Iran vs the rest: the Middle East has reached a tipping point

Last year, in the cigar bar of an opulent London hotel much favoured by visiting Arabs, an interesting conversation took place. My friend was rich enough to have two private jets and claimed to be doing private shuttle diplomacy between Israel and one of the Gulf states. Smoke curled around our heads and a young Qatari in Gucci trainers passed by with a woman my friend assured me was a Russian prostitute. My friend’s phone was out now and he was on a video call with a man he said was a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He asked him about a drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s two biggest oil refineries. The man chuckled. ‘Ah yes, that was us.’ Saudi Arabia’s oil production was briefly cut in half by that attack in September last year, but what really worried the Saudis was how the Americans did nothing more than issue a few tired words of condemnation. The Saudis suddenly had a glimpse of what getting into a war with Iran would be like without US military support.

And this occurred under Donald Trump, perhaps the most uncritically pro-Saudi US leader ever to sit in the Oval Office. When the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, Trump said he didn’t much care whether the Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), had known what was happening. ‘Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!’ This was just a part of one of the more extraordinary statements issued in Trump’s name under the White House letterhead — and there have been a few. Joe Biden, on the other hand, used the second anniversary of Khashoggi’s death to say he would ‘reassess’ the US-Saudi relationship. ‘Jamal’s death will not be in vain.’