Charles “Chas” Freeman is a retired U.S. diplomat, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 until 1992, after having earlier served as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1986. In 1997, Freeman became president of the Middle East Policy Council. His other great center of interest is China. He served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 1981–84, after having served as director of Chinese affairs at the State Department, less than a decade after having been the principal interpreter during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. From 1993 to 1994, Freeman was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Diwan interviewed him in late August to discuss developments in the Gulf region, particularly after the recent signing of the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan.

Michael Young: Some have described the recent Mecca Joint Defense Agreement as a cornerstone of a new regional security architecture. Do you agree, and more generally what do you think the agreement seeks to achieve?

Charles Freeman: Yes, but it is not one that fits familiar models of alliance. Unlike NATO, to which it is often mistakenly analogized, it is a cooperative rather than a collective security pact. It has no unified military command, no patron or enemy external to the region, and no unifying ideology or commonality of political systems. It is an entente. It will evolve, but it is unlikely to embrace the unconditional mutual defense commitments that define alliances.

The goal of the Mecca Defense Agreement is not collective defense but the promotion of strategic autonomy. Its current and future members aim to balance powers that aspire to regional hegemony. The pact marks an effort by the three principal Muslim security partners of the United States in the region to reduce politico-military reliance on Washington, which has proven unable to restrain Israel or protect them from Iran. It provides a basis for diversifying defense relationships with other great powers. It envisages developing indigenous military industries to reduce unreliable dependence on imports from the United States and other Western suppliers. In addition to bolstering industrial self-reliance, this agreement, plus the diversification of imports, should, its members believe, reduce vulnerability to politically motivated supply chain interruptions by partners with interests they do not share.

Much commentary purports to interpret this tripartite entente in terms of the U.S. rivalry with China and Russia. As American influence recedes, both countries will certainly see their levels of engagement with the region rise. But so will India, Indonesia, Japan, and other rising Asian and other great powers. The world is no longer regulated by bipolar dyadic relationships. It is becoming multi-nodal, and variably networked. In the emerging world order, nations once constrained by the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union have increased their agency, freedom of maneuver, and ability to form coalitions to advance or defend their interests as they see them.

MY: You’ve been highly critical of the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in your public remarks. Do you believe the Trump administration has any way out of what appears to be a humiliating defeat in this war? Can stronger economic sanctions make a difference?

CF: Sadly, no. The joint Israeli-U.S. attacks on Iran have produced an unprecedented strategic disaster for both Israel and the United States that demands an admission of defeat, retreat, and a fundamental rethinking of both countries’ policies. The war has left Israel essentially defenseless against a renewed onslaught by Iranian missiles. Israeli aggression against Iran, genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, territorial expansion in Syria, and devastation of southern Lebanon have made Israel a global pariah. Israel’s role in encouraging the United States to join it in a war on Iran and to back its other acts of aggression have discredited it with growing majorities in the United States, without whose continuing support it cannot survive. By attempting to preempt what it portrayed as an existential challenge from Iran, Israel has placed itself in actual existential jeopardy.

The war has devalued the military prowess of the U.S. armed forces. It has revealed that they are incapable of mounting an effective defense against a resourceful middle-ranking power such as Iran. The U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is now untenable. The war led the United States to deplete its offensive and defensive weapons stockpiles to levels that prevent it from supplying Ukraine with essential defenses or responding effectively to contingencies in Pacific Asia. It will take years to restore the capabilities the United States has lost.

Less urgently but more importantly, the Iran war has destroyed the reputation of the United States for steadfast statecraft and leadership, discredited American diplomacy, and led to global hedging against perceived U.S. unreliability. The United States has lost the semiautomatic followership of allies and client states. When it now calls for others to join it in its economic warfare against Iran, few, if any, respond.

Beyond this, Iran is now in effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, with a strategic hammerlock on one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. Repeated efforts to bludgeon Tehran into relinquishing this control have failed. Israel continues to call for the continuation of the U.S. war with Iran, which it has now temporarily abandoned in favor of consolidating its rule in Palestine and adjacent areas. Nevertheless, the United States appears reluctantly to have accepted that the further bombing of Iran will not dislodge it from the strait. Washington has therefore launched an economic war of attrition against Iran that depends on the institution of punitive measures against countries, including U.S. allies, that trade with Iran. This has the potential to upend American global financial hegemony, but no credible prospect of succeeding.

