ABSTRACT
During the late 1970s, Louis Turner and James Bedore published a number of articles and books on Middle Eastern political economy that proved standard reading for over a decade. Some of their work predicted future developments in the region, particularly future relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Thirty years later, though time has left much of their analysis obsolete, a rereading of these works certainly provides useful insights into the past, present, and future of the regional political economy. After assessing Turner and Bedore’s predictions and discussing past and current political and economic factors at play in the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, we move to a predictive analysis of our own: Saudi-Iranian relations of the year 2030.
