The Gulf states are right to view Iraq as a security risk. Thirty-six years after Saddam Hussein’s forces crossed into Kuwait, and twenty-three years after the regime fell, Baghdad remains the one Arab capital whose commitments the Gulf Cooperation Council states (GCC) cannot rely upon. That is not a polemical claim it is a claim of sovereignty.
Iraqi airspace has served as a corridor for Iranian drones and missiles aimed at Gulf territory. Iraqi soil hosts armed groups — Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba — whose military decisions are made in Tehran, not in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The Popular Mobilization Forces—an umbrella framework for militias that is legally constituted as a state body—operate a parallel command structure rather than one beneath the Iraqi Armed Forces. Customs revenue at several border crossings and port facilities is harvested by factions outside formal state accounting. Iraq’s own diplomatic apparatus has at times overshot its political authorization, as the February 2026 deposit of new maritime baselines and zone delimitations with the United Nations—which replaced Iraq’s 2011 and 2021 submissions and drew a coordinated GCC objection led by Kuwait—made plain. None of this is contested within Iraq. It is the political outcome of its post-2003 constitutional settlement.
This is where the analytical frame matters. The Gulf’s Iraq problem is usually described as a threat problem, as though Baghdad harbors hostile intent toward its southern neighbors. It does not. The problem is one of authorization. The Iraqi state’s authority is constrained not by external occupation or by weakness of the prime minister’s office, but by a constitutional and political bargain that distributes coercive powers across actors whose loyalties are not exclusive to Iraq. A sovereign agreement is only as good as the state’s ability to uphold what it has signed. But Iraq cannot yet guarantee that compliance.
This is the honest starting point for any Gulf-Iraq reset. Evading the truth of Iraq’s sovereign limitations will not help. Understanding them can be the basis for both sides to make a fresh start.
The next step is to read the regional environment honestly. Iran’s position is the weakest in a generation. Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been materially degraded. Syria’s Assad regime is gone. Yemen’s Houthis have absorbed considerable damage. Iran’s own retaliatory doctrine against the U.S. and Gulf targets, tested in the strikes on Al Udeid and against American positions across the wider theatre, drew counterstrikes that degraded Iranian capabilities without securing the strategic concessions Tehran was reaching for. Tehran inherited the costs of escalation without its returns. The strategic environment around Iraq is no longer Iranian-dominated by default. For the first time since 2003, Iraqi sovereignty has room to grow, if Baghdad has the political will to grow it, and if its neighbors are willing to make that development materially rewarding.
Baghdad’s outreach to Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi has not been cosmetic. Saudi-Iraqi commercial and border cooperation is real. The Iraq-Jordan-Egypt trilateral, formalized at the 2021 Baghdad summit to advance energy and infrastructure connectivity, has survived as a political framework, even as its core infrastructure remains incomplete. Gulf investment commitments of several billion dollars over the past three years are beginning to shift the calculus of Iraqi political factions that once treated Gulf engagement as ideologically suspect.
What is missing is a security architecture that makes these economic flows survivable. A functional Gulf-Iraq security track would rest on three principles.
Sovereignty is the objective, not the baseline assumption. GCC states should treat Iraqi sovereignty as something to be built jointly, not as a legal fiction to be politely referenced. That means structured intelligence cooperation on specific shared threats like cross-border smuggling, narcotic networks, terrorist financing, and cyber intrusions, where success is measurable and incremental. It means a standing GCC-Iraq security forum at the deputy-minister level with a technical secretariat—not another summit communiqué. And it means Gulf patience for Iraqi progress that is politically constrained rather than disingenuous.
Airspace and borders should be the red lines. The single most corrosive element in the relationship is the Iranian-aligned militias’ use of Iraqi territory for armed action against Gulf states. No government can sustain commercial engagement with Baghdad while Iraqi airspace remains a transit route for attacks on its own citizens and infrastructure. Baghdad’s capacity to close this corridor is limited, but it is not zero. A joint Iraqi-GCC air defense consultation mechanism, tied to Iraq’s own anti-drone requirements, is achievable. So is a border security compact with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that brings Iraqi federal forces—not factional militias—onto the southern frontier. These are not grand bargains. They are measurable deliverables that Gulf capitals can verify and that Baghdad can survive politically.
The militia question cannot be solved from the outside, but external pressure is important. The demobilization or integration of armed groups is an Iraqi political process that will take years. Gulf policy should be calibrated to reward progress, faction by faction, crossing by crossing, deployment by deployment, rather than to demand a full settlement at the outset. Every Iraqi armed group brought under operational command of the Ministry of Defense is a security gain for Riyadh and Kuwait City, even if political integration lags behind. The incentive structure should reflect that.
None of this requires the Gulf to forgive the past or to pretend the Iranian-aligned component of the Iraqi state has evaporated. It requires the opposite, which means a clear-eyed recognition that Iraq’s internal authority crisis is the Gulf’s external security problem, and that the only actors who can resolve it are Iraqis, working within terms heavily shaped by what the region offers them.
Iraq’s window for seizing this opportunity is narrower than Baghdad sometimes acknowledges. The Gulf’s current openness to resetting the relationship is contingent on many factors. It is contingent on Iranian weakness, which may not persist. It is contingent on a generation of Gulf leadership whose political horizons are long but not infinite. It is contingent on the absence of another Iraqi-territorial incident that kills Gulf citizens or strikes Gulf infrastructure. The next such crisis will end the conversation, not restart it.
The wise course of action for Baghdad is to treat the present moment as fragile, and to recognize that regional integration depends on demonstrating sovereign authority. Airspace control, border discipline, and demonstrable constraint of the armed groups whose actions Baghdad disavows but does not prevent—these are not concessions under pressure to Gulf states but the very basis of statehood.
The Gulf-Iraq relationship cannot be rebuilt on trade, culture, or diplomacy alone. None of those channels survived the last breakdown. It was security that broke the relationship in 1990, security that prevented its restoration after 2003, and security that will determine whether the present opening closes behind another lost decade or opens into something durable.
The foundation has always been the same. The question is whether both sides are now prepared to build on it.
