[Salon] One more nail in the coffin of US policy in the Persian Gulf - Guest Post by Graham Fuller

One more nail in the coffin of US policy in the Persian Gulf Graham E, Fuller 25 June 2024 In a seemingly minor diplomatic event in the Persian Gulf, the Kingdom of Bahrain has just re-established long broken diplomatic relations with Iran. While Bahrain is a small island in the Gulf with little latitude in policies largely controlled by Saudi Arabia, this event carries greater significance than meets the eye. Bahrain is an oppressive regime run by a Sunni minority harshly suppressing its majority Shi’ite population. The Shi’ite majority has long been restive under these policies of discrimination, much abetted by a fiercely anti-Iranian Saudi Arabia which dominates Bahrain’s foreign policy. Indeed, this situation has been part and parcel of a broader pattern of American policies globally that routinely seek to identify enemies in various regions in order to establish and maintain US"security arrangements" in any area in question. In the Persian Gulf Iran has a long been designated the “enemy” de choix and US Gulf policy has been based around rallying regional military and political opposition against Iran—heavily supported by Israel. Not surprisingly Iran has reciprocated in kind by lending support to various groups in the region as counterbalancing instruments against American power as well as establishing a nuclear project. Never mind that a significant case can be made that the US did not have to maintain on auto-pilot anti-Iranian hostility for 45 years down to today, but such a policy serves US strategic and military interests to maintain a regional American hegemony. (Readers of history will know that once the United States has identified and declared another state to be on an “enemy list" it is exceedingly difficult to get off that enemy list.) Thus a cornerstone of American Gulf policy for decades was the establishment of a military presence in the region in order to "protect the free flow of oil." Never mind that virtually every anti-American dictator in the region was happy to sell their oil to the world and “free flow of oil" almost never needed protection. The first deep hole in that American military and strategic "wall" was made by the Chinese who two years ago engineered an astonishing rapprochement long viewed as nearly inconceivable by pseudo experts because "everybody knows” that Sunnis and Shi’ites are mortal enemies. The Beijing-engineered diplomatic rapprochement between the Saudis and Iran was the first stunning indication of major shifting geopolitical realities in the Gulf. Now, with Bahrain even more surprisingly mending ties with Tehran we can see more clearly the shift that the Chinese (and Russian) presence in the Persian Gulf is affording. Bahrain could never have undertaken such a shift without Saudi concurrence as well —which had itself just proceeded Bahrain in de-demonizing Iran. In one sense, much of this is reminiscent of the revolutionary turnaround in Turkish foreign policy over three decades ago under Turkey’s inspired leadership under academician and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu who declared a new "zero enemies" foreign policy for a Turkey which would undertake to mend relations with all surrounding countries (who had long been hostile in the NATO or other contexts.) While Davutoglu was held in much contempt in Washington precisely because such a stance was seen to be undermining NATO policies of “enemy identification” used to justify this military bloc. (Indeed there is virtually no independent European foreign policy today permitted to exist outside the structures of American-dominated NATO.) But approaches such as Davutoglu’s striving for “zero enemies” gave pause for thought as to whether "intractable" hostilities in the region might not just turn out to be manageable , especially if one assumes countries have agency to alter negative or hostile postures. Indeed, In this regard one questions the very foundation of so much of American policy so heavily based on “identification of enemies " that requires ever deeper military engagement and confrontation. Bahrain might have been expected to be one of the last countries in the Gulf with its entrenched ruling government hostility to Tehran to undertake a policy about-face. But this event further portends major tectonic shifts underway in this region long geopolitically dominated by American strategy. Furthermore the events serve to strengthen some degree of legitimacy of Iran as a significant regional actor consonant with its desires to join the BRICS bloc—an organization very much part of the emergence of a new Global South. Of course there can be no millennium on the horizon with peace breaking out all over. In international relations it is impossible to have everybody in full harmony with everybody else all the time in a total absence of conflict. Yet it is certainly a worthy aspiration for states to make the assumption that hostility does not have to be automatic, that states indeed do have agency and can make major decisions about whether to foster improvement or exacerbation of of relations with other countries. But the United States with now the most ideological foreign policy in the world since the fall of the Soviet Union (“global war against terror", “bringing democracy to the world,” regime change, etc) Washington might well take a page out of this book in its own relations with Russia and China for starters. Diplomacy, a lost art in America today, was designed specifically to work to lubricate such tensions rather than exacerbate them . Yet exacerbation seems to be the course Washington often follows to maintain the vision of enemies that require American military solutions and American hegemony. Graham Fuller is the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at CIA responsible for long range global forecasting. He is also the author of "the Arab Shi’a: the forgotten Muslims” with Rend Rah Francke.