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The forthcoming first visit by Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Saudi Arabia on November 13 marks a milestone in the rapprochement between the two countries mediated by China in March. The relationship is fast acquiring a qualitatively new level of solidarity in the context of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

This marks a shift in the tectonic plates in regional politics, which has long been dominated by the United States but no longer so.

The events since October 7 make it abundantly clear that the US attempts to integrate Israel into its Muslim neighbourhood in its terms is a pipe dream — ie., unless and until Israel is willing to turn its sword into plowshares. The ferocity of the Israeli revenge attacks on the people of Gaza — “animals” — smacks of racism and genocide.

Iran knew all along the bestiality of the Zionist regime. Saudi Arabia too must be in a chastened mood following the wake-up call that it must first and foremost learn to live in its region.

There is a fallacy in the western discourse about a Russia-China-Iran axis in West Asia. This is a nonsensical misinterpretation. A consistent three-fold foreign policy principle that Iran pursued right from the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is that, one, its strategic autonomy is sacred; two, the countries of the region must take their destiny into their own hands and solve regional issues themselves without involving extra-regional powers, and, three, foster Muslim unity howsoever long and winding that road might seem.

This principle had severe limitations due to force of circumstances — principally, in the conditions engendered by the colonial policy of divide and rule pursued by the US. Circumstances were even deliberately engineered, such as the Iraq-Iran war, where the US encouraged the regional states to collaborate with Saddam Hussein to launch an aggression against Iran to stymie the Islamic revolution in its infancy.

Another painful episode was the Syrian conflict. There, again, the US actively canvassed among regional states for a regime change in Damascus with the ultimate objective of targeting Iran by using the terrorist groups that Washington incubated in Occupied Iraq.

In Syria, the US brilliantly succeeded in pitting the regional states against each other and the result is plain to see in the ruins of what used to be the throbbing heart of Islamic civilisation . At the peak of the conflict, several western intelligence agencies were freely operating in Syria assisting the terrorist groups to rampage the country whose cardinal sin was that, like Iran, it too consistently put primacy on its strategic autonomy and independent foreign policies through the cold war and post-cold war eras alike.

Suffice to say, the US and Israel met with great success in fragmenting Muslim Middle East by exaggerating the threat perceptions and convincing several Gulf Arab states that they faced direct threats or even attacks by Iranian proxies, as well as alleged Iranian support for dissident movements.

Of course, the US capitalised on it by selling huge volumes of weapons and more importantly, to finesse the petrodollar as a key pillar of the western banking system. As for Israel, it directly benefitted from demonising Iran in order to draw attention away from the Palestine issue, which has all along been the core issue in the Middle East crisis.

Suffice to say, the rollout of the Iran-Saudi-China agreement has reduced the hostility that existed between Riyadh and Tehran for the better part of the recent decades. Both countries sought to build on the momentum generated by the success of the secret Beijing talks with regard to their commitment to non-interference. It must be noted, however, that the relations between Gulf Arab countries and Iran had already improved significantly over the last two years.

It continues