A new regional order for the Strait of Hormuz | GCC
The ongoing war of choice launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has shattered the geopolitical status quo in our region. As Washington finds itself entangled in another Middle Eastern quagmire, reports suggest that US President Donald Trump’s administration is increasingly in need of a political off-ramp.
The Hormuz littoral states possess a rare, collective opportunity to provide the American president with an exit strategy. By taking the initiative to establish a new, locally managed security architecture for the Strait of Hormuz, our nations can further elevate their strategic significance in regional geopolitics and the global economy. The alternative to this win-win scenario is prolonged conflict that would ensure that a new regional order is eventually imposed unilaterally by Tehran.
Seeking to balance their positions, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states appear trapped between two bad options. Confronting Trump, especially in the middle of a war, would undoubtedly carry significant costs and unpredictable reactions from an increasingly unpredictable leader.
At the same time, their inability to avoid being seen by Iran as at least passive participants in the aggression against the country makes them legitimate targets under its increasingly assertive military doctrine, which seeks to prevent the repetition of such wars for the foreseeable future.
Yet, this reality also demonstrates the limits of the United States’ security patronage. These limits—especially during what appears to be a historically unconditional alliance with Israel in which Israeli interests increasingly trump American interests in the region—suggest that the status quo is unsustainable.
A new order will inevitably replace the existing one, as conditions for all regional states will further deteriorate if the conflict continues to escalate. There is no longer any scenario in which Iran remains a target while the GCC carries on as usual, as was the case during the 12-day war in June 2025.
Iran’s ability to choke the flow of maritime traffic with $20,000 drones that can be produced underground and launched from anywhere in the country suggests that it possesses immense leverage. Iranian officials have clearly stated that it will now be utilised to forge a new order for Hormuz.
Relations between Iran and the GCC states have seen ups and downs since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The relationship was defined by hostility for a long time until it underwent a radical, positive transformation in the past few years.
Iranian attacks against the military and economic infrastructure in the GCC states, along with the recent expulsion of Iranian diplomats from some GCC capitals, undoubtedly constitute a severe setback and a regression toward the past.
However, this crisis has also demonstrated that security is a collective good; the current war proves how one state’s insecurity renders all states in the region insecure. A security architecture built at the expense of a neighbour is no longer viable. Iran has already begun dismantling the former order, but the new order does not need to be exclusively Iranian in its design.
For a path forward, we can look to Europe’s successful historical experiences in achieving a regional order. From the Congress of Vienna, which stabilised Europe following Napoleon’s wars of aggression, to the gradual economic, political, and security integration that followed World War II, these milestones should not serve as templates, but as sources of inspiration for our region.
The Strait of Hormuz suffers from a legal anomaly, as it remains one of the few critical maritime arteries of its kind lacking a dedicated international regulatory treaty. Unlike Turkiye, whose sovereign control and regional stability are in part anchored in the Montreux Convention regulating the Bosporus and Dardanelles, Hormuz operates without a codified maritime framework, which has made it uniquely vulnerable to superpower impositions throughout history. The current war can thus, to some extent, be understood as a product of this unregulated environment.
Convening a “Congress for Hormuz” could help regional states collectively design a security architecture, fill this legal vacuum, and ensure the stability of not only our own region but the global economy as well.
The ultimate goal of such a platform should be the codification of a treaty that formalises the status of the strait and provides the legal certainty currently absent, while also elevating the strategic weight of regional states in the global economy by ensuring that the management of Hormuz remains a local prerogative.
In the short term, this framework can serve to reopen the strait, providing Trump with a way out of the quagmire by claiming that his regional allies have helped reopen it. In the long term, this framework would protect GCC countries from a patron willing to sacrifice international law and regional stability for the benefit of its principal ally, Israel, an ally that none of us will ever be able to replace or compete with.
The future of Hormuz belongs in the hands of its inhabitants, not the superpowers who have exploited it and are currently destabilising it to pursue their own, or Israel’s, interests.
While a multilateral platform and a formal treaty represent the ideal path towards long-term stability, it is imperative to recognise that the current existential war launched against Iran—a conflict facilitated by the regional status quo—has made the emergence of a new order a non-negotiable necessity for Tehran.
Should the GCC states choose to prioritise the requests of their Western allies over regional integration—which is likely to also prolong the conflict, inflicting costs on all sides—Iran will undoubtedly proceed to forge this new order unilaterally.
In such a scenario, the resulting framework would also be an imposed order, born of strategic necessity and survival rather than consensus. Under these conditions, the common ground for shared peace, regional stability, and collective prosperity would be significantly diminished. This would be a lost opportunity.
The GCC states must now decide whether they wish to be the architects of this new regional era, or passive observers.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
