Why Iran's Rivals Don't Want an “After Iran”
- Mojtaba Touiserkani
- 20 hours ago
- 5 min read
Arab and regional capitals are not trying to save Tehran. They are trying to prevent a vacuum that would leave them all weaker.
Most Arab states — from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) led by Saudi Arabia to Egypt — along with Turkey, spent the better part of five decades treating Iran as the Middle East's primary destabilizer: backing rivals across Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon in contests that were expensive, sometimes bloody, and never fully won. Yet in early 2026, those same capitals — not friends of Tehran, but among its most committed rivals — have acted as if Iran cannot simply be knocked out without consequences they would be forced to absorb.
When U.S.-Iran talks nearly collapsed before they even began on February 4 — after Washington balked at last-minute Iranian changes to venue, format, and agenda — leaders from at least nine regional and neighboring governments pressed the White House not to walk away. As the Muscat and Geneva rounds failed to produce a meaningful breakthrough and the crisis tightened, the same logic persisted: keep Washington at the table, keep Tehran engaged, keep the channel alive long enough to avoid a military handoff. Oman's mediation and Qatar’s public support for a negotiated outcome made the pattern concrete. Saudi Arabia's crown prince told Iran's president directly that Saudi airspace and territory would not be used for strikes; Abu Dhabi issued a parallel declaration. The conventional reading is that these states fear Iranian retaliation against energy infrastructure, desalination plants, ports, and commercial hubs — and that fear is real. But it is not the whole story.
This is a strategic calculation rooted in a deeper fear: Iran's elimination would not distribute power across the region. It would concentrate it — in the hands of Israel — leaving every other state to operate within someone else's freedom of action.
The Gap That Money Cannot Close
That fear begins with a military reality no amount of Persian Gulf wealth has altered. Israel pairs the region's most capable offensive airpower with layered missile defense and intelligence networks built for speed and distance — an asymmetry no coalition of neighbors can quickly replicate. And Israel has repeatedly demonstrated the willingness to use that capacity across an envelope that has widened since October 2023: from Gaza to Beirut, from Sanaa to Damascus, from Tehran to Doha. What looked exceptional in each episode has, in aggregate, normalized long-reach strikes as routine instruments of regional tempo-setting.
GCC capitals did not need a seminar to grasp where that trajectory leads. In September 2025, Israel struck Doha, targeting Hamas leadership in a state-designated compound — treating a city long assumed to be politically insulated as just another target set. The shock was amplified precisely because Qatar had been central to mediation on Gaza. Whether such strikes remain rare is almost beside the point: the boundary many assumed still held no longer looks reliable, and the U.N. Security Council's later condemnation, backed by the United States, underscored how politically consequential the breach had become.
If Iran is removed, who counterbalances this? Not a tidy coalition of anxious neighbors. Saudi Arabia poured years and vast resources into Yemen and still could not decisively defeat the Houthis — one pillar of Tehran's regional network. Turkey has reach but is hemmed in by geography, economic fragility, and domestic politics that repeatedly pull Ankara back toward nearer priorities. Egypt is distant from the Persian Gulf, under sustained economic strain, and fields a military heavily dependent on American aid — a state that recovered Sinai through peace with Israel, not force. Pakistan is nuclear-armed, but that deterrent was built for national survival — and in the geography of the Middle East, nuclear weapons cannot credibly target Israel without devastating the Muslim populations living next door. Advantage flows less to the nervous than to the ready.
Sovereignty by Permission
What follows from unchecked military dominance is not merely a security problem. It is a political one. When one actor can repeatedly set the terms of escalation and de-escalation, its influence bleeds into arms procurement, diplomatic alignments, and the domestic room neighboring governments have to maneuver. The structural risk is sovereignty that becomes conditional — less a right than a permission calibrated to someone else's operational calendar. For Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Jordan, that is a regime-level problem.
This logic reshapes relationships that were supposed to be partnerships. Without Iran as a counterweight, normalization arrangements can shift from mutual benefit toward dependency: smaller states lose leverage and become junior partners whose margin for dissent narrows when it matters most. A constrained Iran gives regional states room to hedge, bargain, and calibrate. An erased Iran collapses the field toward a harsher binary: alignment with the dominant power or strategic irrelevance.
And then there is Palestine — a file Washington routinely underprices because it is not a military variable. For Arab leaders, the Palestinian question is a domestic legitimacy test before it is anything else. More than seventy thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, a figure Israel's own military has acknowledged. In a more openly unipolar order, the issue is settled by force while the anger lands on Cairo, Amman, Rabat, and Manama. The “Axis of Resistance” was resented by these capitals, but its existence gave them cover: the ability to tell publics the issue was still contested. Without it, the accountability shifts to them.
The Alternative Is Not Liberation
Saudi Arabia has already tested this logic. After years of confrontation, Riyadh accepted a China-brokered restoration of ties with Tehran in 2023 — choosing managed tension over open-ended confrontation. Not because Iran had become benign, but because a managed relationship offered what military pressure could not: predictability. A constrained Iran within negotiated limits is a known problem. The configuration that follows Iran's collapse — one actor setting the tempo, everyone else adjusting — is not.
Beyond the balance-of-power question, state collapse carries immediate costs. Iran has nearly ninety million people and no organized opposition that clearly has the structure or legitimacy to manage a post-regime transition. Breakdown exports itself: migration pressure on a scale the region has seen before in Syria, weapons leakage, and the spread of armed groups across borders no functioning state remains to police. The region does not need another case of break the state first, treat the aftershocks as secondary.
None of this absolves Iran. Every capital in the region wants Tehran constrained — on enrichment, missiles, and armed networks. The argument is narrower: constraint is not the same as collapse, and those who confuse collapse with strategy have not studied the region's recent history. The Muscat and Geneva rounds have produced no meaningful breakthrough so far, but the channel survived because regional capitals treated it as a guardrail — not for Tehran, but for themselves. The Middle East can live with a constrained Islamic Republic. What it cannot afford is a “day after” in which one actor's military calendar becomes everyone else's political ceiling. The governments that spent decades building coalitions against Iran are now building something harder to name: a coalition to ensure that the day after Iran is not worse than Iran itself.
This article written by Mojtaba Touiserkani is an independent researcher and international relations scholar (Ph.D., University of Tehran) focusing on Middle East security and regional order.
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