Meh. The UAE belongs to Saudi Arabia. They've always been the sea pirates to compliment the land raiders. Bahrain is the place Saudi Arabia allows the US to keep their military. Sudan, meanwhile... So far no Arab aid has been definitely granted for the Jonglei Canal project, but sources in The Sudan say substantial financial backing is forthcoming and, in any case, the project has been launched. In August, 1978, work began with the assembly of the giant excavator, a 450-foot machine weighing 2,000 tons. Built by West Germany's Siemens Company, and used only once before, the excavator looks and functions like an enormous ferris wheel: as the wheel turns, huge buckets mounted on it take great bites of earth out of the ground and dump them onto a conveyor belt that carries them away. The excavator can shift about 159,000 cubic feet of earth every hour - enough to fill the New Orleans Superdome to a depth of 11 feet. Engineers expect completion of the canal in 1981 - just in time, Arab aid officials think, to provide irrigation for the new breadbasket of the Middle East. Sudan has belonged to Saudi Arabia for so long there are Saudi ruins there. Saudi fingers have been in Sudanese pies since before the Shah fell. Meanwhile, the Iranians can say calm things like "Iran said Saudi Arabia made a “strategic mistake” that could only further divide the region and fuel militancy during crucial battles against the Islamic State and efforts to end Syria’s civil war" (from your own linked article) and remind the world they still have a WaPo journalist for sale . The Saudis being off the chain is entirely an American problem, with two prongs the US has near total control over (Bahrain, UAE) and one they have none (Sudan). Iran, meanwhile, gets to publicly point out that they condemned the execution and the sacking of the embassy, and there haven't been any articles about their nasty tendencies to hang homosexuals and drug users in almost a year. The Iranians are leaving it to the West to keep the Sunnis in line. Since they signed the treaty, that's their card to play. They're playing it. Any destabilization in Saudi Arabia (and let's be honest - if you were the Saudis, would you make a play like this if you weren't experiencing a great deal of destabilization?) only serves to make Iran's oil more attractive. Them crazy Persians can't help but come up on top. C'mon, now. You have to drive through Kuwait and Iraq to get to Iran from Saudi Arabia. Along the way you have to go through the Zagros, which the Kurds own by the way. Meanwhile, Iran has two navies bigger than Saudi's one and the Saudis are currently having a rough time quelling rebellion in Yemen, site of a ceasefire they also rolled back while executing Shia. The more I watch this, the more certain I am that the Iranians successfully provoked Saudi Arabia into lashing out and overreaching for their own geopolitical gain. The Saudi embassy burned because the Iranians wanted the Saudi embassy to burn because it was useful to chase some spies away and piss the Saudis off. Now that they've got the Saudis going batshit they can sit back and let the US spin their wheels in Riyadh. So much more efficient than firing Katyushas at Tel Aviv.The Rahad project has cost the Sudanese government about $333 million - but almost a third of it was provided by the Saudi and Kuwait Funds and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.
This is an area where a lot of people have weapons, and religious tensions run deep. Is there an Archduke Ferdinand driving about?