Brian Katulis
America needs a regional diplomatic and political game plan on Iran to guide security measures
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi traveled to Cairo last week to meet with Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. This visit was part of a weeks-long diplomatic blitz ahead of an anticipated retaliatory military strike against Iran by Israel. Notably, the top Iranian diplomat also recently made stops in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Oman, and Bahrain.
Tehran’s focus seems to be a key center of gravity in the Middle East: Arab states that don’t share the exact same view as the United States and Israel about what’s happening in the region. Iran extracted a statement of neutrality in its ongoing conflict with Israel from the Gulf states earlier this month but clearly didn’t think this was enough because it pushed further, later threatening these same states with retaliation if they allow Israel to use their airspace to attack Iranian soil.
Where is America’s regional diplomatic effort to compete in this space? Crisis shuttle diplomacy by high-level administration officials aside, it’s been mostly absent, having accomplished little if anything to shape the calculations and actions of key Middle East countries since the war in Gaza began.
America’s recent military and security moves to address the threats from Iran and its regional proxies have been important but incomplete because what’s missing has been US statecraft that deploys these moves in a strategic context. The problem is not just an over-militarization of US strategy in the Middle East — something that has grown progressively worse in the two-plus decades since the 9/11 attacks. The biggest weakness is that the exercise amounts to fixating on tactics in the absence of an overall strategy on Iran that includes America’s regional partners.
In turn, brainstorming about various diplomatic solutions that, for instance, might prevent Israel from striking Iran or Iran from retaliating is important to do; but under the present conditions in the region, betting on the success of diplomacy absent other complementary policy options risks sounding academic and fanciful. Given the balance of interests and forces of the two main combatants, Israel and Iran seem poised for another round of conflict, and diplomacy alone has low odds of averting this outcome — though it would surely be a critical component of a potentially more successful multifaceted response.
A more practical regional approach for the United States would involve adopting two main steps.
First, the United States should empower the State Department to shift its regional diplomacy into higher gear on Iran. It is difficult to say what exactly the State Department does these days on Iran because much of the action seems centered either at the Pentagon, White House, or Central Intelligence Agency. This is not to say that the people working on Iran at the State Department are just sitting on their hands — it is just that the US approach to work with partners across the broader Middle East region has been absent for a long time. Indeed, even the last major diplomatic push on Iran, around the 2015 nuclear deal, mostly ignored the region and operated in the global framework of the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany). America has lacked a strategic regional diplomatic approach to coordinate policy with Middle East partners, and not just Israel, on Iran for many years.
Understandably, the focus of the Biden administration’s efforts this year has been to try to modulate Israel’s response and prevent a regional war, but that doesn’t do much to prepare for what comes after the next round of conflict. This first step — of simply reaching out to US partners across the region, including those with which America closely cooperates militarily, and discussing the right diplomatic responses to the next likely round of Israel-Iran fighting is something that could be done immediately.
The second step is something that requires a multi-year approach and deeper engagement in the Middle East: stepping up US diplomatic and political efforts to strengthen the states vulnerable and susceptible to pressure and influence from Iran. This means, first of all, Iraq and Lebanon, where the US already has a relatively robust diplomatic presence on the ground. But it should necessarily also include other areas contested by Iran across the broader region, including Syria, Yemen, and Sudan, among other places, where the State Department’s footprint has been much lighter in recent years.
Today’s Iran presents a security threat to the region and, increasingly, other parts of the world if one includes, for example, its support for Russia’s invasion and illegal war against Ukraine. But it also presents a diplomatic and political challenge that the US would be in a better position to counter if only American diplomats were empowered to show up and make Washington’s presence felt.
Brian Katulis is Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Middle East Institute.
