Rawalpindi-Riyadh embrace

BRUCE RIEDEL, fellow at Brookings' Saban Center states that understanding the Saudi-Pakistani relationship was important to understand the future of both the countries, the nuclear balance in Near East and South Asia and the crisis in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia today.
In an op-ed for Force, "Enduring Allies", he states that Riyadh-Rawalpindi relationship was a longstanding, intimate alliance, with a decades-old strategic military relationship, an as yet unacknowledged nuclear partnership to provide Riyadh with a nuclear deterrent at short notice, if needed.
He states that Pakistan was the largest recipient of Saudi aid outside the Arab world and the Pakistani madarsa system was funded by the kingdom's Wahabbi clergy while Rawalpindi provided military expertise and resources, augmented by close intelligence and security relations and apprehensions about a Shia Iran.
He concludes that turmoil both in the Arab World as well as Pakistan and tensions with Washington were impelling the House of Saud and Pakistan towards even closer partnership.

Tehran-Washington slow dance

SUZANNE MALONEY, fellow at the Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy examines the forces that have conspired to keep Washington and Teheran trapped in conflict, and offered a forecast on the future evolution of the standoff in the wake of epic change unfolding across the Middle East.
In her article for Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI), "Tehran and Washington: A Motionless Relationship?", she states that although Washington has relied heavily on economic sanctions to influence Iran's policies and options, it also experimented with a variety of tactics ranging all the way from back-channel inducements to undeclared warfare depending on cyclical changes in the philosophical, partisan and practical considerations that shaped its approach to Iran.
She states that Iran's oil revenues insulated the Iranian regime, allowed it to exploit the sanctions and also allowed Beijing an uncontested access to Iran's energy sector with Beijing now indispensable in influencing Teheran. She concludes that the current U.S. approach while having impeded Iran's most problematic policies, hadn't altered the regime's political calculus and intensified the Iranian threat.