“Iran is stronger militarily than all of its Sunni Arab neighbors to the west”.
Not so sure that’s true anymore. We’ve significantly degraded their military capabilities.
CC
Saudi Arabia in particular has lots of nice, fancy equipment to go with their huge (REALLY HUGE in some past years*) defense budget, but except for a few elite units are not anywhere near as capable as they should be. :-(
The ironic thing is, Saudi “could” be extremely strong in this new world of FPV drones, etc. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest concentrations of gamers in the world, with approximately 23 to 24 million active players. That represents over 65% of the population!! Put 10% of that resource on the job, use Ukie designs and have S. Korea or Philippines build the millions of drones, the US could supply the communications — Iran would be totally hosed.
*Some years Saudi had the 3rd largest defense budget on this planet!