After the Arab uprisings, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia floated the idea of a loose union among Gulf Cooperation Council states in December 2011. And earlier in the year, Saudi Arabia deployed several thousand troops into Bahrain on the grounds of precluding Iranian influence on the domestic situation of a Gulf state. Attention to these events has primarily been focused on the sway that Saudi Arabia, as the preeminent power in the region, holds over the region. It is equally instructive to examine how non-leading states in the Gulf have advanced and preserved their interests, and have not passively accepted Saudi Arabian hegemony. Political science accounts frame responses to primacy of power within the framework of balancing and bandwagoning. However, when looking at how Gulf states respond to preponderant Saudi Arabian power, the balancing-bandwagoning framework is inadequate. Gulf states, in particular Qatar and the UAE, do not automatically balance against a Riyadh-led order, nor do they simply join forces with Saudi Arabia in hopes of benefitting from its umbrella of security. This fixation on balancing, and its counterpart, bandwagoning, appears to lie in the almost unquestioned assumption that these two strategies represent the two main, if not exclusive, approaches to state security in world politics. Instead, the response of Gulf states has been a departure from this conventional model. Qatar and the UAE have pursued a sophisticated slate of approaches to advancing and defending their interests that may have an impact on the nature and even duration of Saudi Arabia’s regional power preponderance. Geopolitically, Riyadh has become accustomed to leading not only the Gulf region, but arguably the wider Middle East for decades. In its efforts to engender a united front among GCC members towards Iran, Saudi Arabia has encountered significant resistance. The UAE and Qatar have frequently challenged Saudi Arabian attempts at asserting its vision of hierarchy through foreign policy leadership. Instead, the UAE and Qatar have carved out niches in diplomatic settings and pursued less overtly confrontational policies that contest the hierarchy in regional politics. relationship, carved out niches in diplomatic settings, and have contested hierarchy in regional politics.

Turkey’s role in the Iranian nuclear dossier is often portrayed as that of a ‘facilitator’ and ‘mediator’ in scholarly analyses. Due to its NATO membership and commitment to Western security cultures, Turkey was seen as a potential bridge-builder between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the ‘Western camp’ of negotiators. During prime minister Erdogan’s first legislature, however, Ankara’s and Washington’s foreign policy outlooks and strategic priorities started to diverge in the course of Turkey’s new regional engagement in what has been theorized as a ‘Middle-Easternization’ of Turkish foreign policy. It is Turkey’s location as a geostrategic hub in a politically instable region that informed Turkey’s ‘Zero problems with neighbors’ policy and foreign minister Davutoglu’s advocacy for a ‘Strategic Depth’ in Turkey’s foreign and regional policies. Ankara emphasizes its need to uphold good relations to its neighbors and Eurasian partners and publicly stresses its traditionally good bilateral relations with Teheran. This includes an unwillingness to go along with Western pressure on Iran, an insistence on the principle of non-interference, the Turkish repeated reiteration of Iran as a friend and of Iran’s right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Against the background of the 2010 Brazil-Turkey-Iran nuclear fuel swap deal, recent studies have brought the ‘axis-shift’ discussion about a Turkish (security) political re-orientation away from the West and more towards regional engagement back to the fore and have emphasized a distinctive Turkish diplomacy with Iran that does not necessarily converge with ‘Western’ diplomatic preferences. However, Turkish-Iranian relations are undergoing a deterioration in the wake of the Syrian civil war at the time of writing, with both sides supporting diametrically opposite causes and factions. Turkish-Iranian fundamentally differing conceptions of regional order will also impact upon Turkey’s leverage power to defuse the Iranian nuclear crisis. Few analyses on this nexus have been produced so far. Process-tracing Turkey’s foreign policy in the Iranian nuclear dossier in the timeframe 2002-2012, this paper will thus add a timely contribution to our understanding of a multifaceted and nuanced Turkish foreign policy toward Iran that can be a critical complement to (or surrogate for) ‘Western’ diplomatic initiatives. The research method encompasses discourse and content analysis of policy documents (primary sources, e.g. declassified documents and press releases), as well as policy briefs and the scholarly literature, supplemented by semi-structured elite interviews with experts and decision-makers.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel since the rise of former Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, to 2011 was one of cold peace (e.g., Gerges, 1995; Siman Tov, 2000; Miller, 2000; Abadi, 2006; Stein, 2007). To this end, the first part of the paper draws on the burgeoning literature in International Relations examining how and why peace between states emerges, stabilizes and consolidates (Kupchan, 2010; Kacowicz, 2000; Boulding, 1978; Deutsch, 1957). It uses five analytical variables—the impact of great powers, the propensity to revert back to war, foreign policy tools employed, regional factors, the role of intellectuals—to distinguish between three types of peace, which are subsequently used to examine Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel 1981-2011: cold peace, strategic peace, and stable peace Informed by this analytical framework, primary sources in English, Arabic and Hebrew, and interviews conducted by the author in Egypt and Israel in November 2012, the second part of the paper focuses on the empirical analysis. It identifies patters of change and continuity in Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel 1981-2011, which demonstrate that by 1991 Egypt departed from its cold peace foreign policy stance towards Israel. Subsequently, it is argued, the 1991-2004 period set in motion a number of changes, which lay the ground for Egypt adopting a strategic peace foreign policy stance towards Israel since the early 2000s. This stance entailed a significant degree of Egyptian-Israeli politico-military strategic cooperation in relation to the Palestinians, Iran, and the Global War on Terror; trust and routine exchange of information between Egyptian and Israeli politicians and civil servants; a significant rise in the economic activity between the two countries; greater involvement by the US than in previous periods; and backing by a small yet significant number of Egyptian intellectuals. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First it refutes the conventional wisdom that between 1981 and 2011 Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel was one of cold peace. Second, the paper introduces a new analytical category—strategic peace—to the literature examining how and why peace between states can be stabilized and consolidated. To date, the debate has focused primarily on the experience of rich and democratic countries. Attention to poor authoritarian states, such as Egypt under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, is scarce.

The 1983 Israel-Lebanon peace treaty has rightly been described by scholars as “mission impossible” and as a “perfect failure.” It came after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 in which Israel not only sought to wipe out Palestinian armed presence from Lebanon but also aspired to establish a pro-Israeli government in Beirut that would sign a peace treaty with Israel. Signed on May 17, 1983 the agreement was abrogated by the Lebanese government in April 1984 following Syrian pressure, and, in fact, never implemented. Recently declassified documents from Israel and the US shed new light on the content, context and dynamics of the talks among Israel, Lebanon and the United States. Using these documents, this paper reexamines the 1983 agreement with threefold objectives: it analyzes internal Israeli dynamics as they relate to Israeli policies in Lebanon; it studies Lebanese politics in the midst of the civil war; and it explores United States relationship with both Israel and Lebanon and it role as a broker in the Middle East. Furthermore, reading these newly declassified documents allows us to look at a “snapshot” of a significant moment for Lebanon, Israel, and Syria, in which Palestinians were losing their power in Lebanon, Hizbullah was doing its debut steps, Syrian and Iranian strategic alliance was formulating and Israel’s military and moral standing regionally and internationally were showing their first signs of erosion.