The Gulf and its foreign policies

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The nine states of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula – Iran, Iraq, Yemen and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – are bound together in a regional system but not a security community. Four major conflicts in the region since 1980 have contributed to a volatile set of relationships which feed into perceptions of risk, threat and interest, and have shaped the conduct of foreign, defence and security policy-making accordingly. Other factors, such as revolutionary upheaval, sectarian politics and the roles of non-state actors as well as external powers, have added to an already combustible mix and made it harder to reach consensus on key issues of foreign policy. This article examines the foreign policy landscape in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula and assesses a range of factors which determine the context in which measures are framed, formulated and implemented. There are two major parts to this article. An opening section argues that the myriad connections among the nine states together constitute a definable sub-regional complex, to adapt the concept developed by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, and as evidenced by the patterns of conflict in recent decades, albeit one based on an imbalance of conventional forms of power in which three larger states coexist alongside five smaller ones with Yemen separate yet intimately linked. This leads into a second section which explores the many interconnections which have provided the contextual backdrop to the conduct of foreign policy-making in regional states over the past four decades, and which continue to resonate today. The article focuses throughout on the linkages between domestic and foreign policy and between perceptions of interest at national and regional levels as guiding factors for policy-makers in each of the states involved.