Some Gulf states are talking to Iran about a new regional security plan

As the drums of war get louder in Washington and Tel Aviv , the Saudis and their allies have been in Tehran . It could be a sign of things to come. Themselves alone When defence and security chiefs from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey visited Tehran on Monday, it was as partners in the Mecca Pact, a tripartite mutual defence agreement they signed in August. The host was Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei and the other participants were Pakistan’s military leader Asim Munir, Turkey’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin and Saudi defence minister Khalid bin Salman.

They discussed peace and security in the region, including the United States’ war on Iran, the Saudis’ conflict with the Houthis in Yemen and Israel’s war in Lebanon. The multilateral format offered the Saudis cover for asking the Iranians to intercede with the Houthis to stop attacking infrastructure in the kingdom, including Riyadh airport. The visitors expressed support for Qatari and Pakistani efforts to mediate between Iran and the US to avert a return to full-scale war, something Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu have been threatening in recent days.

Iran warned last week that it would respond to any such move by striking targets in the Gulf, possibly including digital infrastructure such as undersea cables as well as military bases and energy facilities. Monday’s meeting reflects a growing realisation in the Middle East that the US, long a security guarantor for the Gulf Arab states, has become an obstacle in the way of a durable regional peace. Instead of relying on Washington to protect them from Iran, some Gulf states think it is time to talk to Tehran about a new security architecture for the region.

In a lecture at Girton College , Cambridge, on Monday evening, Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, said the Gulf should take responsibility for its own security and should do so inclusively. That meant negotiating a non-aggression pact involving the six Gulf Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman) along with Iraq and Iran. “There’s a long history of people devising security plans, not just in the Gulf, but across the wider Middle East and west Asia region,” he said.

“Such arrangements run from Sykes-Picot, which after the first World War carved up the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, to the Gaza Board of Peace in which Palestinians barely have any role in shaping the terms under which it is proposed they should live and be governed.” He said that regional powers, left out of these plans or included as junior partners, have preferred the seemingly easier path of allowing others to provide security rather than negotiating arrangements among themselves.

But the intelligence co-operation, naval fleets, air defence systems and troops provided by the western powers came with political priorities that did not always reflect the region’s interests. “Perhaps the most damaging of the priorities imposed on the region from the outside has been the requirement that Iran be excluded. Not just excluded. Worse. Positioned as the threat against which regional security had to be organised,” he said.

“Instead of a genuine security structure designed to maintain stable relations between the eight states of the Gulf, this produced an unstable regional system constructed on the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf.” Albusaidi said that any Gulf security architecture that did not include Iran would be inherently unstable and structurally unsound. And he said that it was not even necessary to convince “friends and allies beyond the region” about the wisdom of including Iran in a new security structure.

“It would be useful, of course, and so it is worthwhile continuing to try to persuade them that Iran is not inevitably an enemy or a threat to regional security. But it’s not essential. Because the point is that the solution doesn’t depend on friends and allies beyond the region,” he said. “We need to begin a new regional dialogue on Gulf security, and we need to do so before other solutions are imposed on the region which would effectively consolidate the pattern of dependency and exclusion for which we urgently need to find an alternative.”

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