In organising the Manama Dialogue, the IISS was moved by the following considerations:
Firstly, the heads of state, and many different ministers of the six members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) meet regularly. (The members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.) However, GCC security consultations, quite understandably, do not involve non-member states. In particular, they do not involve the security establishments of Yemen, which borders a number of GCC states, nor of the two large countries to the east and north: Iran and Iraq.
Stable relations between these nine countries would form the basis of regional security, hence the formula that the IISS adopted, ‘six plus one plus two’, that inspired our invitations to the relevant regional national security establishments to attend the inaugural 2004 Dialogue.
Secondly, a number of countries from outside the Gulf have key security relationships with regional states, and also have diplomatic and economic roles that intimately affect the shape of regional stability.
In order to ensure that the regional perspective is understood by external powers and that their policies can be explained to the region, in the region, we extend invitations to Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. As the summit has evolved it has been important to involve two other regional countries whose security interests are intertwined with the Gulf: Egypt and Jordan.
