Realpolitik is pretty much the act of never caring about the moral results of policy, and every power in the middle east practices it. I'm not convinced that KSA would be doing anything morally superior to what Iran is doing if they were in Iran's shoes. Stability would be what changes Iranian policies, and there are a lot of parties dedicated to ensuring that stability never breaks out in the middle east.
Yea, and it's not a good idea in the long term.
>I'm not convinced that KSA would be doing anything morally superior to what Iran is doing if they were in Iran's shoes.
What matters is what countries do now and not what some countries might have done if history were entirely different.
>Stability would be what changes Iranian policies
Many years ago, Kissinger said the Iranian regime has to choose whether whether Iran is country or a cause. They chose to make Iran a cause. Stability is incompatible with the cause's ideology.
KSA exports the same toxic religious fundamentalism, the same if not more radical than anything Iran espouses. The difference is they have the fig leaf of support from first world countries as they do it.
Citing Kissinger does not mean endorsing him.
>KSA exports the same toxic religious fundamentalism...
Iranian-supported fundamentalism controls 4 ME captials, KSA controls only 1 capital. Iran is a explicitly anti-American revisionist power with a serious nuclear program while KSA isn't.
Unsurprisingly, I focus on the bigger more toxic power (that wasn't always the case - two decades ago KSA was the bigger issue). Isn't that more like realpolitiks rather than talking about what would some fictional KSA have done?