When US and Iranian negotiators meet in Oman on Saturday they will be just the latest to turn to crisis mediation in the Gulf Arab states, whose wealthy rulers are increasingly seeking out the role.
Oman is a long-established venue for Iranian talks, while promoting peace is a pillar of Qatar’s foreign policy and even enshrined in its constitution.
More recently Saudi Arabia has caught on, hosting Ukraine ceasefire talks including the latest round in a lavish hotel in Riyadh last month.
The United Arab Emirates has also got in on the act, facilitating Russia-Ukraine prisoner exchanges and hand-delivering a letter from US President Donald Trump to Tehran that paved the way for Saturday’s talks.
The Gulf monarchies are convenient facilitators as they often refuse to take sides in conflicts and are careful to maintain relations with a wide array of countries.
They benefit from the prestige and diplomatic leverage of hosting talks, while also helping protect themselves by easing regional volatility.
In the case of Iran, which sits on the other side of the Gulf, there is a clear peace dividend for the Arab states which house a number of US military bases.
“In terms of middle powers, they are just in a really unique position in having such a close relationship to the US and being very trusted by the US but also having relationships with a variety of US and Western rivals,” said Anna Jacobs of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
‘New heavyweight actor’
Oman has always stayed on good terms with its neighbour Iran, facilitating for years discreet contacts with the US, which has not had diplomatic relations with Tehran since 1979.
The sultanate was the first Gulf country to “fully engage in world diplomacy”, said Jean-Paul Ghoneim of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs.
“Then came the Emiratis, the Qataris, and now there is a new heavyweight actor: Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Qatar has been a key mediator in more than a year of talks to end the Gaza war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has a political office in Doha.
Qatar has also been an intermediary for Iran and the Taliban government in Afghanistan, among others.
In organising such talks, often cloistered in luxury hotels, Gulf states are first and foremost seeking to protect their own interests.
Tensions in the Middle East “would put the region squarely in the crosshairs of conflict and jeopardise their reputations as safe places to live, work, and do business,” said Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
In Saudi Arabia’s case, regional instability would “put at risk the giga-projects that lie at the heart of Vision 2030”, the oil-dependent kingdom’s giant economic diversification plan, he added.
Beyond the Middle East, Qatar recently hosted meetings between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, and brought together DRC President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Doha.
In 2022, Qatar brokered an agreement between Chad’s military government and dozens of opposition groups to hold peace talks, after five months of mediation efforts.
“Qatar’s record in mediation has turned Doha into a hub with institutionalised expertise that extra-regional actors are now actively turning to,” said Ulrichsen.
– ‘They want to be players’ –
While Qatar and Oman have long-standing mediation traditions, especially in regional affairs, the role of Gulf states as intermediaries in the Ukraine-Russia war took the world by surprise.
Saudi Arabia’s hosting of indirect talks between Moscow and Kyiv under US auspices, as well as the first Russian-American talks since 2022, highlights how conflict mediation has shifted away from Europe, Ulrichsen said.
“The sight of a Gulf state hosting dialogue to end a major European war is testament to the region’s geopolitical weight in a far more multipolar and less Western-centric world,” he said.
Yet Riyadh’s role in those talks was limited, said James Dorsey, an honorary fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
The Americans and Russians simply “needed a neutral ground to meet”, he said.
“Both the Americans and the Russians wanted to give that to the Saudis on a silver platter,” he said, offering the kingdom “prestige” on the world stage.
“Certainly for the smaller states, but also for Saudi Arabia, it’s soft power,” he said.
“They want to be players. And they don’t want to be just regional players,” he added.
