Saudi King Says Time to Focus on Iranian Dangers

Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdulaziz has called on the international community to take a “decisive stance” against Iran and the dangers it poses. “The kingdom stresses the dangers of Iran’s regional project, its interference in other countries, its fostering of terrorism [and] its fanning the flames of sectarianism, and calls for a decisive stance from the international community against Iran that guarantees a drastic handling of its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction and develop its ballistic missiles program,” the king told the Shura Council, a 150-member body consisting of his top advisers. The remarks were part of an annual address, the transcript of which was published by the official Saudi news agency early on Thursday. With these words, Salman has brought Saudi Arabia’s outlook in line with that of US President Donald Trump, who in 2018 pulled the United States out of a 2015 multilateral agreement aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The US leader said the agreement, reached under the Obama administration, did not go far enough, most notably in regulating Tehran’s development of ballistic missiles. It is unclear how this approach will correlate with that of the next American administration, with President-elect Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, said to be interested in re-entering the Iran accord, although with changes.