Excising the danger of peace in the Middle East

Checking Iran's advances

To check Iran's advances and achieve a more stable order in the region, the United States should do three things: First, provide a more credible security commitment to its Gulf partners; second, push for stronger relationships between Israel and the Gulf states across various domains; third, get a lot more serious about helping the Gulf states develop more effective and sustainable self-defence capabilities.

To be sure, these are all long-term plays, fraught with risks and challenges. But they are definitely worth pursuing since they are perfectly aligned with long-term US interests and strategy in the region.

Knowing how to respond to the Gulf's new diplomatic tack requires understanding the factors that drove it.

The first is a military-technical one.

Over the past two decades, Iran has acquired an arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones that have given it new capabilities to strike the Gulf states and their oil exports in ways that were unimaginable in the 20th century.

Tehran now has conventional weapons to complement its vaunted unconventional capabilities in coercing, undermining, and potentially overthrowing its regional targets.

The second factor is geopolitical.

When Tehran began to employ these new weapons against the Gulf states' cities, airports, and oil infrastructure, the Trump Administration's response was sluggish and ineffective.

Meanwhile, Washington's reduction of the number of US troops and military assets in the region and its total withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, reinforced the Gulf Arab perception that the United States was abdicating its security responsibilities in the region.

Policy shifts

Suddenly, former President Obama's remark that the Gulf Arabs need to learn to "share" the neighbourhood with Iran —which shocked and terrified them — became their official policy.

America's attitude, coupled with Iran's greater ability (and undiminished willingness) to use violence, compelled the Gulf states to recognise that their own vital plans for economic modernisation and diversification had come to depend on accommodating Tehran.

That is why the Gulf states are seeking to reconcile with Iran, even on Iranian terms, to forestall future such attacks. Their goal is to prevent Iranian aggression through diplomacy since they cannot count on American deterrence.

Read more: The credibility of American deterrence in the Middle East

This is also why Saudi Arabia has prioritised ending the war in Yemen, and why the United Arab Emirates, then a coalition partner of the Saudis, withdrew its combat troops from that conflict in 2020. Both now seek calm in Yemen to eliminate that theatre as a proxy war with Iran.

The perils of peace

For Washington, reconciliation between the Gulf states and Iran, while encouraging on the surface, brings several dangers. The first is that, at Iran's insistence, the new dynamic could gradually squeeze out the United States. 

Since the Iranian revolution, every American president, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, attempted to reach out to Tehran, end the conflict, and put bilateral relations on a peaceful, cooperative path.

In every instance, the government of Iran refused. Even when various Iranian presidents tried to reciprocate, Tehran's hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps killed it. For a regime whose enduring strategy is driving the United States out of the Middle East, reconciliation continues to be a non-starter. 

That means that rapprochement between Iran and the Gulf states could create a rift between them and the United States — which is likely Iran's primary motivation to pursue these deals.

Indeed, while Iran has pulled its horns toward Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it has ramped up both its aggressive behaviour and rhetoric toward the United States and Israel, in the hope of driving a deeper wedge between Washington and its Gulf partners. 

While Iran's role in the Hamas assault remains unclear, there is no question that it fits neatly within Tehran's wider strategy of stepping up attacks against Israel, in part to prevent any further reconciliation between the Israelis and other Arab states.  

Moreover, nothing about Tehran's current peace offensive across the region suggests that its ultimate aims have changed. Iran continues to seek to dominate the Middle East, destroy the state of Israel, and drive the United States out.

It has just found a kinder, gentler way to pursue those goals for the moment, enabled by its long and escalating history of violence against these same states.

And if Iran ever could succeed in creating deeper tensions between the United States and the Gulf states,  it will make the latter even more vulnerable to Iranian coercion whenever Tehran is ready to demand greater fealty and more overt subservience.

Using the calm to prepare for a better peace

But there could be a silver lining in all of this. The rapprochements breaking out across the Gulf, again while shallow, could be an opportunity to take steps that would help brace the US-Gulf coalition when Iran eventually returns to the more traditional, violent, coercive version of its grand strategy.  

There are at least three things that the United States could be doing with its Gulf partners to prepare for that potentially more conflictual future.

The first is to recommit the United States to the security of the Gulf states. This remains the main rationale for the American military presence in the region and the basis of the security policies of the Gulf states since at least 1979 if not 1945.

The Biden administration deserves credit for an important but overlooked achievement in that vein when it signed a new security agreement with Bahrain last week.

The accord has little substance on paper, merely committing the two countries to consult in the event of an attack by a third. However, it is of considerable symbolic importance. It is the administration recommitting the United States to the security of a Gulf state after the decade-plus of drift under Obama and Trump.

A second step would be to try to forge closer ties between the Gulf states and Israel, all underneath an American security umbrella. That's why the Biden Administration is working so hard to broker a normalisation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

While that would be all to the good, and they should be encouraged and applauded for doing so, there are very significant obstacles to making this happen, especially now with the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas and the potential for harsh Israeli retaliation against Gaza.

While courtship has benefits, we may be a long way from consummation.

Feasible steps 

Beyond the diplomatic realm, however, there are also important (and entirely feasible) steps that Washington and the Gulf states can take in the military sphere.

The United States has been dutifully working to build up the military capabilities of the Gulf states for nearly 20 years now — and finally doing so for real, not the charade both sides staged throughout the 20th century in which Washington pretended they would actually defend themselves.

Since 9/11 and the Iraq War, everyone has finally recognised that the Gulf states really do need the ability to defend themselves, and the United States really has to help.

As a result, programmes across the Gulf already exist to integrate better and improve their militaries. American weapons sales to the region have become a bit more strategic and rational (on both sides), and so deserve to be spared from unrelated economic and political considerations.

But there is, inevitably, still much more to be done. Gulf air and missile (and drone) defences still need to be more coordinated. Gulf naval forces, arguably the weakest units in Gulf militaries, require recapitalisation, more effective hardware, and better-integrated software, as well as more capable personnel to man them against an ever more dangerous Iranian maritime threat.

And the military effectiveness of every Gulf state is less than what it could or should be. That will be both the hardest challenge to tackle and the most important.

And it will require America's military leaders to recognise what so many of its personnel doing the training out in the Gulf already have: Helping the Arab armed forces fight better will mean helping them to develop doctrine, tactics, training methods, management processes, and leadership that fit their needs, their culture, and their strategic circumstances — not just ones taken from American military manuals and translated into Arabic.

For example, the Gulf states should learn from Israel, which learns everything the United States has to teach and then incorporates the parts that work for it into its own approach to warfighting.

Iran's diplomatic charm offensive should be viewed with great caution and a healthy dose of scepticism. But it does create a lull that could serve Washington well if used to better prepare for the inevitable Iranian volte-face.  

As we have now seen in Israel and Gaza, that worm could turn much faster than anyone expects.