Iran Has Changed the Question by Vijay Prashad

For more than three decades, the United States has treated Middle Eastern diplomacy as an exercise in writing the terms for others. Iran’s emerging regional strategy is challenging that privilege. The immediate evidence is emerging in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran and Oman are negotiating an arrangement under which Tehran could oversee vessels entering the Gulf while Muscat manages outbound traffic. The proposal remains unsettled, but it represents something larger than a maritime agreement: Iran is attempting to move the diplomatic agenda away from the narrow question of its nuclear compliance and towards the wider architecture of Gulf security.

Since the end of the Cold War, US diplomacy in the Middle East has often begun with a conclusion: Washington defines the crisis, identifies the acceptable parties, and sets the boundaries of the eventual settlement. Negotiation then becomes less a discussion over the political order than a process through which weaker states are asked to accept it. The agreements produced under this system were not literally surrender documents. Yet they frequently carried the political logic of surrender: one side retained the power to decide what counted as compliance, while the other was required to prove its fitness for economic relief, political recognition or limited self-rule.

Iraq and Palestine

Iraq was the starkest example. After the 1991 Gulf War, comprehensive sanctions devastated an already battered society. The United Nations’ Oil-for-Food Programme, established by Security Council Resolution 986 in 1995, permitted Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil while the proceeds passed through a UN-controlled escrow system to pay for humanitarian goods. It was presented as relief, but its deeper message was unmistakable: Iraq could access its own principal resource only within a structure designed and supervised from outside. Sovereignty had become conditional and punishment – including punctual bombardment by the United States – became commonplace.

The Oslo process operated differently, but it reflected a similar imbalance. The 1993 Declaration of Principles was negotiated directly by Israelis and Palestinians through a Norwegian channel and signed in Washington. It brought mutual recognition and created Palestinian interim institutions, but the arrangement postponed the decisive questions (statehood, borders, Jerusalem, refugees and settlements) while leaving the occupying party in control of territory and facts on the ground. Washington sponsored a ‘peace process’ without correcting the asymmetry that made a just peace so elusive. Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank became structurally permanent.

In both cases, the United States and the institutions it dominated, exercised a powerful privilege: they determined the question everyone else was required to answer.

Iran

With Iran, that question has for more than two decades been the nuclear weapons file. Concern did not begin in 2005 (the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chronology traces intensive engagement to 2002 and 2003) but the confrontation hardened after 2005, as Iran resumed nuclear energy related uranium-conversion activity and the dispute moved toward the UN Security Council. Iran’s leadership said that it was uninterested in nuclear weapons but was ignored.

From then on, almost every discussion of Iran was organised around enrichment levels, centrifuges, inspections, breakout time, and sanctions relief. The framing of Iran’s nuclear energy programme as a nuclear proliferation issue was politically convenient for Washington. It reduced a broad struggle over Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, US military bases, sanctions, and maritime control to a test of Iranian compliance. The United States could maintain an enormous military footprint across the Gulf while presenting Iran’s capabilities as the singular source of instability.

Iran is now attempting to invert that debate. Through diplomacy involving Oman, Pakistan, and other regional states, Tehran’s position is that the nuclear issue cannot be separated from the architecture of regional security. The question is no longer simply what limits Iran will accept, but it is also what limits should apply to the military presence and coercive power of the United States and its allies.

This is why the issue of US bases in the Gulf matters. 

For Washington, those installations are infrastructure that protects allies, energy supplies, and navigation. From Tehran’s perspective, they are the forward positions of a power capable of attacking Iran while remaining insulated from retaliation at home. Iran’s argument is that no durable settlement can demand permanent restraint from Tehran while treating the military posture of the United States in West Asia as beyond negotiation.

The emerging discussion over the Strait of Hormuz makes this reversal concrete. Iran and Oman have reported progress on a new arrangement for maritime traffic through the waterway. According to accounts of the proposal, Iran would oversee inbound traffic to the Gulf and Oman the outbound lane, with some form of payment for security or environmental services still under dispute. The plan is not final, and Washington opposes any arrangement that compromises free passage or gives Tehran control over its own territorial waters. Even so, the political significance of this arrangement that is being discussed is considerable.

For decades, the United States has long cast itself as the ultimate guarantor of Gulf navigation. The Iran-Oman talks suggest an alternative principle: the states that border a strategic waterway can construct its operating order themselves. That possibility also exposes a contradiction in sanctions policy. If commercial vessels must enter the Gulf through a lane administered by Iran, shipowners, insurers, and banks will need to know whether required Iranian services, data systems or fees trigger US restrictions. Merely sailing through Iranian territorial waters would not automatically violate every US sanction.

The legal problem would arise not from passage alone, but from payments to Iranian entities, the use of sanctioned service providers, insurance exposure, and the processing of vessel data through an Iranian-administered mechanism. 

But a functioning Iranian-administered system could force Washington to issue licenses, tolerate narrowly defined transactions or risk obstructing the commerce it says it is protecting. Sanctions would no longer be an instrument applied in a political vacuum; they would collide with the practical requirements of maritime passage. What this means for the broader US sanctions policy will become clearer only afterwards for insurers and shipping companies.

The wider regional picture reinforces Iran’s argument. 

The 2023 reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by China after earlier talks hosted by Iraq and Oman, restored diplomatic relations between the Gulf’s two main rivals. It did not settle their competition or erase their conflicts. But it demonstrated that de-escalation could be produced by regional bargaining and non-Western mediation (in this case, substantially, by China) rather than a US bombing campaign.

Pakistan’s mediation and the growing security dialogue among Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan point in the same direction, although they should not be mistaken for an Iranian-led bloc. These states have their own interests and, at times, deep suspicions of Tehran. Their significance lies elsewhere: regional governments are experimenting with overlapping arrangements in which Washington is no longer the sole convenor, guarantor, or author. 

US military action has repeatedly promised deterrence while producing escalation, displacement, and new grievances. Bombardment can destroy facilities and commanders, but it cannot create a legitimate regional order. Nor can a system be stable when one state (Israel) has undeclared nuclear weapons, continues to occupy a people and conduct a genocide against them (the Palestinians), and feels emboldened to attack its neighbours (Lebanon, Iran, Syria) whenever it wishes.

The real questions

The real challenge Iran has placed before Washington is therefore conceptual. Who defines the agenda? Who decides which weapons, bases, and alliances are destabilizing? Who controls the waterways through which the region’s wealth passes? And must every settlement be guaranteed from outside, or can regional powers (with all their rivalries) build enforceable arrangements among themselves?

The next Middle Eastern settlement will not be durable if it resembles a surrender document. It will have to address nuclear restraint, foreign military deployments, maritime access, sanctions, missiles, and mutual non-aggression as parts of one security problem. Iran’s achievement is not that it has solved that problem. It is that, after decades of being forced to answer Washington’s question, it has compelled the region to consider a different one. The issue is no longer only what Iran must surrender. It is what every power (including the United States) must be prepared to negotiate.

-Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).

Iran Has Changed the Question

 Vijay Prashad