Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi delivered a lecture on Monday in which he called for a new security architecture for the Persian Gulf that includes all six GCC countries, Iraq and Iran while excluding foreign powers. Busaidi said it was time for the Gulf “to step up and take responsibility for our own security” and end reliance on “external powers,” reported Middle East Eye.
Even more remarkable was that al-Busaidi delivered his lecture at Cambridge University, the intellectual heart of the British Empire to which Oman still maintains extensive ties. Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor of The Guardian, called al-Busaidi’s address a “Significant even brave intervention.”
“The nuclear issue and the Hormuz issue are both impossible to resolve because external powers continue to define the terms of engagement, while regional powers are unable to take collective responsibility for making their own security arrangements and reach a consensus on them,” Busaidi said. “That is why in my talk today I am making a call for us in the Gulf to step up and take responsibility for our own security, and for us to do so inclusively.”
Busaidi said that positioning Iran as the security threat has been “the most damaging of the priorities imposed on the region from the outside.”
“This produced an unstable regional system constructed on the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf,” he said. “There is no such fundamental antagonism.” While problems exist, Arabs and Persians have lived in peace in the Gulf for centuries, he added.
“Any Gulf security architecture that doesn’t include [Iran] is inherently unstable. It’s structurally unsound,” he said. “And recent events expose the terrible cost of allowing the false perception of antagonism and exclusion.”
Busaidi said the region can no longer rely on cooperation from external partners and that the goal should be a “non-aggression pact” among the Gulf states. “The time has come when it no longer makes sense just to blame everyone else,” he said. “We need to begin a new regional dialogue on Gulf security, and we need to do so before other solutions are imposed on the region, which would effectively consolidate the pattern of dependency and exclusion for which we urgently need to find an alternative.” He added that over time, external partnerships, such as with the US, would involve less military commitments and more economic and investment partnerships
Busaidi spoke the day after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian made the same argument in Moscow. Meeting Putin on Oct. 27 on the sidelines of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, Pezeshkian said: “I believe that we can work on all the problems we have in the region and that we are capable of resolving all our problems and all regional issues without the United States. There is no need to rely on American assistance in the region, especially for those countries in our region that think otherwise.” With the Saudi, Pakistani and Turkish signers of the Mecca defense pact meeting Iran’s leadership in Tehran on Monday, the nations of the region made the same case three times in 48 hours, in Tehran, Moscow and Cambridge: regional security without foreign interference.
