Gulf Security: The Case for Regional Ownership

By Tariq Rauf

The writer is a former Head of Verification and Security Policy Coordination, Coordinator IAEA Forum on a Middle East Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Below are his personal comments.

VIENNA| 23 June 2026 (IDN) — The Gulf’s security order is broken. Four decades of foreign military guarantees, more than one trillion dollars in arms transfers, and permanent basing of extra-regional forces have not produced stability — they have produced the conditions for the very war that the Iran-US MOU of 17 June 2026 was required to end. That is the starting point for any honest assessment of what comes next.

The Islamabad Memorandum — co-mediated by Pakistan and Qatar — is, in structural terms, a remarkable document: it combines a ceasefire framework, economic normalisation, nuclear non-proliferation commitments, and multilateral legal endorsement in a single instrument. For Iran, it delivers the economic relief and international rehabilitation that have eluded the country for decades. For the United States, it secures core strategic objectives: no Iranian bomb, open sea lanes, and withdrawal from active hostilities. For the international community, it removes the most acute near-term risk of great-power proxy escalation and restores the flow of approximately 20% of global petroleum liquids through the Strait of Hormuz.

The critical caveat is that the MOU is explicitly an interim instrument. Its durability depends entirely on whether the parties can translate goodwill into a binding final deal within 60 days — a timeline that is highly ambitious given the depth of the outstanding issues. Critically, however, the case for regional ownership of Gulf security does not depend on the MOU’s survival. Whether the 60-day window produces a binding accord or collapses under the weight of unresolved disputes, the strategic logic this assessment advances holds: the security architecture that preceded the conflict has been discredited, and no external power can build its replacement. The Gulf’s States must. The world should welcome this agreement as a necessary first step while maintaining clear-eyed awareness that the harder work of permanent peace lies ahead.

This assessment argues that the MOU’s provisions on Hormuz and force withdrawal, read in their fullest strategic context, point toward a necessary and overdue transformation of the Gulf’s security architecture: from one built around foreign military presence and extra-regional guarantees — demonstrated by the recent conflict to be both ineffective and destabilising — to one grounded in Iran-GCC cooperation, regional maritime governance, and the geoeconomic logic of shared interests in a stable, open, and prosperous Gulf.

The Iran-US MOU has opened a door. Whether the Gulf’s States — Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shia, monarchies and republic — walk through it together will determine whether June 2026 is remembered as the beginning of a new self-determined Gulf order, or merely as an interlude between conflicts. The geostrategic and geoeconomic logic is unambiguous. The political will must follow.

Gulf Maritime Security: The Case for Regional Ownership

Naval cooperation, mine clearance, and the end of extra-regional military presence

The MOU’s provisions on the Strait of Hormuz (Art. 5) and the withdrawal of US naval forces (Art. 4) create a historic opening: for the first time in decades, the Gulf’s security architecture can be reconceived on genuinely regional terms. This section argues that the interests of Iran, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States, and the broader international community all point toward the same conclusion — the Gulf must be governed, cleared, and protected by the States that border it, without the structural presence of extra-regional military powers.

The Gulf is not a theatre for foreign naval power projection. It is the shared sovereign inheritance of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman. Its security is their shared responsibility — and, geostrategically, it can only be their achievement.

1. The Urgent Priority: Mine Clearance and Maritime Hazard Removal

The recent conflict has left the Gulf and its approaches, including the Strait of Hormuz, contaminated with naval mines, unexploded ordnance, and submerged hazards from combat operations. Safe resumption of commercial shipping — upon which the global energy economy depends — requires systematic, large-scale mine countermeasure (MCM) operations. This is precisely the domain where Iran-GCC naval cooperation is not merely desirable but operationally essential.

Iran possesses the most detailed knowledge of minefield locations, types, and densities in the areas under its maritime control. The GCC States — particularly Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman — operate capable mine countermeasure vessels and have trained MCM personnel. No foreign naval force, however well-equipped, can substitute for the local knowledge, geographic access, and political will that only regional navies collectively command.

A joint Iran-GCC Mine Countermeasures Task Force should be established immediately, operating under a shared operational command, with command rotated among member States.
Iran’s hydrographic knowledge of the Strait of Hormuz and the northern Gulf should be formally integrated into a regionalised maritime chart update programme accessible to all littoral States.
Demining priorities should be sequenced to restore commercial shipping lanes first, with the full clearance of military hazards verified by a joint technical committee.
Oman’s established dialogue with Iran — referenced in Article 5 of the MOU — makes Muscat the natural secretariat for a regional maritime safety coordination body.

