Aggression against Iran and the persistence of collaboration in West Asia

As Iran faces sustained aggression, the writer examines regional complicity, the legacy of 1979 and the politics of Muslim sovereignty. And he address USA’s regional partners directly: ‘You cannot facilitate aggression and claim neutrality.’

By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD

This composite image was compiled from official photographs issued by the White House following Donald Trump’s high-level meeting with Arab monarchs in May 2025. Their countries host American military infrastructure. From left: Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The writer notes that Iran warned these states, among others, that if the United States and Israel launched direct strikes, states hosting and enabling that assault would not be insulated from its consequences. (Photos: Daniel Torok / White House) 

For three days now, Iran has been under sustained bombardment. American and Israeli military power — long rehearsed through sanctions, covert strikes, assassinations and proxy wars — has moved fully into the open.

And while the sky over Iran burns, West Asian monarchies and military regimes convene meetings.

They call it diplomacy. They call it stability. They call it coordination. What they are doing is far simpler: preserving their own arrangements while a neighbouring sovereign state is pounded from the air.

The war is visible to all. The question is: who is enabling it — and who is pretending not to.

The architecture of complicity

Wars of this scale do not operate in isolation. Airspace must remain accessible. Intelligence must circulate. Bases must stay operational. Silence must be maintained.

The Gulf monarchies understand this perfectly. Their territories host American military infrastructure. Their security doctrines are fused with Washington’s command structures. Their regimes are underwritten by American guarantees. For months, Tehran warned publicly that if the United States and Israel launched direct strikes, states hosting and enabling that assault would not be insulated from its consequences.

The warning was clear: you cannot facilitate aggression and claim neutrality.

Yet when Iranian retaliation follows bombardment launched from or enabled by regional territory, the monarchies are quicker to condemn Tehran’s response than the assault that triggered it. They issue urgent appeals for ‘restraint’ once missiles approach their own airspace. They rarely deploy the same clarity when those missiles are falling on Iranian cities.

Their outrage is selective. Their fear is not war — it is exposure.

Jordan, too, sits within this grid. Hosting American forces while presenting itself as a stabilising partner, it occupies the familiar space of strategic usefulness. But stability built upon another state’s bombardment is not neutrality. It is participation by arrangement.

Turkey and Pakistan: Managed autonomy

Turkey performs calibrated indignation. It criticises loudly enough to signal independence, yet remains anchored in NATO’s strategic architecture. It aspires to regional leadership while avoiding a rupture with the very power prosecuting the war. It projects strength in peripheral theatres; it grows cautious when Washington moves decisively.

Pakistan’s military establishment operates in an even narrower corridor. Islamabad is deeply interwoven with American security frameworks, yet invokes sovereignty in public rhetoric. When protests erupted in Karachi over the war on Iran and the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the state’s reflex was not to confront the external force waging war, but to contain domestic dissent.

Outside the US consulate in Karachi, anger was not abstract. It was immediate. Demonstrators gathered in response to bombardment and to what many perceived as the extrajudicial elimination of a central Muslim political authority. Two dozen protestors gunned down by American marines collapsed the illusion that this war was distant.

Both Ankara and Islamabad speak of autonomy. Both remain structurally aligned with the power conducting the assault.

1979: The fear beneath the silence

To understand the present compliance, one must return to 1979.

The Iranian Revolution terrified monarchies not because it was Shia, but because it was anti-monarchical. It demonstrated that a ruler sustained by external backing could fall. It showed that Sunni and Shia alike could mobilise around sovereignty rather than sect. That was the contagion to be contained.

Sectarian polarisation became policy. Tehran was framed as a theological aberration rather than a political precedent. The objective was regime preservation, not doctrinal purity.

Today’s war reactivates that suppressed anxiety. The extrajudicial killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — whatever one’s political position — would constitute the violent elimination of a world-historical political figure in the history of Shi‘ism in particular and Islam in general: a cleric whose authority shaped statecraft, theology and resistance politics for decades.

Such an act is not processed in Muslim societies as a routine strike. It is understood as a decapitation of sovereignty itself.

The same logic applies to figures like Hassan Nasrallah, whose stature — regardless of one’s ideological view — commanded admiration that transcended sectarian lines in moments of confrontation with Israel. His symbolic authority was anchored in perceived defiance.

In Pakistan, outrage has crossed sectarian boundaries not because doctrine dissolved, but because symbolism required no translation. When globally recognised Muslim leaders are eliminated in the context of open war by external powers, the meaning is immediate.

The anger is not theological.

It is political — and civilisational.

Selective condemnation

The most revealing feature of this war is not only the bombardment of Iran, but the inversion of moral language in Gulf communiqués.

They condemn Iran’s retaliation.
They caution Tehran against escalation.
They urge ‘all parties’ towards restraint.
The aggression that ignited the exchange receives diluted phrasing, if it is acknowledged at all.

This inversion is deliberate. A clear condemnation of the assault would expose their structural role in enabling it. Silence preserves alliances; clarity risks them.

So Iran becomes the destabiliser for responding. The original strike becomes background.

The palaces fear Iranian missiles. They fear American displeasure more.

The streets and the reckoning

Sectarian engineering long insulated these regimes from unified dissent. But visible war dissolves careful narratives.

When bombs fall openly, the questions become blunt: Who is bombing whom? Who is enabling it? Who condemns the response but excuses the cause?

In Karachi, Beirut and beyond, those questions are no longer theoretical. Protesters are not debating doctrine. They are confronting the spectacle of external domination and internal compliance.

Iran is under sustained assault. That reality stands.

The more consequential question is how long Muslim-majority governments can condemn retaliation while facilitating the war — and expect their populations not to draw conclusions.

The palaces remain composed. The bases remain operational. The meetings continue.

But the streets are watching.

And the longer the war endures, the more visible the gap becomes between rulers who speak of sovereignty and rulers who quietly subcontract it.

Prof. Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE).