TEHRAN — The relationship between Iran and the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf has often been described through the familiar vocabulary of sectarian rivalry, strategic competition, and balance of power. Yet this vocabulary, although useful, is incomplete. It conceals a deeper contradiction: the persistent gap between the Islamic language publicly invoked by the Persian Gulf ruling elites and the security architecture through which they have tied their survival to the United States.
This contradiction is not primarily theological. Nor should it be reduced to an accusation against the peoples of the Persian Gulf. Ordinary Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are not the architects of American hegemony in West Asia. Many of them share with Iranians a civilizational memory, a religious vocabulary, and a regional destiny that official alignments cannot erase. The problem lies at the level of state strategy: ruling elites that have repeatedly treated Islamic solidarity as symbolic capital while treating Washington as the ultimate guarantor of regime security.
For decades, the Persian Gulf monarchies have operated inside a bargain that is rarely stated honestly. The United States provides military protection, diplomatic cover, advanced weapons, financial integration, and strategic legitimacy. In return, Persian Gulf capitals accept a regional order in which American power remains the final arbiter of security. This has been presented as realism. But realism, when stripped of sovereignty and moral consistency, becomes dependency.
The American security system in the Persian Gulf is not an abstraction. It is institutional, military, and territorial. The United States has formal military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, as well as access arrangements with other Persian Gulf monarchies, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. For decades, these arrangements were sold as deterrence. Yet they also place Persian Gulf states within Washington’s strategic conflicts, including confrontations they cannot fully control or independently resolve.
This is the central paradox of Persian Gulf security. The more these states purchase protection from the external hegemon, the less autonomous their regional policy becomes. Their wealth buys weapons, but not sovereignty. Their alliances produce military infrastructure, but not strategic independence. Their leaders speak of stability, but their security model depends on the permanent presence of the very power whose interventions have repeatedly destabilized West Asia.
Iran, by contrast, represents a different political fact: a Muslim-majority state that has insisted, despite sanctions, pressure, assassinations, isolation, and military threats, that regional sovereignty cannot be rented from Washington. One does not need to agree with every Iranian policy to recognize the historical significance of this position. The Islamic Republic has become intolerable to the United States not simply because of its capabilities, but because it refused to accept the hierarchy of a U.S.-managed Middle East.
This is why the Persian Gulf position toward Iran is so morally revealing. Iran is not an alien civilization. It is not a Western colonial power. It is not an occupying army imported from outside the region. It is a Muslim neighbor, a central state of West Asia, and a civilization that has contributed for centuries to Islamic thought, science, culture, and political life. If the language of the Ummah has any political meaning, then disagreement with Iran should be managed through regional dialogue, not through alignment with an external hegemon.
The Saudi-Iranian rapprochement of March 2023 briefly showed that another regional order was possible. In the Beijing-brokered joint statement, Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to resume diplomatic relations, reopen embassies, respect sovereignty, avoid interference in internal affairs, and pursue good-neighborly relations. That agreement was important not merely because it restored diplomatic channels, but because it challenged the assumption that Washington must be the indispensable manager of Persian Gulf security.
The importance of that moment should not be underestimated. It suggested that Muslim-majority states could manage their conflicts without American tutelage. It suggested that Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite deep disagreements, could speak the language of regional responsibility. It suggested that the Persian Gulf need not remain a militarized zone organized around the containment of Iran.
Yet the structural problem remains. The Persian Gulf monarchies continue to depend on a U.S.-centered security order that has historically framed Iran as a threat to be contained rather than a neighbor to be integrated into a stable regional system. This is where the contradiction becomes unavoidable. One cannot seriously speak of Islamic unity while accepting a strategic architecture designed to isolate and weaken one of the most important Muslim states in the region.
This does not mean that Iran and the Persian Gulf monarchies have no real disputes. They do. There are ideological differences, sectarian sensitivities, territorial questions, energy rivalries, and competing visions of regional leadership. But serious disagreement among neighbors is not the same as strategic subordination to an external power. The first is politics. The second is dependency.
The Persian Gulf monarchies often describe their foreign policy as pragmatic. But pragmatism becomes morally empty when it consistently benefits the hegemon at the expense of regional autonomy. It is one thing to pursue national interest. It is another to define national interest so narrowly that Muslim solidarity, regional independence, and resistance to external domination disappear whenever Washington offers security guarantees.
