What Would a Saudi-Iran War Look Like?

Foreign Policy: What Would a Saudi-Iran War Look Like? Don’t look now, but it is already here

When asked to address the question of what a Saudi-Iran war would look like, my first instinct is to ask the reader to look around because it is already happening. As the futurist William Gibson noted, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Already, Saudi Arabia and Iran are killing each other’s proxies, and indirectly are killing each other’s advisors and troops, in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia’s Shiite Eastern Province.

The future is likely to look similar. The existing pattern will intensify, eventually spill over in a short, sharp direct clash, and then sink back down again to the level of proxy wars in other people’s territories.

The preferred method of conflict between these states has for a long time been proxy warfare. Since its devastating eight-year war against Iraq, the leadership in Tehran has demonstrated a strong preference for acting through proxies like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shiite militias, and Hamas. Lacking a strong military for most of its existence, the state of Saudi Arabia has likewise used proxy warfare to strike painful blows against its enemies, notably against Egypt’s occupation forces in the 1962-1970 Yemeni civil war and against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both these players try to get others to do most of their fighting and dying for them.

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WNU Editor: This is a conflict that goes back centuries .... the only difference now is that they have better weapons.