The precedent for such cooperation exists: the International Mine Action Standards (IMAS) framework has been applied in multi-party post-conflict environments, including the Red Sea. A Gulf application, however, would be the first conducted entirely under the operational authority of the States directly concerned, without a Western-led coalition headquarters.

2. Maritime Vessel Traffic Management and Commercial Maritime Safety

Beyond hazard clearance, the Gulf requires a permanent, regionally administered Maritime Vessel Traffic Service (MVTS) architecture to manage the extraordinary density of commercial shipping transiting its waters. According to the US Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency, approximately 20 million barrels of oil per day transited the Strait of Hormuz in 2024-2025 — equivalent to approximately 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and roughly 25% of world seaborne oil trade. LNG carriers, bulk cargo, container vessels, and tankers serving the Gulf’s own rapidly growing consumer economies add substantially to this volume.

For decades, vessel traffic management in the Gulf has been a patchwork of national systems, supplemented by US Navy coordination mechanisms designed primarily for force protection rather than commercial facilitation. The post-MOU environment demands a purpose-built civilian maritime traffic management system, jointly operated by the littoral States, anchored in international maritime law, and aligned with the International Maritime Organization (IMO) framework.

A Gulf Maritime Vessel Traffic Management Authority (GMVTMA) should be established as a permanent intergovernmental body, with Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iraq as founding members.
The GMVTMA should operate integrated AIS (Automatic Identification System) tracking, mandatory reporting zones, two-way traffic separation schemes through the Strait of Hormuz, and emergency coordination protocols.
Revenue from maritime service fees — pilotage, traffic management, port coordination — should accrue to the GMVTMA’s operating budget, making regional maritime governance financially self-sustaining.
The body should have a permanent technical secretariat co-located in Muscat, consistent with Oman’s Article 5 dialogue mandate, with rotating operational command among member States.

Such an arrangement would, for the first time, give the Gulf’s littoral States direct institutional control over the world’s most strategically important waterway — replacing ad hoc arrangements and foreign naval oversight with a permanent, treaty-based, regionally legitimate governance structure.

3. The Demonstrated Failure of Extra-Regional Military Presence

The recent conflict has rendered a definitive verdict on a proposition that has animated Gulf security policy for four decades: that the presence of US, British, and French military forces in and around the Gulf provides security guarantees to GCC States. The evidence now compels a different conclusion.

Despite hosting the largest concentration of foreign military infrastructure in the Middle East — including the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar (the largest US military installation in the region, serving as CENTCOM’s forward headquarters), Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, and multiple UK and French installations — GCC States were unable to prevent, and in some cases directly suffered, retaliatory Iranian strikes on military infrastructure throughout the region. The core premise of the foreign military forces basing model — that it deters attack — was operationally categorically falsified.

More than one trillion dollars in arms purchases from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France over the past three decades, combined with the permanent stationing of foreign naval and air forces in the Gulf, did not prevent Iran from successfully targeting military installations across the region. The security guarantee was exposed as a strategic illusion and fallacy.

The historical record of extra-regional military involvement in the Gulf is not merely a story of ineffective security guarantees — it is a story of active destabilisation:

The United Kingdom’s imperial administration of the Gulf, and its arbitrary drawing of borders and manipulation of tribal and dynastic structures, created fault lines that continue to generate conflict — including the territorial disputes that have periodically inflamed Iran-UAE, Iraq-Kuwait, and intra-GCC relations.
France’s arms sales to belligerents on multiple sides of Gulf conflicts, combined with its pursuit of strategic and commercial interests without regard for regional stability, made it a spoiler rather than a stabiliser.
The United States’ post-1979 Gulf policy — oscillating between backing Iraq against Iran, enabling Saudi military adventurism in Yemen, sanctioning Iran while simultaneously creating the conditions for Iranian regional influence to expand — has been strategically incoherent and consistently counterproductive to lasting peace.
The presence of foreign military bases in the Gulf has historically made those States hosting them inviting targets for adversarial action — transforming sovereign GCC territory into frontlines in great-power competitions that GCC States did not choose and from which they bear disproportionate costs.
Every major escalation cycle in the Gulf over the past four decades has been either initiated by, or significantly worsened by, the involvement of extra-regional military powers pursuing interests that diverged from those of the Gulf’s own populations.
Foreign military presence in the Gulf region has run its course and must be terminated with the withdrawal of all extra-regional armed forces and security personnel, along with the closure of foreign military bases and their conversion to national security sites.

