Saudi Arabia and Iran, we know this story, the two major Middle Eastern powers fighting

endless proxy conflicts. Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bahrain, you name it.

Like I said, we know this story, the Saudis do what Western countries want but can't

admit publicly, the Iranians act for the Russians and the Chinese.

So I'm going to let you into a secret. We've been looking at everything from the wrong

end of the telescope. The Saudi-Iran rivalry is driving us, not us driving them. It seems

like we can't stop the Iranians from getting yukes and it seems like the Saudis don't want

to sell us oil at a price we'd like. In fact, almost every major geopolitical event of

the past 40 years has been driven by a war we barely knew was happening. This is the

invisible war.

I'm Arthur Snell, I was a diplomat in some of the most troubled places on planet Earth

and now I'm here to investigate the threats of today and warn you about the dangers of tomorrow.

This is Doomsday Watch.

I'm Kim Hatas. I'm a senior non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace in Washington and I'm also the author of Black Wave, a book about Saudi-Iran rivalry

over the last 40 years. Black Wave is really the product as so many books of a long journey

of being surrounded by the culture, the geopolitics of a complicated region. The central question

that I kept bumping up against was what happened to us, a question that people asked themselves

a lot in the region. When they look back at the lives their parents or grandparents had,

they look at their pictures, they see people riding bicycles by the Tigris River in Iraq

or they hear about the musical evenings in Peshawar and Pakistan. They hear about fiery political

debates and the bars of Beirut. It's just a generalized sense that we were almost a different

...