The reactions of the Gulf states must, therefore, be accounted for in American thinking about the future security of the region. And while the United States and its partners have also begun to undertake containment efforts outside of the Arabian Peninsula, for example against Hamas and Hezbollah in the Levant, the core of Iran's military, intelligence, and sub-conventional power projection capabilities remain rooted in the Gulf. Any attempt to significantly limit Iranian influence must be directed at the region in which it maintains its most potent strengths and highly valued assets.
Second, the United States already has a large network of military bases and pre-positioned military equipment in the Gulf, as well as strong pre-existing relationships with Gulf countries, which form the core of current (and future) efforts to contain Iran. This massive extant military infrastructure provides another set of reasons that Gulf states will play an essential role in efforts to contain Iran. Indeed, the United States already makes use of critical base and port facilities for the Army, Navy, and Air Force in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and has strong military and intelligence relationships with Saudi Arabia. (10) Beyond that, both Bahrain and the UAE have troops fighting with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. (11) In addition, as noted above, U.S. officials have suggested that the GCC organization itself may supply an embryonic skeleton for any future regional security structure that could be used to contain the threat posed by a potentially nuclear Iran. (12) If, therefore, the United States were to consider constructing a security architecture in the Middle East in order to contain an evolving Iranian threat, the Gulf Cooperation Council would be a logical place to start, since working through an existing multilateral organization rather than relying on new institutions could be more efficient and effective. Some policy analysts, and indeed some government officials, have already gone as far as to suggest that the GCC could serve as the NATO of the Persian Gulf, (13) making an evaluation of the viability of such a possibility important.
Despite the opposition that the American political leadership has voiced to a policy of containment, there is an active debate within the academic and policy commentary communities regarding whether the United States and its allies can contain Iran. (14) But in all of the discussion of these issues, there has been little substantive analysis of what form that containment would take and whether the construction of such a containment regime including the Gulf States is feasible. Two analysts have suggested the formation of a "regional alliance network that would marshal Arab states into a more cohesive grouping," and one has suggested formalizing the GCC as a true military alliance. Others, however, have asserted that credible new alliance commitments in the Gulf are likely to be very difficult to achieve. (15) But the fact that American political leaders have taken high-level discussions of containment off the table has had the consequence of precluding "thinking very hard about how either Iran or its neighbors would behave" if and when a more robust effort in the Gulf becomes necessary. (16)
It is clear that there is an ever-deepening American security interest in the Gulf, and ever-greater interest in whether the United States will be able to stabilize the region. This article seeks to remedy some of the gaps in strategic thinking about the future security architecture of the Gulf by considering the prospects for effective cooperation among the Gulf states to contain Iran. We examine the scenarios in which some form of containment regime against Iran might be employed. We argue that in the continued U.S. standoff with Iran, containment need not denote a "default solution" that is turned to after other attempts to prevent Iran's acquisition of a nuclear capability have failed. (17) Indeed, containment is already under way, and there are several possible futures in which containment will almost certainly be employed even if no decision to "live with" a nuclear Iran has been made.