For the families and workers living along the Gulf’s shipping lanes and around its oil terminals, recent months have brought a reality few had prepared for: restricted passage through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted oil and gas supplies, and damage to energy facilities and infrastructure across Gulf states. It is this accumulation of daily disruption, rather than any single event, that has pushed Gulf governments into an unusually intense round of diplomacy with Iran, as fears grow of renewed US strikes on Tehran and of deepening hostilities between Iran-aligned Houthi fighters in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The urgency was visible this week in Tehran. Diplomats from Qatar met with high-ranking Iranian officials alongside representatives of the three nations that signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement in August: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye. The goal, according to those involved, was to prevent a return to all-out war. The stakes were underscored by the presence of Saudi Minister of Defence Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, who arrived just days after Houthi fighters struck Saudi airports, ports and oil facilities.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/28/are-gcc-countries-looking-for-a-regional-security-pact-with-iran.
It was the first high-level contact between Iran and the Mecca pact nations since the US-Israel war on Iran began on February 28. The talks, however, stopped short of producing an agreement. According to Reuters, Qatari mediators presented Iran with a draft deal on Sunday, with Tehran expected to respond by the end of the week. By Wednesday, the agency quoted Iranian officials saying Qatar’s ideas were unacceptable and that Tehran would show no flexibility on the nuclear issue.
Khaled Batarfi, a Saudi political analyst and academic, read the Saudi visit to Tehran as a signal that the kingdom was willing to give Iran a “last warning” and an opening to “submit to the region’s concerns”, but that Iran has so far refused. “The gap is [wide] and what makes it worse is that there is no trust,” he told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, the question of what might replace the current fragile arrangements surfaced elsewhere on the same day. During a diplomatic visit to the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi called for a regional security framework between the Gulf countries and Iran, including a “non-aggression pact”, under which the United States would no longer be the primary provider of security.
Whether such a framework is realistic is another matter. Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, told Al Jazeera it is “really hard to see a regional security framework coming out in the coming months or even years”. What is emerging instead, she said, are “small groups, flexible groups of countries that are taking the lead in trying to reach either bilateral or multilateral solutions”. A regional framework, in her view, would require a shared vision for the region, and that vision “is not necessarily shared… among the GCC countries themselves”.
The wider context remains volatile. On Friday, US President Donald Trump repeated warnings that Washington may carry out another military operation against Iran, as rising fuel prices weigh on US midterm elections scheduled for November 3. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the country would respond more forcefully to any renewed US military action, deepening fears of a wider escalation.
Hamidreza Azizi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, noted that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye share a concern that prolonged confrontation between Iran and the US could further destabilise the region. The main obstacle, he told Al Jazeera, is “the fundamental disagreement between Tehran and Washington over the sequence of commitments”. Washington wants Iranian concessions, particularly on the nuclear issue, while Tehran insists its conditions for ending the war must be met first. “Regional mediation could help bridge this gap, possibly through an interim arrangement,” he said, but the willingness of regional actors to facilitate an agreement does not mean the two principal parties are prepared to make the necessary compromises.
On the question of a new security order, Azizi argued that regional countries do not share a common understanding of what it should look like, or what role the US, so far the GCC’s main security partner, would play. Iran has long advocated for a security architecture that would reduce or eliminate the US military presence in the region. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states remain deeply integrated into the US security system, and there is little indication they intend to abandon it.
“The recent war has certainly raised questions about the reliability of American security guarantees,” Azizi said, “but this has encouraged these countries to diversify their security partnerships rather than fundamentally redefine their strategic alignments.” For now, that means the people most exposed to the conflict, from Gulf port workers to communities near targeted facilities, continue to live with the consequences of diplomacy that has not yet hardened into anything lasting.