The Manama Declaration issued last Thursday marks the beginning of a new phase. The joint statement from the ministerial meeting between the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council member states deserves to be read as an announcement of a different regional equation, after its institutions have absorbed a barrage of missiles and drones.
The most important element the declaration carries is not the reaffirmation of the Gulf–American partnership, but rather the way in which the GCC was viewed. For the first time in years, the world's foremost international power has begun to regard the Council as a single political bloc with shared interests and a convergent vision, rather than a collection of states bound only by geography. This is an acknowledgement that the Gulf has become a partner in shaping regional balances.
This shift reveals the great distance the Gulf–American relationship has travelled since the Camp David summit of 2015, when the Gulf side was prevented from participating in negotiations with Iran. Today, GCC member states have moved from a position of waiting for the results of understandings to a position of participating in drafting them — a transformation no less significant than any clause contained in the declaration itself.
Yet this shift is met by a very different scene in Tehran. Contrary to what some believe — that the Iranian negotiator is adept at manoeuvring — that assessment is closer to impressionistic judgement than to political analysis. The Iranian negotiator operates within a system in which centres of power compete to outbid one another in intransigence.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that the supreme leadership remains captive to absolute convictions holding that any substantive concession, whatever its benefits, risks opening the door to a weakening of the system. The difficulty of negotiating with Iran does not stem from the negotiator's skill but from the nature of a system that narrows the room for manoeuvre and makes any flexibility a matter of suspicion — and perhaps deserving of punishment.
Hence the issue is no longer the nuclear programme, or long-range missiles, or even proxy forces; it is the nature of the Iranian regional project itself. Political practice over recent decades reveals that the practical priority of Iranian regional policy has become the entrenchment of influence in the Arabian Gulf.
Slogans have receded — foremost among them the slogan of