The Gulf region – consisting of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Iran and Iraq – has witnessed a long history of Persian-Arab and Shiite-Sunni rivalry that has resurfaced again strongly in the past three decades. It follows that the strategic landscape of the region should have logically been determined primarily by the relationship between Iran and countries of the Arabian Peninsula. However, having become the pre-eminent global power after World War II, the policies of the United States have shaped the strategic landscape of the region much more than those of the regional countries themselves. But, in the past two years or so there has been a growing perception that the overweening US role in the region is perhaps becoming less influential than before, when it was perceived to be the indispensable ingredient of ensuring regional stability. Meanwhile, as we survey the contemporary and evolving global strategic scenario, it is increasingly evident that the Gulf region has now acquired as much strategic significance for Asia as it has had for the United States. Two questions arise – one, should Asia not have a role too in the processes of ensuring peace and security in the region? And two, if it should, then how must it be choreographed?

Political Ground Realities

The following factors have shaped the contemporary political ground realities in the Gulf region, of which Iran is the pivotal country.

First, Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 and its first Supreme Leader, declared that “the concept of monarchy totally contradicts Islam” and announced intentions of exporting the Islamic revolution to other parts of the Muslim world. The monarchical regimes of the Arabian Peninsula countries were alarmed and established the GCC in 1981. They actively aided Saddam’s war on Iran launched in 1980, amongst other things, by giving Saddam billions of dollars. Thus, the foundations were laid for a relationship marked by mutual animosity, suspicion and tension.

Second, there is a huge and unbridgeable asymmetry between the GCC countries’ national power and that of Iran in terms of demography, institutional capacity, and military manpower strength, combat experience and indigenous capability. Iran’s population is larger than the combined indigenous populations of the GCC countries and Iraq. Iran’s total military manpower is much larger than that of all the GCC states together. Its fast indigenizing impressive missile arsenal can deliver crippling blows to strategic economic targets in the GCC countries, completely unused to handling any large-scale disruptions as was evident in Kuwait in 1990. Furthermore, the GCC is not a military alliance like NATO and would not be capable of mounting really effective and concerted joint offensive or defensive military actions in the context of any large scale hostilities with a major nation such as Iran.