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Is the Iran War Tipping the Gulf Away From the U.S.?
Foreign Affairs
Is the Iran War Tipping the Gulf Away From the U.S.?
The countries that have borne the brunt of Iranian retaliation have an incentive to diversify their security structures.
(Photo by AFP via Getty Images) /
On June 3, as messages continued to pass between Iranian and American negotiators, the U.S. endangered diplomacy with renewed aggression against Iran. Enforcing the blockade on Iranian ports, U.S. forces fired a Hellfire missile into the engine room of a Botswana-flagged oil tanker. Moments earlier, per CENTCOM, they had “conducted self-defense strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island” in the Strait of Hormuz. These were the third round of U.S. strikes on Iran in the past week.
The Iranian reply to the attacks included the firing of 13 ballistic missiles and 17 drones at Kuwait. Some of those projectiles penetrated the roof of a passenger terminal at Kuwait International Airport. People rushed away from the huge hole in the roof as flames and smoke filled the building. One person was killed, and 63 others were injured.
There is no legal or moral justification for targeting civilian infrastructure. But, amid all the talk of “criminal Iranian aggression” and of Iran’s “deliberate, calculated, and unjustified attack” on a civilian airport when all the American bases in Kuwait “are dozens of miles from the airport,” one small sentence went unnoticed. Buried in the body of a New York Times article was the single line, “In recent years, American forces have operated out of a site in the Kuwaiti airport complex.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said that “our allies in the region have been very cooperative—some, obviously, very aggressively cooperative, like the UAE, for example. Kuwait’s been fantastic in this part.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Iran is “carrying out self-defense strikes on sites the United States was permitted to use to attack civilian shipping and violate the ceasefire.”
The Gulf states believed that hosting U.S. bases provided them with an umbrella of defense against Iran. They have come to see that those bases have become magnets for Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.
But the U.S. has not only failed to protect the Gulf states; it has openly coerced and threatened them.
Oman is a small country of outsized importance. It has a long, uninterrupted history of good relations with the United States. Oman has mediated several conflicts and helped get the U.S. out of several jams. It mediated the ceasefire between the U.S. and Yemen last year. Most importantly, Oman helped the Obama administration secure its nuclear deal with Iran. As Trita Parsi lays out in Losing an Enemy, “while the world’s eyes were locked on the ongoing P5+1 [U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, China] talks… the real show was taking place in secret in the heat of the Omani mountains.”
But none of this history was enough to prevent President Donald Trump from threatening to bomb Oman.
The Trump administration is angry with Oman for three reasons. The first is that, on the eve of the U.S. decision to go to war with Iran, the Omani foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who was mediating the negotiations, made sure the world knew that war was not necessary, saying that a peace deal “is within our reach, if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”
The second was Al Busaidi’s article in the Economist in which he called the U.S. strikes on Iran “unlawful.” Though calling the strategy “unacceptable,” he empathized with Iran’s decision to strike American bases in the Gulf countries, calling it “probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership.” And he criticized the Trump administration, saying it miscalculated and “lost control of its own foreign policy.”
Most importantly, Oman has not cut ties with Iran and has reportedly been in discussions with Iran to jointly control the Strait of Hormuz. It was this potential relationship that led Trump to threaten Oman that it must “behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up.”
The U.S. does not like the neutrality of Oman, which has made it such a valuable asset in the past. It has begun to press Oman to cut diplomatic ties with Iran and align itself unambiguously with America. Despite its long history of friendship, if Oman does not acquiesce to America’s demand, it will be treated the same way as Iran: sanctions and bombs. The day after Trump threatened Oman with bombs, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened it with sanctions, warning that “Oman, in particular, should know that the U.S. Treasury will aggressively target any actors involved—directly or indirectly—in facilitating tolls for the Strait.”
The United States no longer aligns with the Gulf states’ interests. They have become instruments for projecting American interests. Kuwait, Oman, and the other Gulf countries lobbied hard to prevent the U.S. from going to war with Iran. When Trump was a day away from restarting the war with fresh strikes on Iran, he said it was the leaders of the Gulf states who asked him “to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow.” It was the Gulf states that paid the retaliatory price of the war; it was Kuwait that paid the price for the renewed limited strikes.
The Gulf countries’ interests have not been served by this war. Crucial infrastructure, including energy and water desalination plants, has been struck. Investor and tourist confidence have been diminished. Lives have been lost. Hard-won regional diplomatic gains with Iran have been set back. The U.S. failed to take their interests into account by dragging them into the war, and then failed to protect them once it started.
The Gulf states’ defense networks are too integrated into the U.S. system to extricate themselves entirely. But diversification is possible. In March, Oman’s Al Busaidi said the time had come for the Gulf countries to reconsider their defense strategies. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last year signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement that states “that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.” Last month, during the war with Iran, Pakistan sent 8,000 troops, 16 fighter jets, and a Chinese air defense system to Saudi Arabia under that agreement.
Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, the leading military powers in the Muslim world (including the only nuclear power), have all expressed interest in a comprehensive regional security architecture that would encompass all the Muslim-majority nations of the region. Recent events have only enhanced those discussions.
The Iran War has highlighted the need for the Gulf countries to update their security arrangements. Washington ignored their warnings, rebuffed their lobbying, and then failed to deliver the promised protection. The war may have accelerated the Gulf states’ decision to modernize and diversify their security arrangements and, perhaps, even move to a more integrated regional security architecture.
The post Is the Iran War Tipping the Gulf Away From the U.S.? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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