Foreign Policy of Saudi Arabia: Sources, Purposes and Issues

This article explores the regional and international factors as the independent variables affecting foreign policy of Saudi Arabia and then it discusses four main features of its political system, namely, kingdom, wahhabism, rentierism and peninsula situation as the intermediate variables – domestic sources. Within this approach, five principles and grand goals of its foreign policy, including peripheral dominance seeking, regional balance, Islamic- Wahhabism centralism, coalition building and anti – democracy actions are analyzed. The main existing issues of Saudi Arabia's foreign policy are to be further explained at different levels as the reference of its constant elements and grand goals.