When we are hit with the bitter truth that Iran has launched fivefold more strikes on the Gulf than it has on Israel, we go back decades searching for the roots of this behavior. The origins are probably found in the early days, 1979, and the trajectory is peaking this war season.
From its inception, the Khomeinist regime raised the banner of "exporting the revolution."
Like all fanatical ideological movements, it claimed to uphold an absolute truth that justifies pursuing any means it deems useful for its agenda. It has forcefully rejected the notion that international law should constrain its actions since it saw the light of day by seizing the American embassy in Tehran and taking the embassy staff hostage.
Of course, Palestine and its cause were the primary pretext that Tehran has relied on since these early days, expanding its use of this pretext after the Iran-Iraq War.
For a comparison to this approach that disregards states, borders and sovereignty, another trajectory moving in the opposite direction also began to take shape in the same year, 1979: retreat from the principle of cross-border intervention and a focus on domestic affairs.
Through its peace treaty with Israel, Egypt reversed course; it broke with its previous policies that are best exemplified by its participation in the Yemen War during the 1960s and, before that, its reluctant acceptance of a union with Syria, and its encouragement of military coups and civil conflicts as experienced by Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon.
On the other hand, it is inaccurate to claim that the Camp David Accords and the policy of focusing on domestic affairs ignored the Palestinian cause. The accords addressed it in a document entitled "A Framework for Peace in the Middle East," proposing full autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Residents would manage their own internal affairs; during a five-year transitional period, an autonomous governing authority would be elected, and the authority of the Israeli military government would gradually diminish. After that, final status negotiations would determine the future of the occupied territories.
This proposal did not explicitly call for an independent Palestinian state, but it offered far more than the balance of power could have delivered — especially since the October 1973 war had exhausted the maximum military capacity of the combined Arab effort, economic pressure included. And while it did not foreclose theoretically possible future scenarios, the alternative described as revolutionary — the armed Palestinian factions — had come out of one war in Jordan and was mired in another in Lebanon.
The fact is that the victory of the Khomeinist approach over Sadat's has had disastrous consequences that continue to accumulate. It is worth noting that many parties (for various reasons, including the fear of being blackmailed through the "cause") facilitated this victory.
Lebanon, in turn, came under the control of Hafez al-Assad's army, becoming the stage for the embodiment of one approach’s triumph over the other under the pretext of the "cause."
Gradually, particularly with and after the Iran-Iraq War, the strategy born of this trajectory took full shape. Iran had to operate wherever its expansionist policies could be advanced. This entanglement imposes something close to dissolution on its smaller "allies", leaving little for their states, their societies, or their political arrangements. Qassem Soleimani, for instance, becomes a transnational savior; the Revolutionary Guard becomes both partner and patron to the military and security apparatuses of those countries. Officials, whether appointed or elected, must pass through an Iranian filter. Eventually, these countries are reduced to something like deferred projects: their domestic schisms are summoned, fueled, and exploited, with their communities potentially dragged into clashes that expose them (as has happened more than once) to Israeli occupation. In pursuing this gradual encroachment, monopolizing the Palestinian cause has always been essential, and it was established in coordination with the Assad regime and was manifested in successive wars against the Palestine Liberation Organization before culminating in the engineering of the "unity of the arenas."
The closest parallel to this transnational posture may be what became known as the "Brezhnev Doctrine," which the Soviet leader developed in 1968 following the Prague Spring.
The doctrine held that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene in any socialist state where it believed socialism had been "imperiled." Smaller "allies" had to fall in line with the Soviet regime and its demands or face an invasion by the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Indeed, a "threat" to one socialist state, so the argument went, was a threat to them all.
In the Middle East, particularly after the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei and the growing influence of the Revolutionary Guard at the expense of other centers of power, this disregard for states, borders, and sovereignty is likely to only become stronger and more entrenched.
Twice already, the Gulf states have faced similar challenges posed by regimes with no regard for states, borders, or national sovereignty, first with the Yemen war that Egypt entered forcefully, and then with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. If this current challenge is by far the greatest and most dangerous, especially with the Gulf states now deeply integrated into the global economy, these two precedents prove the rule.
