Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman explained on Friday the difference between Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and “vision 1979” that the Iranian regime has been working on for the past four decades.
Vision 2030 was launched in 2016 and is being spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister.
Speaking to Vice television, Prince Khalid stressed: “We have a forward-looking vision to improve our economy, to make our peoples’ lives better in the Kingdom, and to move our society forward. To be able to achieve that objective we want to have a stable, peaceful region around us, a prosperous region. We want to increase basically the economic cooperation.”
“Iran wants to do the opposite. Iran has expansionist policies. They want to basically take over countries in the region. They have these destructive activities in the region that is pulling the region backward, not forward. This is the cause of friction.”
“They want to export the revolution through any means possible, and that’s what they’ve been doing since 1979. The strategic goal never changed. Their tactics have changed throughout the 40 years that have passed. And that’s what they’ve been doing since 1979,” the date of the country’s revolution.
Prince Khalid added: “I believe the biggest threats to the region, and to international security, is basically Iran.”
“The Iranian regime and its proxies on one side, and ISIS, al-Qaeda and terrorist organizations on the other side. We believe that they’re both two sides of the same coin,” he remarked.
“They believe in the same concept, not necessarily exactly the same ideology, but they both do not believe in the sovereignty of nations, they both believe in a transnational ideological state, they both do not believe in international law, and sometimes they compete with each other, and they fight each other, but when it comes to us, we’re the common enemy, and they cooperate.”
