Securing the Gulf

Kenneth M. Pollack

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2003

Summary:  The sweeping military victory in Iraq has cleared the way for the United States to establish yet another framework for Persian Gulf security. Ironically, with Saddam Hussein gone, the problems are actually going to get more challenging in some ways. The three main issues will be Iraqi power, Iran's nuclear weapons program, and domestic unrest in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. None will be easy to handle, let alone all three together.

Kenneth M. Pollack is Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. From 1995 to 1996 and 1999 to 2001, he served as Director for Persian Gulf Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council.

Still, this approach also has its drawbacks. In particular, the GCC states do not actually want a formal alliance relationship with the United States, at least not at the moment. GCC leaders fear that far from legitimizing an American presence, such an alliance would be seen as the ultimate act of colonialism and cronyism and would thus help to delegitimize their own regimes. Even a very pro-American Iraqi government might be uneasy with a formal treaty relationship, for similar reasons. It is also unclear how such an alliance system could address the threat of domestic instability in the GCC. Because of the weakness of its armed forces, if Tehran does ever decide to pursue a more aggressive policy, it is more likely to try to undermine its neighbors from within than attack them directly from without. And despite its fearsome punching power, a Persian Gulf alliance would still be vulnerable to an enemy that hits below the belt.

A GULF SECURITY CONDOMINIUM

If a return to offshore balancing might be inadequate to deal with external aggression and a new alliance system might be inadequate to deal with internal instability, a third course offers the tantalizing prospect of handling both problems simultaneously. This approach would have the United States pursue a security condominium for the Persian Gulf, modeled on the arms control experiences in Europe at the end of the Cold War.

Beginning in the 1970s, NATO and the Warsaw Pact engaged in a host of security engagement forums, confidence-building measures, and arms control agreements (such as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions talks, and the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe) that were intended to deal with all of the continent's various security issues as a whole. Negotiating these deals took over two decades of painful wrangling. But in the end, they produced a Europe that was much more stable and secure than ever before.

In the Persian Gulf, such a security condominium would entail a similar set of activities bringing together the United States, the GCC countries, Iraq, and Iran. The process would begin by establishing a regional security forum at which relevant issues could be debated and discussed, information exchanged, and agreements framed. The members could then move on to confidence-building measures, such as notification of exercises, exchanges of observers, and information swaps. Ultimately, the intention would be to proceed to eventual arms control agreements that might include demilitarized zones, bans on destabilizing weapons systems, and balanced force reductions for all parties. In particular, the group might aim for a ban on all WMD, complete with penalties for violators and a multilateral (or international) inspection program to enforce compliance.

Such an approach has a lot to recommend it. It would be the least rancorous way to handle the inevitable prohibition on Iraqi WMD, for example. Framing the ban within a larger process in which all of the regional states were working toward similar disarmament and Iraq was simply the one leading off would help the pill go down more easily in Baghdad. Likewise, for the GCC states, if a regional security condominium succeeded in eventually defanging Iran and locking in limitations on Iraq, it would address their security problems without having to rely on a heavy, destabilizing American military presence. Moreover, U.S.-GCC military relations might be more agreeable to the Persian Gulf populations if they took place within the rubric of a regionwide forum.

Another advantage would be that the Iranians might actually be willing to participate. For 20 years, Iran has demanded that the United States, Iraq, and the GCC take its security concerns seriously, and this process would grant Iran a venue and an opportunity to discuss those concerns for the first time. Inviting Iran to discuss security issues in the Persian Gulf at the same table with the United States would give Tehran the sense that it was finally getting the respect from Washington that it believes it deserves. More to the point, such a process is the only possible way that Iran could affect the military forces of its toughest opponent, the United States. For such a system to work, Washington would have to be willing, as it was in Europe, to agree to limitations on its regional deployments. Such limitations by themselves might be worth the price of admission for Iran.

Even if the hard-liners in Tehran opted not to participate, that would not be a disaster, since they would likely isolate themselves both internally and internationally as a result. At home, it would be very difficult for them to justify any action based on a supposed threat from the United States (or Iraq or the GCC) if they were unwilling to participate in a process in which they would have the opportunity to address that threat through diplomacy and arms control. To foreign audiences, meanwhile, Tehran's refusal to accept such an olive branch from the United States would demonstrate that Iran was a pariah state uninterested in peaceful means of addressing its security concerns. This, in turn, would make it easier for Washington to muster international support for tighter sanctions and other forms of pressure.

Some might oppose such a system for fear that it would legitimize the current Iranian government. But it need not do so unduly, and it would not stand in the way of regime change if that was where political development in Iran seemed to be heading. After all, a similar process did not impede regime change in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The real problem with this approach is that such a regional security condominium might be impossible to achieve. It is worth remembering that in Europe it took between 20 and 25 years of excruciating negotiations to produce a workable system. The United States has had agonizing experiences negotiating multilateral agreements in the Middle East, and there is no reason to believe this one will be any easier. All of the parties will come to the table with their own agendas and will attempt to subvert or structure the process to address only those issues that interest them. One of the dirty little secrets of the Persian Gulf is that GCC unity is a fiction: the Qataris want American military bases not to shield them from Iran or Iraq but to deter Saudi Arabia. Likewise, Bahrain wants powerful missiles not to make it an effective member of the Peninsula Shield Force but so that it can strike Qatar if it ever feels the need. A regional security forum coupled with arms control measures could bring out all of these intra-GCC insecurities, further complicating the process.