Finally, the war has given Iran the most powerful arguments imaginable to develop a nuclear deterrent. The joint Israeli-American massacre of the Iranian leadership eliminated most of those opposed on theological grounds to weapons of mass destruction. Israel has long feared that Iran would follow it in the clandestine development of nuclear weapons. The war has greatly increased the probability that it will now do so. The constraint to that is no longer Tehran’s acceptance of international safeguards, but its judgment that, if it were to emulate Israel by going nuclear, this would stimulate others in West Asia, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Türkiye to do the same, reducing rather than enhancing its national security.

MY: One consequence of the war is that the U.S. base network in the Gulf states appears to have been devastated by Iran. Do you feel the Americans will be able to reconstitute it, or has the thinking in the Gulf states turned decisively against such an option?

CF: The bases in the Persian Gulf region are not owned by the United States, though they are operated by the U.S. armed forces. The Gulf Arab monarchies have lent them to America. These bases have now been destroyed and the U.S. has been forced to retreat to Jordan and Israel.

The Gulf Arabs now understand that the United States, while justifying its bases on their territory as a means of defending them, has in fact seen them primarily as platforms from which to project power against Iran. The Trump administration, acting on behalf of Israel and without consulting the Gulf Arabs, implicated them in a war with Iran they did not want and from which they have suffered severe physical and economic damage. They are highly unlikely to facilitate a postwar American military presence on their soil. There is circumstantial evidence that they are quietly discussing with Iran how to comply with its demand that they dissociate themselves from U.S. hostility toward Iran and expel the U.S. forces that menace it. 

MY: Israel has emerged as major regional destabilizer. Can regional states contain Israel, and would U.S. disengagement from the region make such containment easier?

CF: The Gulf Arabs are risk-averse realists. Most but not all governments in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have appeased domestic rage with Israeli cruelties directed against their fellow Arabs by posturing against these, but none has taken specific actions to counter Israel. This is due, in part, to their recognition of the Israel lobby’s enforcement of the U.S. commitment to Israel. They fear that the United States would punish them were they to act. Unable to contain Israel by themselves, the Gulf Arabs, like Egypt and Jordan under the Camp David Accords, have looked to the United States to constrain the Israelis. They now realize that Washington is incapable of mustering the political will to do so. They are looking at alternatives to reliance on the United States. Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of the Mecca Defense Agreement with Pakistan and Türkiye is a case in point. It is open to expansion and will likely achieve it.

MY: How would you assess Iran’s role in the emerging regional order? The Iranians, on the one hand, seek to preserve their regional power, but at the same time share an interest with other states, such as Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, in containing Israel. How will Iran square the circle of collaborating with states that also view the Iranians as regional destabilizers—the Turks in Syria and possibly Lebanon, and the Saudis in Yemen, elsewhere in the Gulf, and Lebanon and Syria?

CF: We will only learn the answer to this excellent question after the end of U.S. hostilities with Iran. The Gulf Arabs have already suffered greatly from the war and are fearful that it could yet resume as a result of American missteps. They are understandably angry and vengeful toward Iran. On the other hand, they also realize that they must find a modus vivendi with the Islamic Republic. One GCC member, Oman has become a reluctant collaborator with Iran in the management of ship transit through the Strait of Hormuz. The other members will need to make their peace with that and with Iran itself. 

The tripartite entente established by the Mecca Defense Agreement has the potential to expand. Depending on how things shake out, it could develop anything from a consultative relationship with Iran to inclusion for it. At the moment, Israel’s relentless pursuit of territorial expansion and the subjugation of its West Asian neighbors has overshadowed concerns about Iranian ambitions for regional hegemony. Iran has welcomed the Mecca agreement. There are rumors that Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military leader, has initiated a dialogue with Tehran about how it might relate to the Mecca agreement. For now, this remains an open question.