Iran and the Gulf: History’s Mistake, Geography’s Dilemma

There are moments when events move faster than politics can understand them. States then become prisoners of the images they built of their rivals, explaining the present with tools from the past, even after the balance of power has shifted and the map has been redrawn.
Few relationships in the Middle East show this better than the one between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf. Since the 1979 revolution, the region has lived in a new era of rivalry. But many Arab readings treat the revolution as the beginning of everything, when the contest between the two shores of the Gulf is older than the revolution, broader than the sectarian divide, and tied more closely to the region’s place in international calculations. What changed in 1979 was not that Iran existed as a regional power. It was the nature of the regime that governed it, the ideas it proclaimed and the tools it chose to secure its role.
That is the first mistake: turning one historic moment into a permanent explanation of all history. The revolution matters, but it cannot account for Iranian policy on its own, any more than sectarian disputes can account for Arab relations with Iran.
How the map of power changed
Before the revolution, the Shah’s Iran was a main American ally and part of the Western security order in the Gulf. That alliance did not erase rivalry with some Arab states. It reflected a US plan to manage the region through friendly regional powers. When the Shah fell, Washington lost one of its pillars, and a state emerged that opposed it and began building a network of influence beyond its borders.
Yet the biggest shift did not happen in Tehran alone. The Iran-Iraq war drained both countries for eight years and ended without settling the causes of their rivalry. Then came Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which reshaped the region again. Before 2003, Iraq was a central weight in the regional balance, whatever one thought of its government. When that government fell and large parts of the state came apart, Iran’s old rival did not simply weaken. The strategic environment around Iran changed. A state that had fought a long war to stop Baghdad imposing its will found itself with far more room to shape Iraqi affairs.
This matters for what followed. Iran’s rise in influence was not only the product of Iranian strength. It also followed the decline of Arab powers, outside interventions, the collapse of state institutions and widening political and security vacuums. It would be wrong to read every change as a purely Iranian project. It would be equally wrong to ignore how skilfully Tehran exploited the openings. History does not move at one actor’s will, but it hands bigger chances to those who can use them when others cannot defend or rebuild their positions.
Washington’s Iran and the Arabs’ Iran
Two different questions have been tangled together: Iran’s place in its struggle with the United States, and the nature of its influence in the Arab world. Confusing them has muddied some Arab strategic thinking.
Washington looks at Iran through its global interests, the security of its allies, its military deployments and the nuclear programme. Arab states have other calculations: sovereignty, the balance of power, regional interference, and the security of borders, societies and vital facilities. These can overlap with the American position on some files, but they are not identical.
There is also a strategic risk. If Washington confronts Tehran in one period, it may bargain with it in another when it judges its interests require that. States do not build foreign policy on enmity alone, and they reorder their positions when costs and rewards change. So a policy that assumes the US-Iran conflict will last forever is a gamble. If the two sides reach broad understandings, Arab states may find themselves facing arrangements they did not help make but must live with. If the conflict escalates, the Arab world will be among the most exposed to the fallout.
The issue, then, is not that Washington might negotiate with Tehran. Negotiation is a normal part of international relations. The issue is whether Arab states can define their own interests, voice them and defend them rather than wait for others to decide.
The Gulf is not outside history
Some political commentary treats the Gulf as a region defined by energy and shipping lanes, as if its importance were limited to what lies beneath and crosses it. But the Gulf is also where power relations are formed and where states are tested on managing clashing interests without sliding into open war.
Iran holds a strategic position on the northern shore and overlooks the Strait of Hormuz. In 2024, oil flow through the strait averaged 20 million barrels per day, about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Yet that importance does not give Iran unlimited power. Threatening shipping can raise the cost of confrontation for its opponents, but it also endangers Iran’s own interests and invites outside military action. In the same way, Gulf states cannot hand responsibility for maritime security entirely to great powers.
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That is the strategic paradox. Geography hands every side leverage, and it also imposes limits. Each can affect the others’ security, but none can control every consequence of escalation alone. So Gulf security cannot be reduced to arms races, base counts or the size of outside alliances. Those tools may be necessary for deterrence, but they do not answer the deeper question: how do you stop rivalry from hardening into an unending cycle of threat, response and counter-threat?
A mistake of the past or a duty to the future?
Invoking history is not the same as submitting to it. It can explain rivalries, but it cannot make them eternal. Iranian-Arab relations inherit real contradictions over status, influence and political memory, and they have been shaped by sectarian and nationalist struggles that were sometimes used to mobilise societies and justify policy. Turning these elements into fixed verdicts strips politics of its ability to adapt.
Arab states need not ignore their fears of Iranian policy, and Iran need not abandon its regional interests. But everyone should recognise that power is not read through slogans, and that influence is measured not only by what a state achieves beyond its borders but by its ability to build relations that do not leave neighbours constantly looking for ways to counter it.
The Middle East has changed many times, and each stage redistributed power in ways few predicted. The lasting lesson is that vacuums left by war do not stay empty, and that states that withdraw from the region’s equations later find others have drawn up arrangements that do not necessarily respect their interests.
Geography offers no guarantee of peace, and it does not condemn anyone to permanent hostility either. It confronts states with facts they cannot ignore and leaves politics to deal with them. Between the error of reading history and the trap of geography, the question is whether Arabs and Iranians can move from a conflict that outside powers exploit to a regional balance in which the region’s own states have a real hand in the design.
Nations do not lose their place only because they lack strength. They can lose it by misreading the moment they live in, still fighting yesterday’s battles while others redraw tomorrow’s map. Lasting security needs both the ability to defend sovereignty and the ability to stop disagreement from becoming confrontation.
Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf will probably keep differing over security, influence and the regional order, perhaps for a long time. Politics is not judged by whether it can remove every difference, but by whether it can stop difference from becoming a fate of repeated conflict.