The relationship between Iran and its southern Arab neighbors — namely, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states — has been turbulent for the past few decades. The GCC states were under the shadow of Iraq and Iran, the two prevailing powers in the Persian Gulf, for much of the 20th century, with the latter historically being the more dominant power. Stricken with internal disputes, weak central governments and rivalries among themselves, the Arab states along the Persian Gulf's southern coast were never in a position to challenge the powers to their north.

The situation changed after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought political Islam to the geopolitical scene. The autocratic Persian Gulf monarchies immediately felt threatened by this new political force, which had the potential to undermine their legitimacy and jeopardize their rule. Within this context, in 1981 they established the GCC, comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 had provided a convenient excuse to exclude Iraq and Yemen, notable omissions even though the latter does not border on the Persian Gulf, and Iraq has close to 40 miles of coastline.

The relationship between Iran and the GCC has been largely confrontational. The GCC’s combined political, military, intelligence and economic infrastructure has often covertly and at times overtly aimed to marginalize Iran. The GCC emphatically supported Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran, providing him with billions of dollars and supporting an “oil war” against Iran, even as his army rained chemical weapons on Iranian as well as Iraqi civilians. More recently, GCC governments have supported the harsh international sanctions regime imposed against Iran and have even publically called for military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, telling The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2010 that the United States should “absolutely” attack Iran.

For its part, the United States has propped up the GCC with the full gamut of military, political, economic and intelligence support for more than 30 years. These states regularly buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated weaponry from the United States, seemingly with little concern in Washington about the complete lack of democracy and the endemic prevalence of human rights abuses and corruption in all these states.