The conclusion is not anti-Western in motivation — it is geostrategic in logic. Foreign military forces in the Gulf have consistently generated more insecurity than they have prevented. Their departure, far from creating a vacuum, creates the space for a durable regional security architecture to emerge on genuinely indigenous terms.

A withdrawal of this scale requires sequencing, not a cliff edge. The logical progression runs as follows: first, a mutual non-aggression framework reached among Gulf littoral States without foreign intervention creates the political prerequisites; second, joint Iran-GCC mine clearance operations — as detailed in Section 1 — establish operational trust between formerly adversarial navies; third, a speedy phased drawdown of foreign forces begins with the facilities most clearly compromised in the recent conflict; and fourth, the Gulf Regional Security Architecture institutions described in Section 5 can put in place the required coordination functions. Confidence-building need not await institutional completion — the mine clearance task force can begin work immediately, generating the operational familiarity on which broader cooperation depends.

4. The Abraham Accords: A Strategic Miscalculation to Be Rectified

The Abraham Accords of 2020, under which the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalised or agreed to normalise relations with Israel, were presented as a historic breakthrough for Middle Eastern peace. In geostrategic terms, they represented a profound strategic miscalculation — one whose costs have become fully apparent in the aftermath of the Gaza conflict, the Iran-Israel confrontation, and the broader regional war that preceded the June 2026 MOU. (Sudan’s agreement, signed in October 2020, has remained formally unratified due to ongoing domestic instability; Kazakhstan subsequently joined in November 2025.)

The Accords achieved normalisation with Israel at the precise moment when Israel’s conduct of unrestrained war primarily against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon was generating historically unprecedented levels of opposition across the Arab and Muslim world, and even internationally to a large measure. By aligning themselves with Israel — and, through Israel, with US regional policy — the Abraham Accord signatories invited the perception that they had chosen a short-sighted and mistaken foreign-backed alignment over Arab and Muslim solidarity, and over their own geostrategic interests in a stable relationship with Iran.

The Abraham Accords were, in essence, a US-brokered arrangement that subordinated the long-term geostrategic interests of participating Gulf States to a short-term United States diplomatic objective. Those States that signed on purchased marginal economic benefits at the cost of regional legitimacy, Iranian hostility, and alignment with an Israeli military campaign that has since been the subject of international condemnation.

Renouncing the Abraham Accords is not a gesture of hostility toward normalisation as a concept — it is a recognition that durable normalisation must be built on a foundation of regional consensus, Palestinian rights, and mutual security, not on United States political scheduling. No signatory State has yet formally renounced the Accords, though Bahrain recalled its ambassador to Israel, Bahrain’s parliament voted to suspend economic agreements, and the UAE has significantly cooled public cooperation with Israel in the aftermath of the Gaza war. The grounds for formal renunciation are multiple and compelling:

Geopolitical realignment: the Iran-US MOU creates the architecture for a new Gulf security order premised on regional cooperation. Continued adherence to the Abraham Accords — which were premised on a US-Israeli alignment against Iran — is structurally incompatible with participation in this new order.
Economic logic: Iran’s reintegration into the regional and global economy — with $300 billion in reconstruction investment and full sanctions removal — represents an economic opportunity of a different order of magnitude than anything the Abraham Accords promised to deliver. The relevant measure is not Israel as a bilateral trading partner, but the unlocking of suppressed economic complementarities between Iran and the GCC: energy, infrastructure, labour, and consumer markets that decades of confrontation have prevented from realising their potential. The Gulf’s economic future runs through regional integration, and Iran is central to it along with other Gulf States.
Security calculus: the recent conflict demonstrated that Israel’s military capacity does not translate into security guarantees for GCC States. On the contrary, alignment with Israel made some GCC infrastructure vulnerable targets. The security argument for the Accords has been empirically refuted and shown as ephemeral.
Regional legitimacy: the Palestinian cause commands overwhelming support among the populations of GCC States. Leaders who maintain normalisation with Israel in the aftermath of Gaza do so at mounting cost to domestic political legitimacy. Renouncing the Accords restores a critical dimension of internal political coherence.
Precedent of sovereignty: the Abraham Accords were negotiated with significant US pressure and the implicit offer of arms sales, security guarantees and economic benefits. Those guarantees and promises now have been shown to be hollow. The normative premise of the Accords — that US-backed normalisation with Israel advances GCC security — has been disproved by events.

