The Persian Gulf region is home to the six members of the Gulf Cooperation
Council (viz., Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia),
Iran, and Iraq. Holding over 60 percent of the world’s oil and over 40 percent
of its natural gas reserves, the Persian Gulf is central to the global economy.
Yet a dominant regional power is lacking; beginning with the British in the
late nineteenth century, foreign powers have consistently been meddling in
the region. Significant economic, social, cultural, and political changes have
transformed the region’s international relations since Britain’s withdrawal in
the 1960s. The contributors to this volume, which provides a rich account of
this transformation, focus on natural resources, the Iranian-Saudi competition,
the interest of major external actors, and political reform.
The volume’s main thrust is the centrality of both state and regime security
in order to understand the region. The volume’s editor, Mehran Kamrava,
notes that the international politics there is essentially that of security
politics. He offers four reasons for this: (1) its central role in oil and natural
gas production and, increasingly, global finance, (2) the competition between
Iran and Saudi Arabia over regional leadership, (3) the long-standing
American-Iranian conflict, and (4) the instability brought about by intermixing
politics and religion.
He identifies three poles of power that shape the region’s security dynamics:
the American pole; the GCC pole, which is centered on Saudi military
and Qatari-UAE financial power; and the Iranian pole, which relies both on
military might and soft power. Since the Iranian revolution, the American and
the GCC poles have built a resilient alliance that has been driven by both the
United States’ growing direct involvement and the GCC’s failure to provide
security to its members.
The chapters, written by leading regional specialists, further elaborate on
the region’s security dynamics. In Chapter 2, J. E. Petersen offers a useful typology
of boundary formation. He discusses how the state-building process,
historical claims, colonial imposition, and resource competition have shaped
state boundaries. As these boundaries remain contested, Petersen details various
ongoing problems. In Chapter 3, Fred H. Lawson refines the concepts “security
dilemma” and “alliances dilemma” and uses them to explain the arms race in
the Gulf since the first Gulf War. Middle East specialists and international relations
scholars will find these chapters useful in conceptual refinement ...
Iran-Saudi Relations: From Rivalry to Nowhere