What started out in 2004 as an internal conflict between the — a Shiite rebel movement — and the Yemeni government seems to have devolved into an ideological and geopolitical war involving both internal and external forces.

So much has been written about and ’s hegemonic pursuits in the Middle East. Neglected in many analyses, however, is a fair assessment of how internal (socioeconomic, historical and ideological) as well as external factors (geopolitical praxis exerted by key regional players) have given rise to a wider regional conflagration that threatens the peace and security of the entire region.

As Egypt and Saudi Arabia mull over to send ground troops into , one wonders about the denouement of Riyadh’s intervention against the backdrop of Iran’s ascendance; whether and violent extremism will ultimately devour the Arabian Peninsula, or if a semblance of order will be restored.

Almost six years before the advent of the in 2010, a ragtag of disgruntled student activists led by Hussein al-Houthi — a radical cleric who to “promote a Zaidi revival” in the northwestern province of Saada — staged a putsch against the government of then-Yemeni President . Although, Houthi himself was killed following months of skirmishes between Yemeni security forces and Zaidi Shiite rebels, the northerners’ pent-up antipathy toward the Saleh regime and his divide-and-rule system of governance never subsided.

For whatever reason — be it Saleh’s endorsement of the Iraq War in 2003, balancing the rising influence of Salafism in the northern highlands or due to their chronic sense of disenfranchisement — the Houthi rebels, better known as Ansar Allah, pressed ahead with their never-ending demands for greater autonomy. They spearheaded another five before a flimsy ceasefire was reached between the rebels and the government in 2010. A year prior to the ceasefire, however, Yemen saw for the first time since 1991 a military incursion initiated by the Saudis inside the northern parts of the country; although it culminated in an embarrassing defeat for Riyadh and Saleh loyalists.

Meanwhile, in the south — where the populace had grown weary of the Yemeni government’s alleged unequal distribution of land and resources, and of Saleh’s inability to address unemployment, political marginalization and insecurity — the Southern Separatist Movement, better known as Hirak, entered the fray. This movement called for splitting Yemen, a country of 24 million people and one of the poorest in the Arab world, down pre-unification lines.

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According to the World Bank, aside from the continued scourge of poverty in Yemen, 45% of the population is food insecure and the country’s scarce water resources are far below the regional average. Added to this cataclysmic turn of events, an ever-present terrorist threat is posed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its local affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, who have taken large swathes of territory in the restive south.

The Arab Spring

In 2011, the air in the Middle East and North Africa was thick with the sense of fear and fin de régime. As the Arab dictators of Tunisia and Egypt fell like dominoes during the Arab Spring, a whiff of wind was more than enough to push large sections of Yemeni society out onto the streets of Sana’a, where the youth and civil society activists demanded an end to Saleh’s 33-year rule. For this to happen, a gaggle of unlikely bedfellows came together to form a revolutionary . It was in this amorphous and loosely organized coalition, which Houthis were a part of along with the main opposition bloc, the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), that the Zaidi Shiite movement found a unique opportunity to further augment its bargaining power vis-à-vis its rival factions and government-aligned forces in the face of a potential power vacuum created by regime change in Yemen.

In early 2012, Saleh relinquished power as part of a transition road map devised by a (GCC) initiative, and he agreed to legally hand over power to his deputy, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, in exchange for domestic immunity from prosecution.

Consequently, a National Dialogue Conference (NDC) was patched together to deliberate over myriads of longstanding challenges and ultimately produce a new constitution. Although the conference concluded in January 2014 with the promise of federalization — which is carving out the country into six regions — it became increasingly evident that neither the Houthis, nor the separatist Southern Movement had reached a solid consensus within themselves and with each other to fully implement and comply with the provisions of the GCC initiative. In fact, to northerners a united southern federal state would give the southerners full access to Yemen’s largest oil reserves, whereas to many of Hirak’s representatives, who were grappling with internal at the time of negotiations, independence was considered to be the only viable option.

The Houthi Surge

In this setting, and in the absence of a fully-fledged military apparatus and state security services in many areas of the country, a whole host of state forces, armed non-state actors and external regional players seem to have stepped up to the plate in a bid to fill the security void.

Most importantly, though, things took a turn for the worst in September 2014, when the Houthi rebels attacked the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, and then put President Hadi under house arrest. Hadi, who resigned in January 2015, fled to Aden in February and subsequently escaped to Riyadh in March as Houthi forces took control of large parts of Sana’a.