5. Toward a Gulf Regional Security Architecture

The combination of the Iran-US MOU, the operational failure of extra-regional military guarantees, and the strategic imperative of economic reintegration all point toward the same destination: a Gulf Regional Security Architecture (GRSA) built by and for the States of the Gulf, with Iran as a central and equal participant.

The model for such an architecture exists in embryonic form in Article 5 of the MOU itself, which mandates Iranian dialogue with Oman and Gulf littoral States on maritime administration. This provision should be the seed of a far broader framework encompassing:

A Gulf Security Council — a permanent intergovernmental body bringing together Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman to coordinate on shared security matters, including maritime safety, counterterrorism, border management, and military confidence-building measures.
A mutual non-aggression and non-interference treaty among Gulf littoral States, codifying the principles of Article 2 of the Iran-US MOU in a regional multilateral instrument binding on all parties.
Joint naval exercises and interoperability programmes between Iranian and GCC naval forces, beginning with mine countermeasure operations and expanding to search and rescue, anti-piracy, and maritime domain awareness.
A Gulf Economic Integration Compact — a framework for coordinated hydrocarbon production policy, infrastructure investment, trade facilitation, and labour mobility among Gulf States, including Iran, designed to capture the economic complementarities that decades of confrontation have suppressed.
A phased, speedy negotiated drawdown of foreign military bases in the Gulf, beginning with those facilities that have been operationally compromised in the recent conflict, with a target of full regionalisation of Gulf security within five years.

Geoeconomics reinforces geostrategy: GCC States collectively hold approximately 33% of global proven oil reserves — and if Iran and Iraq are included, the broader Gulf region accounts for approximately 56% of the world’s proven reserves. GCC sovereign wealth funds collectively manage approximately $5–6 trillion in assets, representing around 40% of the global total. A unified, peaceful, regionally governed Gulf, free from foreign military presence, would represent the most consequential economic and strategic realignment since the discovery of oil. The question is not whether the Gulf can afford regional cooperation — it is whether it can afford to continue without it.

Conclusion

The Iran-US MOU has opened a strategic window that may not remain open for long. The Gulf’s States — Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shia, monarchies and republic — now face a choice that has been deferred for four decades: whether to rebuild the security architecture that failed them on the same foundations, or to construct something genuinely new. The argument of this assessment is that the logic of regional ownership is not merely desirable but strategically necessary. External security guarantees have been tested by events and found wanting. The alternative is not a vacuum — it is a Gulf Security Council, a joint mine clearance task force, a regional maritime authority, and a mutual non-aggression framework built by the States that will live with the consequences.

The renunciation of the Abraham Accords is part of this reckoning. Those arrangements were not a peace settlement — they were a geopolitical positioning exercise conducted under US pressure, at a moment when the costs of alignment with Israel had not yet been fully borne. Those costs are now apparent. The grounds for formal renunciation — geostrategic, economic, security, and legitimacy-based — are set out in Section 4 of this assessment. They are compelling on their own terms, entirely apart from any sentiment about normalisation as a concept. The Gulf’s States are well-placed to make this move, and to do so as a sovereign act of strategic recalibration, not as a concession to any external pressure.

One further dimension demands explicit treatment. The closure of the Iran nuclear file — nearly a quarter century after it was first opened in 2002 — removes the most frequently cited proliferation concern in the Middle East. That achievement is substantial. But a durable regional security architecture cannot rest on asymmetric non-proliferation commitments. The Middle East WMD-free zone, mandated in principle since the 1995 NPT Review Conference, must now move from diplomatic aspiration to negotiated reality. A regional order in which one State maintains an arsenal of approximately 120 nuclear weapons outside IAEA safeguards — while all others are bound by the NPT — is not a stable order. The completion of the Iran nuclear settlement creates the political conditions, for the first time, to place Israel’s nuclear programme on the regional security agenda in a structured way — it is well past time to address Israel’s nuclear weapons to ensure its complete verified irreversible denuclearization. The Gulf States, asserting ownership of their security, should make this a central demand of the new architecture they are building. [IDN-InDepthNews]