**1. Introduction**

Saudi Arabia's international attitude in recent years has been labeled aggressive, reckless or even outright dangerous, in contrast with decades of cautious reserve and status quo-oriented foreign policy. This departure from the traditional mentality of restraint has been described as a shift from "defensive realism" to "o ffensive realism". According to this approach, "defensive realism stresses moderate, cautious policies in the pursuit of security. Survival is best realized through a mentality of restraint that tends towards small, incremental and non-disruptive actions in security seeking", whereas o ffensive realists consider that in the quest for survival "there is no such thing as an adequate level of security; states must hoard as much as possible" by maximizing their power at the expense of their rivals and adopting unilateral behavior and regional hegemony to secure their survival (Rich 2019).

Indeed until 2015, the Saudi monarchy demonstrated a cautious, status quo foreign policy in line with its main priorities of domestic stability and external security (Gause 2018). E ffectively unable to project hard power, Saudi Arabia displayed a foreign attitude based on diplomacy and balancing through regional alliances, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), while delegating its external security, and most importantly the secure flow of its oil production, to the US security umbrella (Nonneman 2006). Domestic stability e ffectively meant the secure flow of revenues from oil production, upon which the Saudi economy and the unity of the regime depended, itself built upon a patronage system running through all segments of Saudi society, whilst relying on the *ulama* (religious scholars) for legitimacy. Therefore, the internal stability heavily relied on external security of its borders and the uninterrupted trade through the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia's foreign policy orientation has relied upon two pillars which allowed it considerable freedom of maneuver; financially, its position as an oil giant gave it a leading role within the OPEC and the global oil trade. Spiritually, the custodianship of Islam's holy places gave the monarchy and religious authorities the mobilization capacity of over a billion Muslims, while the pact between the royal family and the religious establishment provided the moral grounds of internal legitimization. The Saudi state has relied heavily upon these two elements of soft power, religious ideology and financial largesse (Korany and Moataz 2008), to attain its foreign policy objectives. The accumulation of wealth in the second half of the twentieth century made it possible to project its native religious discourse to other Muslim countries through its *da'wa* (proselytizing) mission via a number of state and independent religious institutions and organisations such as the Muslim World League (MWL), the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and international offices affiliated with the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and through the courses offered by the Islamic University of Medina and the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh (Commins 2015).

Furthermore, throughout the 1950s and 1960s the dual pillars of this strategy kept the kingdom from external rival ideologies such as Nasserism and Baathism and positioned it as the defender of the *umma* (the Muslim community) against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As new perceived external threats rose in the following decades, Saudi religious diplomacy was deployed as a foreign policy tool in order to face the danger of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Islamist opposition expressed by diverse groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) following the Gulf War in 1991, and jihadism following 9/11 (Mouline 2020). Following the 2001 attacks, and as in previous times of crisis, this tool was further deployed in order to whitewash the image of the regime and to clarify that extremism in fact emanates from distorted interpretations of Islam, namely by the Muslim Brotherhood and violent jihadism. Hence, religion is incorporated in Saudi Arabian foreign policy as a tool of "soft power" in order to serve geopolitical objectives and used as a "space for expressing conventional geopolitical rivalries" (Mandaville and Hamid 2018). This has become particularly evident since 2003, when the Saudi-Iranian rivalry entered a new era of tension.

Regionally, the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq left vacuums that the main rival of Saudi Arabia in the region was swift to fill, thus creating a context of sectarian divisions, violence and heightened tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia in what was called the "new Middle East Cold War" (Gause 2014). Iranian expansionism mainly in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, as well as the added challenge of jihadist attacks on its own soil, was at the core of the Saudi regime's threat perceptions until the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011.

The consequent transition processes and civil wars that followed the revolts added new layers of crisis in the region, further challenging Saudi Arabia on multiple levels: on the ideological level, its primacy was contested by the strengthening of the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam narratives which caused further fragmentation within the Sunni world. The rise of the Islamic State and the territorialization of Salafi jihadism also challenged the Saudi perception of being the Islamic state *par excellence*. On the geopolitical level, the weakening of the relations with the US under the Obama administration and the nuclear deal reached with Iran in 2015 exacerbated Saudi security dilemmas, thus imposing a rethinking of foreign policy objectives and the means to achieve them.

The new foreign policy dogma and the shift towards an offensive realist attitude materialized under King Salman and especially since the promotion of his son Mohammad Bin-Salman (MBS), emboldened by the arrival of President Trump and his intense anti-Iran rhetoric. However, this strategy quickly produced very mixed results, considerably damaging the regime's international image. Parallel to the demonstrated aggressiveness, the Saudi leadership promotes a renewed "soft power" policy under the banner of "moderate Islam" and the modern "Vision 2030" internal reform program. While these coincide with a recent turn towards diplomacy, they are perceived more as a public relations tool, complementary to the current aggressive tactics, rather than a complete U-turn towards the former behavior pattern, resembling the definition of defensive realism.

Based on academic literature on Saudi Arabian foreign policy and more recent empirical observations, this paper aims to examine the recent developments in Saudi Arabia's international behavior and to observe the role of Islam in current security dilemmas and policy objectives, taking into account the geopolitical factors that weighed on the leadership's threat perceptions pre- and

post-2011 reconfigurations. Furthermore, it aims to show that under King Salman the foreign policy direction shifted towards an offensive realist attitude in pursuing three main objectives; (1) to gain a hegemonic role in the Gulf region, (2) to contain Iranian expansionism and (3) to contain political Islam as manifested through Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations and their patron states in the Middle East. Finally, it intends to examine the (geo)political and ideological motivations behind the notion of 'moderate Islam' promoted by the Saudi leadership. Acknowledging that this is an ongoing process whose results remain to be seen, this paper attempts a discussion on the nature of Islam to which Saudi Arabia wishes to adhere, at a time when internal developments point towards a merge of Salafism and nationalism, amidst an intensifying authoritarian rule (Blin 2016).

### **2. Saudi Arabia Post-2011: Responding to the Challenges through 'Hard Power' and 'Moderation'**
