On Monday a fairly heavyweight group of visitors sat down with senior Iranian officials in Tehran. Three of them came from the countries that signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement in August: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye. Diplomats from Qatar were there as well. As Federica Marsi writes for Al Jazeera, they went to stop the war from restarting in full, with Washington openly weighing new strikes on Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, who are backed by Tehran, trading fire with Saudi Arabia.
The guest list shows how seriously they took it. According to The National, the visitors were Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Ibrahim Kalin, who runs Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation. Their host was Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. This was the first high-level contact between Iran and the Mecca pact states since the war began on February 28. Prince Khalid arrived only days after Houthi strikes hit Saudi airports, ports and oil facilities. I covered the trip as it was being put together.
It reportedly produced no agreement. The National’s sources said the clearest result was a promise to keep talking, with no de-escalation on any front, the Houthi attacks on Saudi cities included. Rezaei called the talks “very good” on state television and said everyone agreed that the countries of the region, and not outside powers, should guarantee its security. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the meeting a step toward dialogue and peace. A few hours after it ended, the Saudi-led coalition said it had intercepted three ballistic missiles and four drones fired at the kingdom by the Houthis.
So that is the state of dialogue.
Renegotiating the contract
For decades the Gulf’s security arrangement has worked roughly like a contract. Gulf states host American bases, buy American weapons and keep the oil flowing. In exchange the United States is supposed to make sure nobody hurts them. This war has been a bad stress test for that deal: shipping through Hormuz has been restricted, energy supplies disrupted and Gulf infrastructure damaged. When a contract stops paying out, you look for a new counterparty, or at least a second one.
Oman has been the most explicit about this. In a lecture at Girton College, Cambridge, Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi called for a regional security framework with Iran that would include a “non-aggression pact”. According to the Irish Times, it would cover all six Gulf Arab states plus Iraq and Iran. He said the US would stop being the region’s main provider of security. That is a striking thing for a Gulf foreign minister to say in public. It is roughly what Tehran has been saying for years.
The specialists are doubtful. “It’s really hard to see a regional security framework coming out in the coming months or even years,” Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi of Chatham House told Al Jazeera. She sees small, flexible groups of countries working out bilateral or multilateral fixes. A real framework, in her view, would need a shared vision of the region that the GCC states don’t have even among themselves. The Saudi analyst Khaled Batarfi described the visit as a “last warning” from Riyadh, and said Iran has so far rebuffed it. “The gap is [wide] and what makes it worse is that there is no trust.”
Who goes first
Hamidreza Azizi of the International Crisis Group puts the core problem precisely: “the fundamental disagreement between Tehran and Washington over the sequence of commitments.” Washington wants nuclear concessions first. Iran wants its conditions for ending the war met first. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei restated those conditions on Wednesday.
Any lawyer who has closed a deal knows this problem. Imagine selling a house to someone you don’t trust. You won’t hand over the keys until the money arrives, and they won’t send the money until they have the keys. The usual fix is an escrow agent, a neutral party who holds both sides’ performance and releases each at the same moment. Azizi suggests regional mediation, possibly through an interim arrangement, could do that job here. He also points out the weakness: mediators being willing to hold the escrow doesn’t mean the buyer and seller are ready to close.
Qatar has drafted something like escrow instructions. Reuters reported that Qatari mediators gave Iran a draft deal on Sunday, and Tehran was expected to answer by the end of the week. Iranian officials have since called some of its ideas unacceptable and said they will not budge on the nuclear issue, which is the part Washington wants handed over first.
The deadline pressure is mostly American. On Friday President Trump again warned of possible new military action against Iran, while fuel prices hang over the November 3 midterms. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps promised a stronger response to any new attack. CENTCOM has strike options ready.
Hedging
The deeper difficulty is that “regional security” means different things to different signatories. To Iran it means the Americans leave. Gulf states, in Azizi’s words, “remain deeply integrated into the US security system.” They are not about to walk away from the bases and the weapons pipeline. What the war has done, he argues, is push them to diversify their security partnerships rather than overhaul their strategic alignments. This is less a new security order and more a portfolio rebalancing: keep the big American position, add some Pakistani, Turkish and maybe Iranian exposure, and hope the correlations hold.
The National also reported a more modest aim behind Monday’s meeting. The talks were reportedly not meant to deter a US-Israeli attack on Iran. They were meant to agree on principles and a course of action if fighting resumes, so that a new round could be brought under control quickly. Nobody in the room expects to prevent the next war. They are trying to agree on how it ends before it begins, which is the one part of the contract where the sequencing problem doesn’t come up.