Trump’s Persian Gulf Summit must look beyond the Iran war - opinion

That is the correct question, but it must be asked in its largest form. A postwar strategy cannot be limited to determining when the shooting stops, how the Strait of Hormuz is secured, or what diplomatic formula allows governments to declare the immediate crisis over.

The more consequential question is whether the political structure that has generated recurring confrontation for nearly half a century will remain intact and capable of rebuilding what the war has destroyed. If Washington plans meticulously for the end of the war while refusing to contemplate political change inside Iran, it risks producing not a postwar strategy but another interval between crises.

The Persian Gulf states have an especially powerful reason to think beyond the immediate battlefield. Over the past two decades, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their neighbors have invested enormous political and financial capital in transforming the region into a center of commerce, finance, tourism, aviation, technology, and global investment.

Regional prosperity and regional security are therefore no longer separate questions. If the political machinery that repeatedly produces instability survives each confrontation and is permitted to rebuild, billions of dollars in investment will remain hostage to the next crisis.

This is why the Islamic Republic itself must become part of any serious discussion about the day after. Since 1979, Tehran’s use of terrorist proxy warfare and revolutionary militancy has not been an occasional departure from otherwise conventional statecraft; it has been embedded in the political identity and security doctrine of the system.

Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and armed terrorist Shi’ite networks across the region emerged in different circumstances and possess different local agendas, but Tehran repeatedly found in such movements a means of projecting power beyond Iran’s borders while avoiding the full costs of conventional confrontation.

Sanctions can weaken this architecture, military action can destroy portions of it, and diplomacy can temporarily restrain it. None of those instruments, by itself, answers the deeper question of what happens if the political order that constructed this architecture survives and begins rebuilding it.

Washington should therefore be willing to contemplate a possibility it has often treated with excessive caution: a political transition in Iran. That does not mean the US should choose Iran’s next ruler, manufacture an opposition, or dictate whether a future Iran becomes a republic or constitutional monarchy. Those decisions belong exclusively to the Iranian people.

But respecting Iranian sovereignty is not the same as refusing to prepare for political change.

The Islamic Republic faces not only military and economic pressure but a profound crisis of legitimacy accumulated over decades of repression, corruption, ideological rule, and repeated confrontations with its own society. No responsible analyst can predict when such a system will fall, and authoritarian governments often survive longer than their opponents expect.

Yet political orders can also erode gradually before reaching a point at which apparently permanent institutions lose authority with remarkable speed. The Islamic Republic may appear solid from the outside while melting like snow from within.

The strategic consequence is straightforward: preparation for transition must begin before transition becomes an emergency.

The US and its regional partners should develop a clearer understanding of the Iranian political landscape, distinguish credible democratic and national forces from ideological, sectarian, and separatist movements, and recognize that preserving Iran’s territorial integrity would be essential to preventing regime collapse from becoming state collapse.

Dialogue before a crisis is not the same thing as imposing a political outcome after one.

Iran’s neighbors would also have an important responsibility in such a transition. Their territories should never become platforms from which armed factions pursue the fragmentation of Iran or foreign powers construct competing proxy forces.

Instead, they could provide a political and diplomatic space in which legitimate Iranian transitional actors can communicate and prepare for continuity of government if authority in Tehran begins to fracture.

A credible transitional authority would need to reassure Iranians and neighboring states simultaneously: Iran would remain one nation within its existing territorial boundaries; state institutions would be preserved wherever possible; revenge would not become a substitute for justice, and the ultimate political order would be determined through a democratic national process. The objective should be regime transition without the destruction of the Iranian state.

This is where Saudi Arabia and Israel could become the two indispensable regional pillars of a broader architecture.

Their histories, political systems, and strategic priorities are different, but both have confronted threats arising from Tehran’s regional network, and both have an interest in a Middle East in which sovereign governments rather than revolutionary militias determine the rules of regional security.

Recent discussions among American, Israeli, and Arab military leaders already illustrate the degree to which previously separate security concerns are converging. Deeper Saudi-Israeli cooperation, supported by the US and eventually anchored in broader normalization through the Abraham Accords, could extend beyond defense against missiles and drones.

It could become part of a regional understanding that economic integration, maritime security, counterterrorism, and resistance to proxy warfare are components of the same strategic project.

Such an architecture would also protect the extraordinary economic transformation underway in the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia cannot insulate its long-term development from instability in Yemen, threats to shipping, and recurring confrontation with Tehran.

Israel cannot achieve lasting regional integration while large parts of the Middle East remain vulnerable to armed organizations whose political legitimacy depends upon permanent conflict. And the US cannot indefinitely move from one Middle Eastern emergency to another while treating each manifestation of instability as an isolated event.

A Saudi-Israeli understanding would not eliminate their disagreements, nor should it be presented as an alliance against the Iranian people. Its larger purpose would be to help construct a regional order capable of surviving the disappearance of the revolutionary system that has dominated Iranian foreign policy since 1979.

The distinction between Iran and the Islamic Republic is therefore essential.

Iran is an ancient nation whose history does not begin with Ayatollah Khomeini nor belong to the political system created by his revolution. A postwar strategy built merely around containing the Islamic Republic assumes that the regime will remain the permanent organizing fact of Iranian politics.

Washington made a comparable intellectual mistake in 1979 by failing to imagine how rapidly an apparently durable political order could disappear and how profoundly its replacement could transform the region. It should not make the inverse mistake today by assuming that the revolutionary order born in 1979 must endure indefinitely.

Trump’s meeting with Persian Gulf leaders should therefore address two horizons simultaneously: how to end the present war, and how to prevent its political causes from reproducing the next one.

The first requires diplomacy, deterrence, and regional security cooperation. The second requires strategic imagination.

If political transition begins inside Iran, Washington, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and other Persian Gulf capitals should already understand the actors, principles, and institutions capable of preserving Iran as a unified state while allowing its people to determine their political future.

The Islamic Republic may survive the present war. It may survive the economic pressure that follows it. But a serious strategy cannot be built upon the assumption that it will survive forever. Regimes sometimes collapse dramatically. At other times, they lose authority almost imperceptibly until the structure that appeared immovable is suddenly no longer there.

If that process has begun in Iran, the task of American and regional statecraft is not to manufacture the outcome, but to ensure that the disappearance of one political order does not produce another generation of war.