On Monday, while Donald Trump was publicly pondering whether to “make a deal” with Iran or “finish them off,” something happened in Tehran that should have set off alarms in every office of the State Department, assuming anyone is still left there to hear them.
Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the brother of the Crown Prince, flew to Tehran. With him came Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkey’s intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin. They sat down with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and senior security official Rezaei, who hosted the talks, for about two hours. The agenda: the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Hormuz, the American blockade of Iran’s ports and a regional non-aggression framework.
Read that list again. Those are the four biggest security problems in the Persian Gulf. The countries that actually live there just met to discuss them. The United States, which has two carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group and a blockade in the neighborhood, was not in the room. Nobody seems to have missed it.
The three visitors are the signatories of the Makkah Agreement, the mutual-defense treaty that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed on August 7. Article 2 says an attack on one is an attack on all. It was sold, at least in Washington’s imagination, as a Sunni shield for the Kingdom against Iran and its friends in Yemen.
Eleven weeks later, the entire shield showed up in Tehran to talk about cooperation. Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan says Tehran will “study” the agreement, “and if it is good, we will support it.” The treaty conveniently includes an accession clause allowing new members to join by consensus. My sources tell me the three formally invited Iran to join once the U.S.-Israeli war ends, and that Tehran accepted on that basis. No official readout confirms that yet. But the official readouts did agree to keep talking “among the four,” and Iran has a phrase for what it wants: “endogenous security.” Translation: security for the Gulf, by the Gulf, without the 5th Fleet.
According to my sources, Field Marshal Munir told Prince Khalid that Riyadh needed to reach an accommodation with Ansar Allah, and reportedlyPrince Khalid arrived in Tehran with a $1 billion down payment to help buy one. An anonymous report in the Israeli paper Israel Hayom says the same, including that the money flew in on the prince’s plane. Riyadh hasn’t confirmed it, and officially insists on the return of seized territory first. I personally doubt this story because it is a piddling amount that the Houthis will view as a meaningless gesture. But consider the picture if it is true: the Saudis would be paying Iran to get the Houthis to stop shooting at them. Washington spent a decade and billions of dollars in arms sales so that Saudi Arabia would not need Tehran’s help. That worked out well.
Araghchi had offered on October 11 to broker Saudi-Houthi talks. Two weeks later the Saudi defense minister was in his capital. Iran has gained more leverage in a month of diplomacy than in a year of American “maximum pressure.”
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