The Saudis, however, were quick to respond to the siege of Sana’a and Hadi’s forcible removal from office. They used the same tactic that had previously been implemented in response to ’s pro-democracy uprising in 2011. Backed by American intelligence and supplied with advanced US-made weaponry, Saudi Arabia, along with its allies, launched massive airstrikes in March against Houthi strongholds in Yemen under the of “restoring the legitimate government.”

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At this juncture, it is far from certain whether the Saudi military’s intervention will successfully catapult Hadi back into the Republican Palace. But one thing is deemed irrefutable: Owing to the confluence of several factors previously discussed, a domestic rebellion has devolved into a sectarian security threat to the entire Arabian Peninsula, where insurgents affiliated with the Islamic State have set their sights on the whole region.

It is in this context that the geopolitical narratives come to the fore, as the civil war in Yemen is now largely portrayed as a proxy battle between the Middle East’s Sunni powers and Shiite-dominated Iran. In fact, both Riyadh and Hadi have the Shiite Houthi rebels as the “stooges of Iran.” This brings us to the question: Is the raging pandemonium in Yemen a classic example of geopolitical maneuvering at play, and to what extent is this conflict a corollary of realpolitik reasoning on the part of regional stakeholders in the first place?

Iran-Saudi Arabia Nexus: A Geopolitical Turn

Tensions were further complicated on January 23 as a result of the interception and subsequent seizing of what officials in Yemen as an “Iranian vessel trying to smuggle explosives and surface-to-air missiles to the country,” a claim denied by Tehran. Although there is no substantive evidence to corroborate these allegations — with the United Nations Monitoring Group saying that the ship could have been intended for — the discourse of Iranian officials since the onset of the Yemeni uprising have provided Sunni petro-monarchies of the GCC with ample ammunition to project Tehran’s rhetoric as feeding into the Sunni-Shiite divide in the Middle East, and to portray its moves as blatant onto the Saudi sphere of influence.

Having said that, it is interesting to note that less than a week into the ship incident, the former speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri, referred to Yemen as Iran’s new sphere of influence, : “We witness today that our revolution is exported to Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.” At around the same time, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Lieutenant Gen. Hossein Salami, struck a similar tone, : “Ansarollah [Houthis] is a similar copy of Hezbollah in a strategic area.”

But let us juxtapose these comments with a statement from GCC Secretary-General Abdullah Bishara back in 1982, when he : “Iran’s quest for supremacy in the (Persian) Gulf was the primary threat to the stability of the GCC.” Based on the foregoing, it is quite axiomatic that the fear of Iran’s ascendency in the Middle East has been a recurrent theme in the Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy.

What merits pondering, however, is that Saudi’s Iranophobia and the use of the sectarian card in Yemen came on the heels of two geo-strategically important events which, much to the GCC’s dismay, have shifted the balance of power in favor Iran. The first is the perceived US-Iran ��é�ٱ�Գٱ� and the recent announcement of the tentative agreement between Iran and the P5+1. The second pivotal trend pertains to the perceived expansionism and the “” of Iran’s foreign policy, as evidenced by the increase in the power and influence of Tehran in shaping regional trends and security preferences in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, a move viewed by the GCC as an offensive power.

In fact, if we assume, as Stephen Walt does, that states attempt to prevent a potential hegemon by balancing and forming alliances against the perceived threat, then it would be justifiable to assert that Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen can be best explained through the lens of the balance of threat in international relations.

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The contention, therefore, is that Yemen has become the epicenter of the Saudi-Iranian geopolitical collision as Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria are seen as opposing the Salafist order, whereas the GCC aims to stifle the spread of the so-called Shiite Crescent extending from Beirut to the Persian Gulf.

Feeding into the Extremist Narrative?

Keeping these premises in mind, an intriguing question arises as to what really makes the Saudi and Iranian vying for domination different from the former instances of jockeying for power and influence in Yemen’s history.

It is needless to say that such adventures and occupations are not alien to Yemenis: The British capture of Aden in 1839 aimed at staving off the Egyptian conquest of the entire Arabian Peninsula, while Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser set out to export pan-Arabism across Yemen the 1960s.

But today’s Yemeni conflict proves to be a sui generis case, in that it threatens to open the floodgates of an ideological warfare in the Arabian Peninsula; one that does not only pit the Zaidis against the Salafists, but the kind of which that may put the final nail in the coffin of dialogue and ultimately secure a Pyrrhic victory for the Islamic State and the discourse of extremism.

