Saudi View Of Trump’s New Iran Approach Identical To Israel’s موقف السعودية متطابق مع موقف إسرائيل من مقاربة ترامب الجديدة لإيران
Jerusalem Post/October 15/17
King Salman praised Trump in a phone call for his “firm strategy” against Iran.
Saudi Arabia’s reaction to US President Donald Trump’s more confrontational posture toward Tehran was strikingly similar to Israel’s, highlighting the two countries’ common desire for a more determined American effort to counter Iranian influence in the region.
On Saturday, King Salman praised Trump in a phone call for his “firm strategy” against “Iranian aggression and its support for terrorism in the region,” the Saudi Press Agency reported.
The king praised the Trump administration, which recognizes the magnitude of these challenges and threats and the need for concerted efforts on terrorism and extremism and its primary sponsor, Iran,” the Agency added.
The report followed an announcement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late Friday, also praising Trump for the same reasons, saying the US president “has created an opportunity to fix this bad deal, to roll back Iran’s aggression and to confront its criminal support of terrorism.”
Since Trump’s election, the Saudis had been hoping for a tougher American stand on Tehran, which they view as a great and growing threat to their interests.
In May, the Saudis gathered Islamic leaders for a summit with Trump in Riyadh that highlighted Iran as the epicenter of subversion and terrorism in the region. Trump’s decertification of the nuclear deal, his sanctioning of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and his vow to stand against Iran’s fueling of “conflict, terror and turmoil” are seen by the Saudis as initial crystallization of the more assertive — some would say, aggressive, approach they had hoped for.
The Trump speech was music to the ears of Abdul-Rahman Rashed, former editor-in-chief of the London-based, Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. He echoed Netanyahu’s choice of the word “courageous” to describe Trump’s approach.
“It’s a correct beginning for regional corrections or at least stopping the creeping of Iran,” he wrote of the speech in Asharq al-Awsat Saturday.
“The project of Iran is expansive and it wants to have hegemony over the region. It is not only building its nuclear capability for defensive purposes,” Rashed wrote.
“Iran is waging destructive military wars every day in the region. All of them are expansionist activities,” he added.
In the view of Gabriel Ben-Dor, a Middle East specialist at Haifa University, “what the Saudis want from the US is what we Israelis want: to lean hard on Iran, to make sure they don’t cheat and find ways to bypass the nuclear agreement to develop nuclear weapons — to not allow them to develop long range ballistic missiles unhindered and to confront them on their support of terror and subversion.”
“The Saudis feel that Trump’s assertive speech is a signal that the US is prepared to do something on these three things critical to the Saudi perception of national security. Their view is quite identical to what we Israelis feel about things on the agenda,” Ben-Dor said.
The Saudis are worried about Iranian subversion across the region: in Yemen, where Riyadh has gotten bogged down in its war with Iranian-backed Houthi forces; in Syria, where growing Iranian influence threatens Saudi allies; and in Bahrain, where there are outbreaks of unrest among the Shiite majority.
“These are immediate threats. The nuclear project and long range missiles are not immediate but they are very paramount in the Saudis’ thinking about their future,” Ben-Dor said.
In Ben-Dor’s view, the Saudis do not want to see the US pull out of the nuclear deal entirely. “They don’t see an alternative. If the agreement collapses now without an alternative agreement and without an international coalition subscribing to an agreed upon policy than Iran gets a free hand to continue and develop its own nuclear ambitions more forcefully and without international inspection.”
Rather than it collapsing, the Saudis want the agreement “to have more teeth, a tougher inspection regime and to expand it to include Iran’s missile program.”
