John M. Ellis
It is disconcerting to read in Elliot Kaufman’s op-ed “JD Vance Appeals to Arab Authority” (June 26) that the vice president believes we should be guided by the Arab Gulf states’s strong support for the recently signed memorandum of understanding with Iran—because we should trust “the people who know the Iranians the best.”
That would be true only if Arab Gulf states’ interests were the same as ours, which they clearly are not. Those Gulf states have always intervened to stop America when it was on the verge of large-scale attacks that might have destroyed the regime.
The probable explanation of this consistent behavior is that the Islam-oriented autocratic rulers of the Gulf states fear that if the Iranian regime fell, it might be replaced by a large and powerful western-style secular democracy—one whose proximity could cause unrest in their own countries.
Accordingly, the Gulf states want to tame the regime but not break it. In this respect the difference between the interests of the Gulf states and those of the U.S., the Iranian people and Israel couldn’t be greater. Too bad our chief negotiator seems not to understand that.