Chasing the Dream: The Salman Doctrine and Saudi Arabia's Bid for Regional Dominance.

• Author: Nuruzzaman, Mohammed
• Position: COMMENTARY

Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud has made a big break from his predecessors by redefining and re-strategizing the Kingdom's foreign policy approach, particularly in the Middle East region. Marked by an abrupt aggressiveness in the pursuit of foreign policy goals and interests, his foreign policy approach relies more on force (as in Yemen), and less on diplomacy and backdoor negotiations or financial leverage to defuse tensions and hammer out deals with opponents (as with Iran). This approach is a clear shift from the traditional policy of restraint to the use of force to realize national interests. Analysts and the global press have dubbed this foreign policy shift the "Salman Doctrine." Though not officially formulated, the doctrine has a number of significant features: firstly, for the first time in contemporary history and unlike other regional powers, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has come to be associated with a foreign policy doctrine; and secondly, the doctrine looks like an attempt to latch an Arab tradition onto the American tradition of articulating and proclaiming a new foreign policy or security doctrine after the election of almost every new American president, starting with George Washington (1789-1797) down the road to incumbent Donald Trump (2017-).

But unlike the American foreign policy doctrines, which have had a global thrust--a thrust to reshape or significantly influence the course of global politics to suit America's interests as well as the interests of its allies--the Salman doctrine has a limited geographic focus in the Middle East and it primarily aims at serving the Saudi bid for regional dominance vis-a-vis Iran, the Kingdom's arch regional competitor. The doctrine came to the forefront after the Kingdom launched a massive air attack, code-named "Operation Decisive Storm," on Yemen on March 26, 2015, just three months after King Salman ascended to the throne, to punish, and if possible, eliminate the Houthi rebels who had seized control of the Yemeni capital Sanaa in September the previous year, and to teach their regional backer Iran some hard strategic lessons. The air attack was soon followed by a Saudi-led land assault on the rebel-held territories to restore President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi to power. Hadi had fled to Riyadh just a day before the air campaign started. But four years after the onset of these air and land offensives, Saudi Arabia is nowhere close to defeating the Houthi rebels who continue to control Sanaa and serve as the de facto rulers of Yemen. The Kingdom is rather caught in a quagmire with no exit strategy in place and has been incurring spiraling material, human, and financial costs from its military adventures in Yemen, which many commentators often refer to as Saudi Arabia's "Vietnam."

This commentary has two purposes: firstly, it contends that the Salman doctrine was a major misstep in Saudi foreign policy. There was a glaring mismatch between the doctrine's ends and the means to achieve the ends, relegating it to the status of a dysfunctional doctrine. Secondly, the doctrine has done more damage than good to Saudi national interests and reputation in terms of the Kingdom's standing in the global community.

The Context and Rationale of the Salman Doctrine

On a general level, the direct military strikes against the Houthi rebels have marked a clear shift from soft power to hard power in Saudi foreign policy under King Salman, but the shift was not definitely precipitated by that incident alone. The Houthis were just a part of the broader post-2003 geopolitical competition for power and influence between the Middle East's two archrivals--Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, as well as other Gulf officials, rightly or wrongly perceive the Houthis, a group of Zaydi Shias, as a proxy of Shia Iran. They interpret the Houthi takeover of Sanaa and other Yemeni cities as an Iranian bid to gain a foothold in the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, after having gained influence in the Levant, and thus pose an existential threat to Saudi national security. Iranian scholars and commentators dispute such interpretations, however. (1) They contend that Yemen, compared to Iraq or Syria, has never been a high priority area for Iran. Indeed, the Islamic Republic has deployed elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops in and committed huge financial resources to Iraq and Syria, while its support for the Houthi rebels is more political and less material in nature. That clearly means that the real motives of Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen were critically defined or determined by developments in other political and strategic areas.

The post-2003 geopolitical power play in the Middle East has more or less favored Iran, often at the expense of the Saudis. The Iranians emerged much emboldened and more powerful in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ironically, it was Iran's nemesis, the U.S., that dislodged two of the former's erstwhile formidable foes--Afghan Taliban on the eastern border and Saddam Hussein's Iraq on the western border. The collapse of the anti-Iran ultra-Sunni Taliban regime and Saddam's secular Ba'athist regime, which had fought an eight-year long devastating war against Iran (1980-1988), created an unprecedented strategic breathing space for Iran which it swiftly utilized to cultivate and nurture ties of solidarity with Iraqi Shias and to oppose the...