“We are in the region. We will never leave. We cannot leave our home. We are not asking anyone to leave. It is in our interest to help secure this place.”
Mohammed Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, so explained his country’s position last week to an impressive gathering of Mediterranean foreign policy experts and practitioners in Rome, organised by the principal Italian international think tank and the ministry of foreign affairs. A major theme was the growing tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East multiplied by their proxies in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Qatar.
One prominent speaker said Iran benefitted so much from the US intervention in Iraq from 2003 that it is a key player, though limited as a Persian Shia power in a Sunni Arab world. He depicted a post-Islamic State landscape in the region, where the organisation has been defeated militarily but not politically. Battles for the spoils intersect with Sunni-Shia conflicts, civil wars, weak states and a lack of any institutionalised policymaking or diplomacy. There is no global power as an arbiter – and US president Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital this week copperfastens that US demise.
Iran’s recent alliances with non-Shia Kurds, Qataris, Turks and Afghans cut across this religious divide, Zarif argued. But its appeals for an inclusive win-win approach to the region’s current problems are vehemently rejected by Saudi Arabia which demands Iran withdraws to its own borders. Security should be sought in each society and cannot be purchased externally, while a formula for dialogue on sharing regional influence must be found, Zarif added.
The Saudi foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir told the conference Iran has been a negative influence in the region since its 1979 revolution, exporting subversion with no regard for international law or good neighbourliness. It must now pay a price for its attempt to build a land bridge to Lebanon. He strongly defended the activist foreign policy of the young Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman as well as his radical domestic reforms. Other conference participants saw both as dangerously overextended.
According to Vali Nasr, a Middle East specialist from John Hopkins university we are living through a unique moment in the Middle East, as the state structures and regional order put in place by imperial powers after the first World War fall apart. We are witnessing not an Iranian surge but the collapse of structures to contain the 1979 revolution.
As he sees it, the US can only repair that containment wall by deploying hundreds of thousands of troops once again in the region. In fact, Iran is the most stable country there and is therefore best able to project force. It was never colonised and is far older, more civilised, more resilient and socially integrated internally than its neighbours since 1979. Rule by its lower middle class revolutionaries is usually legitimised by outside pressure such as that now exerted against Iran by US sanctions affecting mainly its wealthier upper middle class citizens who rally to nationalist calls in response.
Looking at the nuclear arms deal reached by Iran in 2014 with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and the European Union, Vasr fears Trump will replace secretary of state Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo from the CIA, a man like others in the ruling circle with long grudges against Iran from clashes in the 1980s. They want a more forward US policy against Iran, but Trump is unlikely to give them the necessary military resources. As Walter Russell Mead, another US policy intellectual attending put it, Trump has “more bark than bite on the use of force abroad. He like winning, not war” and will resort more to theatrical gestures than military interventions.
Zarif says a key factor in the nuclear issue will be whether European powers and the EU stand by the deal and refuse to link it to missile tests and tighter US sanctions with extraterritorial effect. The EU foreign policy high representative Federica Mogherini told the conference the EU is determined to be a reliable partner and would insist on defending the deal.
The Russian foreign minister Sergej Layrov told the conference Russia wants a peaceful, stable Middle East open to the world and capable of living together culturally. If the US drops the Iran deal what credibility will it have on North Korea? His authoritative command of the regional issues, including Syria, was in sharp contrast to the official US absence from this important gathering.
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