It appears the Gulf States have chosen a side, and it’s not the US-Israeli alliance:
Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the brother of the Crown Prince, flew to Tehran. With him came Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkey’s intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin. They sat down with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and senior security official Rezaei, who hosted the talks, for about two hours. The agenda: the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Hormuz, the American blockade of Iran’s ports and a regional non-aggression framework.
Read that list again. Those are the four biggest security problems in the Persian Gulf. The countries that actually live there just met to discuss them. The United States, which has two carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group and a blockade in the neighborhood, was not in the room. Nobody seems to have missed it.
The three visitors are the signatories of the Makkah Agreement, the mutual-defense treaty that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed on August 7. Article 2 says an attack on one is an attack on all. It was sold, at least in Washington’s imagination, as a Sunni shield for the Kingdom against Iran and its friends in Yemen.
Eleven weeks later, the entire shield showed up in Tehran to talk about cooperation. Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan says Tehran will “study” the agreement, “and if it is good, we will support it.” The treaty conveniently includes an accession clause allowing new members to join by consensus. My sources tell me the three formally invited Iran to join once the U.S.-Israeli war ends, and that Tehran accepted on that basis. No official readout confirms that yet. But the official readouts did agree to keep talking “among the four,” and Iran has a phrase for what it wants: “endogenous security.” Translation: security for the Gulf, by the Gulf, without the 5th Fleet.
Imagine NATO’s founding members inviting the Soviet Union to join in 1952, and you have some idea how badly this has gone for American strategy.
In fairness to American strategists, none of the people involved in the US strategy for the Middle East for the past 40 years have actually been Americans. What we’re witnessing is the failure of the Greater Israeli strategy of the neocons, which I have to admit, did succeed rather better than I would have ever imagined given how effectively it exploited the non-nation states of the region.
The problem, as always, is that the seeds of ultimate failure are planted with initial success. Fortunately for the USA, it appears to have been more of a Suez moment than a Sicilian one.