Competition among the Regional Powers of the Persian Gulf (Iran and Saudi Arabia) after the Islamic Revolution

In the various geo-political regions of the world, the competition among powers has developed a multi-layered nature and extended its domain from local and national scales to regional and trans-regional ones. At this point, one of the challenging and competitive scales is created in the regional nature of the powers; in other words, the different benefits of regional powers results in the development of a politically variable and a tight security atmosphere. Here, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as two equally powerful rivals, are both trying to increase their influence in the Persian Gulf region and in the world of Islam. This problem has resulted in an ever-increasing competition between the two countries both before and after the Iranian Islamic Revolution. After the Revolution, this competition has intensified in terms of the domain of influence of each country due to some conditions. Generally speaking, however, it has greatly affected the relationships between these two countries and has itself undergone several ups and downs. Moreover, at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, the Arab countries of the Gulf region, particularly Saudi Arabia, clearly showed their suspicions as to what they considered to be the attempts of the newly-developed Islamic Republic of Iran to export its Islamic-Shi’ite Revolution and the anti-West ideology to other countries. These suspicions were quite detectable in their reactions to Iran. Two years after the victory of the Revolution, these countries established the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf in order take a practical step towards standing against the presence of a new Iran in the region and remove their worries in this regard. In the course of the relationships between Iran and Saudi Arabia, these two countries have sometimes stood against each other regarding regional, cultural, and religious problems and have sometimes cooperated with each other concerning their shared benefits. In this paper, the researchers have tried to investigate the competitive atmosphere dominating the relationships between the two powers of the Persian Gulf region, namely, Iran and Saudi Arabia, after the Islamic Revolution. In doing so, they have employed the analytic-descriptive method of research and used library sources.