PLO. Fourth, Riyadh’s hope to terminate Hamas’ sole control of the Palestinian executive was also based on the perception of an ideological and political threat emanating from Hamas. The firmly republican and transnational character of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, like the Saudi leadership, draws its legitimacy from a conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam, poses a direct challenge to the Saudi political order. Fifth, the Saudi leadership hoped that after the formation of a more moderate Fatah-Hamas unity government the international community would resume its financial aid to the Palestinian executive. Consequently, so Riyadh hoped, Iran’s influence on Hamas, which had significantly increased due to Hamas’ lack of funding, could be contained and ideally rolled back. Sixth, the Saudi government’s mediation efforts were also a demonstration of its soft power and its leadership role in the Arab and Islamic world. Lastly, the Saudi leadership, with King Abdullah leading the way, felt a religious and moral responsibility to mediate in a conflict that was costing the lives of many Arab and Muslim brothers. The importance Riyadh attributed to the de-escalation of the intra-Palestinian conflict becomes clear when considering that the Saudi leadership proceeded with its mediation activities despite clear U.S. opposition. As in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Saudi mediation activity in the intra-Palestinian conflict was to the largest degree motivated by defensive interests, although humanitarian and offensive interests played a role as well.