The most important news for the future of the Middle East in several years has just broken in Beijing, as a sign of the times. Official representatives of Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed there to resume diplomatic relations and reopen their respective embassies within two months. The outcome of the meeting has been confirmed by the Saudi state agency and Iranian media.
In this way, Riyadh and Tehran bury a hostility that dates back to 1979 and which bottomed out again in 2016, when a senior Shiite cleric was executed in Saudi Arabia, spurring a mob assault on the Saudi Arabian embassy in Iran.
The Saudis then decided to suspend diplomatic relations, which couldn't be worse anyway, locked as they were in an influence struggle, if not proxy war, in various Arab states, from Syria to Yemen, via Lebanon and Iraq.
It was precisely in Baghdad, in 2020, when both countries began to explore, out of the spotlight, an improvement in relations. Several meetings in Iraq were followed up in Oman. But the handshake took place in Beijing, the day after Xi Jinping was unanimously confirmed as the most powerful man in China since Mao Zedong. The day after the meeting in Moscow between the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Because peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran involves untangling the mess in Syria, where Moscow's ally Bashar al-Assad has won the war but not yet the reconstruction, which in turn requires the reinstatement of his regime among the rest autocratic regimes in the Arab world. Riyadh would have put on the table a political dialogue with the opposition in exile and the return without reprisals of the refugees. Tehran says that it is possible "within the framework of Astana", which also incorporates Ankara and Moscow.
The trilateral negotiation between Saudi Arabia, Iran and China had been underway for several days and was encouraged last month with the official visit of Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi to Beijing. Throughout this week, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamjani, and his Saudi counterpart, Musaid bin Mohamed al Aiban, have brought the negotiations to a successful conclusion. The first has described the dialogue as "frank, transparent and general".
Yesterday, after his re-election, Xi Jinping hinted at a more active role for China on the international scene. No one believed that he would arrive so soon. Although his success also reflects the return of Russia to the region since 2015, when it turned the Syrian civil war on its head in favor of the secular and police regime of the Baath party and the Assad family, its traditional allies.
It should be added that both Iran and Saudi Arabia have knocked on the door of the expansion of the BRICS, the multilateral organization of which China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa are part, which some see as a counterweight to the Western bloc structured by States. Joined.
Two recent events have created stupor in the Saudi kingdom, beyond the impact of the Khashoggi case in the international press. Namely, the failure to help when the Houthis attacked their oil installations and, last year, the unclaimed blowing up of the German-Russian NordStream gas pipelines. All this, after years of hearing that Iran was the great threat to the free circulation of hydrocarbons.
Until the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the Shah's Iran and Saudi Arabia were Washington's two pillars in the world's main oil region. Such harmony will not be repeated, because their competition in the Islamic world is real, beyond the
interest of some to turn it into a sectarian struggle between Sunnis and Shiites. In any case, the fact that Arabs and Persians shake hands is news of great historical importance that could relax and change the panorama in the entire region.
