Iran's neighbors may not have wanted a war with Tehran. The emirs of the region may resent Donald Trump for demonstrating their vulnerability without the kind of warning they wanted. Now that Trump has finally decided to address the threats Iran's regime poses to the region and the world, however, these Middle East states want him to finish the job and ensure the collapse of the regime.
The question is whether they're willing to pay for it, literally and figuratively:
Gulf Arab states did not ask the US to go to war with Iran, but many are now urging it not to stop short by leaving the Islamic Republic still able to threaten the Gulf’s oil lifeline and the economies that depend on it, three Gulf sources told Reuters.
At the same time, these sources and five Western and Arab diplomats said Washington was pressing Gulf states to join the US-Israeli war. According to three of them, US President Donald Trump wants to show regional backing for the campaign, to bolster its international legitimacy as well as support at home.
“There is a wide feeling across the Gulf that Iran has crossed every red line with every Gulf country,” said Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Saudi-based Gulf Research Center and familiar with government thinking.
“At first we defended them and opposed the war,” he said. “But once they began directing strikes at us, they became an enemy. There is no other way to classify them.”
The Iranians miscalculated on this reaction. Their entire strategy took a page out of Vladimir Putin's playbook, specifically the "escalate to de-escalate" page. The IRGC and Ali Khamenei deliberately escalated and expanded the war to their neighbors in hopes of producing one of two reactions. Their best hope would be to get these states to eject Americans from bases in their countries, but failing that, Khamenei and Ali Larijani wanted to get these states to use those bases and trade as leverage to get the Americans and Israelis to back down and withdraw.
Instead, the Iranians just gave everyone a practical demonstration of the risks they created by appeasing the Iranians for the last 47 years. All of them have now done the obvious calculation: what would the mullahs do if they actually built a nuclear device? All of these states would have to fall in line because none of them are under the peculiar fantasy that plays in the West about the Iranian mullahs. They know Khamenei and his apocalyptic successors would use nuclear weapons, first on Israel and then on any states that dared to oppose them. This war just proved that the Iranians see them as enemies, thanks to their engagement with the US, and that they have been targets all along.
Now that the illusions of appeasement have been stripped away, these Gulf states understand better than anyone that they cannot live with this regime in power at any level. The only way out of this war for them is through it to the absolute destruction of the mullahs' regime, and especially the IRGC.
This explains the sudden shift at Al-Jazeera that David caught yesterday. Qatar had probably been the closest thing to an ally to the Iranian regime in the region, with perhaps the exception of Turkey, and had acted as a mediator to legitimize Iran's proxy Hamas for the last twelve years. Since the start of the war, the Iranians have launched unending volleys of missiles and drones at Qatar, whose emirs also bankroll Al-Jazeera. The Qataris want the regime demolished too, and that's almost certainly why their news service has begun to extol the Americans and their military success. (It also has the virtue of being accurate, something of a rarity at AJ.)
Fortunately or not, the IRGC seems to agree. In a statement made before the death of Ali Larijani, a "senior Iranian official" claimed that Nepo Babytollah had ordered that the war continue until the US and Israel begged for mercy, or something:
Iran's new supreme leader has rejected de-escalation proposals conveyed to Tehran by intermediaries, demanding Israel and the United States first be "brought to their knees," a senior Iranian official said on Tuesday.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei had held his first foreign policy session since being named supreme leader, and had taken a stance for revenge against the US and Israel that was “very tough and serious”, the official said, without clarifying whether the leader attended in person or remotely.
The senior official, who asked not to be identified, said two intermediary countries had conveyed proposals to Iran's Foreign Ministry for "reducing tensions or ceasefire with the United States."The official did not give further details of the proposals or the intermediaries.
The supreme leader had responded that it was not "the right time for peace until the United States and Israel are brought to their knees, accept defeat, and pay compensation."
First off, Mojtaba is clearly in no position to hold anything. If he could hold a meeting, the regime would put him on camera to establish his leadership capacity. This message came from Larijani, who has been conducting this war and making all of these decisions since the death of Ali Khamenei. Larijani's exit into the non-respiratory column will not likely produce an immediate change away from these strategies, at least not nominally. However, as the remaining struts of power keep getting demolished – the Basij in particular – we can expect the remnants to attempt a diplomatic settlement with the US short of a regime collapse.
The Gulf states are telling Trump it's too late for that now, and that the only way out of this war is through it. Let's hope he's listening.
Addendum: Just in case you missed the headline reference ... I needed to keep up with Beege's early-70s music references this week, of course. It feels so right, being with you here tonight ...
Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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