Abstract:
The article aims to understand how the relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia have evolved in the 2000s, through applying the regional level of analysis. It examines how the regional relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which ranges between regional cooperation and regional competition, affected the political, economic and military relations between Ankara and Riyadh through the period of study between 2003 until 2015 and how Saudi- Turkish relations affected Iran’s regional status. The hypothesis posed in response to the question is the regional context, which impacted the Turkish-Saudi relations positively after the US invasion of Iraq and negatively during the Arab uprisings and more specifically in the Egyptian uprising in 2013. In case, of Syria, the high level of coordination appeared since 2014. The Regional Security Complex Theory, Securitization and De-Securitization will be implemented to understand the regional interaction between Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East and its effects on Iran.
Machine summary:
"Moreover, the paper applies the concepts of Securitization and De- Securitization in understanding how Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran securitized regional issues differently which led to a different regional behaviours towards the developments in Iraq after 2003, Lebanon after 2006, Egypt after 2011 and Syria after 2011 as two regional powers in the Middle East.
Ankara specifically would undermine Tehran's influence in Palestinian politics and its dominance in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria by getting closer to those states itself, while "Saudi Arabia, in the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, began building alliances with states that shared its outlook, a "Sunni axis," like Egypt and Jordan and it wanted to include Turkey.
While Saudi Arabia regarded Iran as the source of regional instability along with Syria, Turkey approached Iran and Syria to form an anti-Kurdish coalition (as these countries share the same fear of the regional spill over of the Iraqi-Kurdish autonomy) and it activated the High Security Commission between Ankara and Tehran to discuss the Kurdish insurgent activities in their countries who founded their training camps in the Kandil mountains in the independent Kurdish Northern Iraq(Oguzlu, 2008: 10).
The regional interaction between Turkey and Saudi Arabia started since the war on Iraq in 2003 and continued during the Arab uprisings as they have interests in the regional issues of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Egypt which ranges between convergence and divergence."