The five-day pause on attacking Iran’s electricity plants announced Monday by US President Donald Trump has been widely welcomed. But a permanent settlement — “the complete and total resolution” in Trump’s words — will remain elusive. It is hard to square the circle of power asymmetry between Iran and its Arab neighbours that lies at the root of Gulf insecurity. Iran is simply too large, and its Arab neighbours too small, for the region to find a stable equilibrium on its own. The Gulf Arabs have therefore long looked to external powers to balance Iran. That reliance — principally on the United States — has made Gulf security hostage to political mood swings in Washington.
The numbers tell the story. Iran’s 90 million people dwarf the 27 million citizens of the GCC states. Persia is a unified state; the Arab Gulf is divided among several kingdoms. Iran’s ambition to dominate the Gulf has endured regardless of whether Tehran was governed by a monarchy or a theocracy. For nearly 150 years, that ambition was constrained by Great Britain, the world’s pre-eminent power from the early 19th to the mid-20th century, operating from the Indian Subcontinent. The Raj protected the weaker Gulf states while maintaining a working relationship with Tehran. The decline of Britain, its withdrawal from the east of Suez, the independence granted to Gulf kingdoms in 1971, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 together marked the demise of the old regional order.
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The Islamic Republic did not invent Iranian assertiveness — it inherited it from the Shah and intensified it. Mohammad Reza Shah had already demonstrated Iran’s hegemonic instincts before the revolution. He seized the islands of Abu Musa and the Tunbs from the nascent UAE on the eve of the British withdrawal in 1971. He claimed Bahrain as Iran’s 14th province until international pressure forced a tactical retreat. He deployed thousands of troops to Oman’s Dhofar province to crush a left-wing insurgency — not out of altruism, but to establish Iran as the Gulf’s indispensable security arbiter. He built the most powerful military force in the developing world, positioning Tehran as a regional gendarme with American blessing.
The Islamic theocracy has been even more vigorous in pursuing regional hegemony, but in opposition to Washington rather than in partnership with it. Both monarchy and theocracy made similar mistakes: In focusing on external adventures, they exacerbated domestic unrest. A popular slogan from Iran’s recent protests captures the contradiction: “No to Gaza, No to Lebanon…my life is for Iran.”
When Iran transitioned from a monarchy to the Islamic republic, the underlying logic of Iranian hegemonic ambition did not change. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced Persian nationalism with Shia revolutionary ideology, but the instruments — proxy forces, interference in neighbours’ affairs, projection of military power — differed little from the Shah’s playbook. The difference lay in ferocity and religious fervour.
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The conservative Gulf Arabs responded by establishing the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981 to pool resources against the Islamic Republic. The GCC has barely limped along, hobbled by internal divisions. In a telling paradox, the Gulf Arabs turned to Iraq’s secular dictator, Saddam Hussein, to contain revolutionary Iran. Eight years of the Iran-Iraq War kept Iran at bay, but at great cost. And the counterweight proved double-edged: The same army that bled Iran rolled into Kuwait in 1990. The Arab shield had turned on those it was meant to protect. American intervention expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 but did not resolve the underlying structural imbalance. It merely replaced Iraqi protection with a direct American military presence on the Arabian Peninsula. A brief debate about a “Gulf NATO” never took off.
The Arabs also encouraged radical Sunni forces to fend off the Shia threat from Tehran. That strategy backfired spectacularly on September 11, 2001. After 9/11, the United States made the fateful decision to destroy the Iraqi state, disband the Ba’athist military, and hand Tehran the geopolitical windfall it had spent eight years fighting to prevent. Iran’s Shia allies now ruled in Baghdad. The land route from Tehran to Beirut became a physical reality. Iranian proxies strutted across the region. The Gulf Arabs were left staring at an Iranian sphere of influence stretching from the Zagros mountains to the Mediterranean. The rise of Iranian power also drove a quiet rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf Arabs, adding a new strategic wrinkle.
Where does the regional balance go from here? The US, Israel, and the Gulf Arabs want a credible defanging of Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities. They want Iran to relinquish its proxy forces and stop meddling in Arab internal affairs. They also seek the internationalisation of the Strait of Hormuz to guarantee freedom of navigation. Iran has its own demands. It insists on its right to develop nuclear and missile technologies. It wants guarantees against future American military action, an end to US bases in Arab states, compensation for wartime damages, and a veto over governance of the Hormuz.
This brings us back to the central problem. Iran is too strong to be ignored, but not strong enough to exercise unilateral dominance. The Gulf Arabs cannot balance Iran on their own and will continue to depend on the US for security. No other power — not Russia, not China, let alone Europe or India — can replace Washington as the ultimate security guarantor of the Gulf Arabs. Notwithstanding the flicker of hope offered by Trump’s pause, the tragic cycle of the impossible balancing between Arabia and Persia is likely to continue. The Gulf’s geopolitical predicament is not one that can be solved. It can only be managed — just barely, and with a great deal of luck.
The writer is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He is associated with the Motwani Jadeja Institute of American Studies, Jindal Global University, and the Council on Strategic and Defense Studies, Delhi
