In this war, many cards have been shuffled together in the virtual world. Shuffling them in the media does not make them reality on the ground, and it confers no legitimate right on whoever did the shuffling. Nor should it stop us, as the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, from asserting our own.
The entry of a regional power, Israel, and an international one, the United States, into the war on Iran does not give Iran the right to drag the Gulf states into its battle in the name of self-defense. Iran knows the Gulf states are not, and never were, a party to this war. Blending its flimsy justifications into the Israeli-American war on it does not turn them into facts, and it gives Iran no right to attack the Gulf states, directly or through its proxies.
By the same token, the war's having begun as an Israeli-Iranian one does not make the GCC states a party on Israel's side. Some of them have agreements with Israel, but none of those agreements is military.
What the GCC states are doing is exercising their legitimate right of self-defense. That is the reality. Their measures are the ones the international community supports, whether through individual states or through the Security Council.
The same confusion is at work elsewhere. That Europe is at odds with the American administration is no reason for European states to abandon their interests and accept a reality imposed by Iran, in which the energy and resources they need are blocked from reaching them through the waterways. Defending those interests, through security cooperation with the states bordering the waterways, does not mean joining a war started by Israel or the United States. It is the legitimate right of every state that depends on those waterways, and its duty to its own interests.
The same holds for East Asia. Condemnation alone does not absolve its states of responsibility for protecting their interests, and taking a larger role in securing the waterways does not make them partners of a rival such as the United States. The responsibility falls on everyone harmed by this illegitimate blackmail.
That is where the Gulf states' leverage lies. Their legitimate right of self-defense includes the right to tie their shared interests with these states to their own security, and to hold those states to their responsibilities. This is not blackmail of the kind Iran practices. It is a refusal to wait on, or accept excuses from, states that are slow to do their part.
Shuffling these cards together in the media does not make them fact. The shared interests between the Gulf states and the states that depend on the waterways are the fixed point from which Gulf diplomacy should proceed. Those interests call for a joint Gulf diplomatic campaign, one that turns them into leverage and presses those states to face their responsibilities in this bitter reality.
