Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said Saudi Arabia wants to resolve its differences with rival Iran, a marked shift in tone in the wake of the election of US President Joe Biden. Prince Mohammed said in an interview on Saudi television that Riyadh did not want “the situation with Iran to be difficult” and wanted to build a “good and positive relationship” with the Islamic republic.
“We are working now with our partners in the region and the world to find solutions for these problems,” he said. “At the end of the day, Iran is a neighboring country. All what we ask for is to have a good and distinguished relationship with Iran.”
His comments late on Tuesday, come days after the Financial Times revealed that top Saudi and Iranian intelligence officials held secret talks this month in Baghdad in an effort to repair relations between the regional powerhouses. The rivals severed diplomatic ties five years ago.
Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s day-to-day leader, has regularly railed against Iran, accusing the republic of stoking conflict in the Middle East and seeking to destabilize Saudi Arabia. In 2018, he likened Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Adolf Hitler.
At the time, he was a staunch backer of former President Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally withdraw the US from the nuclear deal Iran signed with world powers and impose crippling sanctions on the Islamic republic.
As Riyadh backed Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, the former US president stood by Prince Mohammed after the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents triggered the kingdom’s biggest diplomatic crisis in decades.
But Biden has promised to reassess relations with the kingdom and has been critical of human rights abuses in the kingdom, including Khashoggi’s brutal murder. He has also pledged to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and lift sanctions if Tehran falls back into full compliance with the accord.
The Biden administration has also intensified diplomatic efforts to end the six-year war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is fighting Houthi rebels aligned to Iran. Prince
Mohammed sought to play down any differences with Washington, saying the kingdom was “in agreement with the Biden administration on more than 90 per cent of Saudi-US interests”.