Further to this, one should not lose sight of the fact that the Yemen crisis was first and foremost a sociopolitical and domestic problem, which was not addressed properly by Saleh and the corrupt state apparatus he left behind. What Yemen suffers from is somewhat a corollary of manufacturing an ill-functioning regime, whose main constitutive elements were repression, megalomania and corruption. Yemen’s weakness in surmounting a multiplicity of home-grown challenges set the stage for major regional actors to readjust their security alliances and carve out their own niche of influence in the hitherto divided country.

Saleh used to claim boastfully that ruling Yemen was “like dancing on the heads of snakes.” It was only a matter of time before he noticed that the Islamic State is silently snaking through the streets of Sana’a and valleys of the southern cities.

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It appears that after a 12-year impasse, and the P5+1 — the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany — have reached an on key parameters of a framework for a final nuclear deal, which would be hammered out by June 30. Though nothing is set in stone, the tentative accord reached on April 2 should be a “critical milestone” in dealing with an ascending Iran. It can also be viewed as a fortunate starting point for bringing a semblance of control over the cauldron of fire called the Middle East.

But aside from the growing euphoria among those who portray the existing framework as either the end of Iran-US antagonism or as giving Tehran a free ticket into the international community, it is important not to turn a blind eye over a range of tricky questions that must be dealt with prudently, in order to prevent this diplomatic breakthrough from falling to pieces.

The Deal Breeds Domestic Pressure

According to the Lausanne framework, Iran will be subject to the most intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection regime ever . But while nuclear-related sanctions and UN Security Council resolutions are to be lifted immediately if a final nuclear deal is signed, one should not forget that US sanctions on Iran for terrorism, human rights abuses and ballistic missiles will remain in place. This is not good news, particularly for those Iranians and international observers who worry about the country’s human rights status.

All in all, many skeptics and hard-liners inside Iran have already begun against Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad and his team of diplomats and advisers for the sweeping concessions they have given to the West. Hossein Shariatmadari, an ultra-conservative and an aide to Supreme Leader , has reportedly that Iran exchanged its “ready-to-race horse with a broken bridle.”

In the United States, hawks seem to be vocal about the Lausanne accord. Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican who holds ’s former seat from Illinois, struck a similar tone, : “Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Adolf Hitler.”

With these hawkish voices in mind, it remains to be seen whether Iranian President and US President Barack Obama will be able to convince the Iranian Majlis and the US Congress that this tentative nuclear ��é�ٱ�Գٱ� is the only viable alternative to curb Iran’s nuclear power. Having said this, selling the parameters to the public and manufacturing the of cynics is by no means an easy job.

John Kerry and Javad Zarif / Flickr

The Deal Has Regional Geopolitical Dimensions

Even in the case of a full agreement between Iran and the P5+1, no one can assuredly say that the Saudis, Israelis and perhaps the rest of Middle East’s major players — namely Turkey — will sit idly by and do nothing in the face of Tehran’s growing influence.

It is interesting to note that it was only a day before the Lausanne joint statement when ’s General Assembly an international agreement between Ankara and Tokyo for the construction of Turkey’s second nuclear plant. Saudi Arabia has also that it may consider launching its own nuclear program as a hedge against Iran’s nuclear prowess.

That aside, what is happening in is a vivid example of ’s preemptive geopolitical maneuvering against Iran. The balance of power in the Middle East appears poised to undergo tectonic changes as regional actors shift alliances, adjust to new realities and, by doing so, recalibrate their positions in a Sunni-Shiite for geopolitical mastery in the region.

The West and Iran

As soon as the sweat dried on the foreheads of exhausted diplomats in Switzerland, some Iranians rushed to celebrate what they termed as reconciliation between Iran and the West, in general, and between Iran and the US, in particular.

However, one must note that shortly after the framework agreement was unveiled, President Obama it clear that “this deal was not based on trust. It’s based on unprecedented verification.” The first paragraph of the US fact sheet outlining the parameters of the agreement also that “important implementation details are still subject to negotiation, and nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon.” Ayatollah Khamenei, for his part, has also that “negotiations with Americans are solely on the nuclear issue and nothing else. Everyone has to know that.”

So, as Tehran appears to be groping toward Washington’s strategic orbit, thanks to the tentative nuclear accord as well as the recent Iranian offensive against the Islamic State, it seems very unlikely that even a final deal could put to rest the decades-long animosity between the two sides.

Indeed, lots of work must be done before the June 30 deadline. But so much hinges on the extent to which both sides are committed to rein in internal and external pressures, and most importantly, on whether they are fully prepared to withstand and surmount the geopolitical repercussions of a deal, which has already set alarm bells ringing in Riyadh and Tel Aviv and perhaps Ankara.

The Iranian nuclear marathon may seem to have reached a critical milestone, but the finish line remains many miles away.

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