Maturity must replace frenzy to achieve a Gulf grand bargain

A fascinating aspect of the escalating feud between Iran and Saudi Arabia is the variety of views and actions by the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Two of them (Saudi Arabia and Bahrain) cut off diplomatic ties with Iran, three others only recalled their ambassadors, and Oman has maintained full diplomatic ties.

This instructive variety of responses shows the range of political attitudes and calculations among the GCC members, who follow their own self-interest rather than act like an unthinking herd. Four of the six maintain official communication channels with Tehran because it allows continued direct diplomacy at a moment when this crisis starts to shift towards trying to find a negotiated resolution.

The Omani foreign ministry noted in a statement after the assault on the Saudi embassy in Tehran that Oman, “…considers this action unacceptable and at the same time affirms the importance of finding new rules that prohibit any kind of intervention in countries’ internal affairs.”

The reference to “new rules” presumably refers to the urgent need to mend relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which requires a comprehensive review of their mutual accusations. The most intriguing development in this respect has been the news since Thursday of attempts by Iraq, Kuwait, and Oman to mediate between Tehran and Riyadh, alongside offers by Turkey, China, and Russia to mediate.

The respected Kuwaiti political science professor and international human rights expert Dr. Ghanim Alnajjar wrote in his weekly column in Al Jarida newspaper a few days ago that the most effective mediation should come from parties within the Gulf region. This is eminently sensible, because the major factor that has generated the current bilateral stress reflects mutual Iranian-Saudi perceptions of hostile desires to dominate the entire region. This makes a Gulf-anchored mediation that could address those regional fears the most likely to succeed, because it would identify the problems and their solutions more fully than could any foreign intervention that would probably approach the situation more like a wage bargaining process in a car-manufacturing factory or a salary dispute between athletes and their club owners.

This situation needs mediation of immediate tensions but also a permanent resolution of the Saudi-Iranian concerns that have always seemed to me to be highly exaggerated, and based more on exaggerated threat perceptions than on actual dangers. This situation needs a negotiation similar to the one that recently concluded between Iran and the P5+1 states, where both sides dropped their threatening remarks, laid out their critical concerns and demands, and made concessions that allowed them both to achieve their bottom line demands.

The issues at play in the worsening Iranian-Saudi situation are deeply emotional and existential; they have to do with these two leading regional powers’ self-perceptions of their own place, role, vulnerabilities, and worth, in the three concentric circles of the Gulf, the wider Middle East, and the world. One giveaway for this is the very broad and generalized nature of the mutual accusations, which tend to speak of “meddling in the internal affairs of others” or “seeking hegemonic aims” in the Middle East.

So resolving this dispute needs progress on two fronts simultaneously. The first is addressing specific accusations and concerns by either party (e.g., arming proxies and allies in third countries, like Syria and Yemen, stoking sectarian tensions, or promoting threatening fundamentalist religious movements across the region). The second is allowing both parties to rest assured that their natural regional relations and interests will be acknowledged, as long as they both indicate by their actions and words that they do not seek to threaten or undermine the other. This sounds a lot like a Gulf-anchored, Middle East-wide version of the Helsinki Agreement between the USA and USSR and their respective camps in 1975.

Ghanim Alnajjar says that a joint Kuwaiti-Iraqi mediation effort is likely to be most effective, given those countries’ good relations with the two feuding regional powerhouses. He and others in the Gulf, like Dubai-based Lebanese military analyst Riad Kahwaji, talk of seeking a “grand bargain” to resolve the current dispute that goes beyond the incidents of the past week.

This is sensible, given the nature of Saudi-Iranian ties and their impact across the entire Middle East. Moving towards a possible “grand bargain” requires defining the precise issues that have generated the current tensions and escalating moves, and then crafting a negotiating mechanism to resolve them. It is time for mature men and women to step in and deal in practical political facts and actions, instead of the heightened emotional fears and frenzy that now seem to drive the wasteful tit-for-tat moves by both sides.