The IISS Regional Security Summit, or Gulf Dialogue, is an exercise in ‘paradiplomacy’.
The IISS has for many years brought together government ministers and officials, bilaterally and multilaterally, in circumstances that they could not easily organise for themselves. Since 2002, the IISS has successfully convened the so-called Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, bringing together the defence ministers, chiefs of staff, national security officials and intelligence professionals from the states of the ASEAN Regional Forum. The success of the Shangri-La Dialogue, and its institutionalisation as Asia’s premier forum for regional defence consultations, inspired us to work similarly in the Gulf region to develop an informal security mechanism. The first Gulf Dialogue was held in December 2004; proof that the experiment had worked was provided by the fact that more ministers attended in 2005 and by the interest shown in attending the second summit by countries who did not attend the first.
In organising the Gulf 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 Cooperation Council 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 establishment of Yemen, which borders a number of GCC states, or 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’. This inspired our invitations to the relevant regional national security establishments to attend this Dialogue.
Secondly, a number of countries from outside the region have key security relationships with these 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 was understood by outside powers and that the policies of outside powers could be explained to the region, in the region, we extended invitations to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, Germany, Japan, India, Australia and Singapore.
Thirdly, security is not the preserve of any single ministry in these countries: national security advisers, defence, interior and foreign ministers have a role, as do intelligence chiefs. To limit invitations to any one agency would not permit a rounded discussion of regional security challenges.
Hence our determination to organise this event as a summit meeting of the national security establishments of the participating states. While ministers and officials spoke in plenary and break-out sessions, the greatest value in the summit for the participating ministers and senior officials was the opportunity to meet privately in bilateral and multilateral formats.
The inaugural meeting in 2004 and the second summit in 2005, which is the subject of this report, proved that there was a need in the region for an informal mechanism for regional security consultation involving all the relevant actors.
The main themes in 2005 that dominated discussions were three: the security situation in Iraq in the run-up to the December elections; the uncertainty surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme at a time when diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis were waning; and the variety of measures that needed to be undertaken to tackle terrorism in the region.
In discussing these issues three other important challenges emerged, sometimes implicitly, sometimes more explicitly. Firstly, the potential geopolitical impact of the sectarian struggles in Iraq, especially between Sunni and Shi’ite, on both domestic arrangements elsewhere and regional stability as a whole. Secondly, the need to involve external powers other than the US, especially from Europe and Asia, in regional security activity beyond the rhetorical expression of interest in peace and stability. Thirdly, the difficulty in balancing internally generated, and externally supported regional peace and security when the local states were moving at different speeds in modernising their domestic economic and political arrangements; when the three larger states, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, had such fluid and unsettled relations between themselves; and when so much of the external military burden was taken up by the US, whose presence in the region rested on such a delicate structure of local acceptability.
All this underlined the need to grasp the seemingly ever-receding prize of an acceptable regional security architecture.
At the inaugural IISS Gulf Dialogue, the Rubik’s cube of regional arrangements began to be turned. Further slow movement took place in 2005. Although it will take time for all the colours to align themselves harmoniously, with the right countries beginning to involve each other in the effort, the prospect of a more coherent framework for regional security discussions in the Gulf has become real. Throughout 2006, the IISS will consult closely with the participating countries to ensure that the Gulf Dialogue plays a central role in this
process.
