On April 18, 2026, Iranian Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani went to Baghdad to ensure that Iraq’s next prime minister would remain acceptable to Tehran. The message was clear: Despite the war and the pressure now facing Iran, Tehran still holds a strong hand in shaping the government in Baghdad. Iraq remains inside Iran’s political and security orbit.
Days earlier, Gulf Arab states had summoned Iraqi representatives to protest attacks and threats launched from Iraqi territory. That contrast captures the flaw in the Gulf Arab approach to Iraq since 2003. States that invested political capital, money, and territory in the process that ended Saddam Hussein’s rule find themselves threatened by drones and rockets fired by militias protected by the order that followed. They should have had greater weight in shaping Baghdad’s post-2003 balance, or at least enough leverage to prevent Iran from dominating Iraq’s political and security sphere.
Despite the war and the pressure now facing Iran, Tehran still holds a strong hand in shaping the government in Baghdad.
That failure goes back to the post-2003 period, when Gulf Arab capitals assumed Washington would manage Iraq’s transition in a way that blocked Iranian expansion and preserved a regional balance. The Obama-Biden approach moved in the opposite direction. In practice, it allowed Iraq, and with it an important part of the regional balance, to drift into Iran’s hands.
Iranian leaders, by contrast, always knew what Iraq meant to it. Tehran did not treat Iraq as a neighboring arena to influence from a distance, but rather as part of its own national security and strategic depth. It worked on every layer that produces or protects power: Shi’i alliances, prime ministers, militias, economic channels, and state institutions.
It also pushed Iraq toward something closer to the Lebanese model: a formal state with real limits set by armed groups aligned with Tehran. Whenever the Islamic Republic felt pressure, it raised the threat of civil war, internal chaos, or Shi’i fragmentation as a form of political deterrence aimed at blocking any serious effort to rebuild the state or curb militia power. Gulf Arab states, meanwhile, refrained from pushing Iraq toward such a scenario. The result was to leave the Iraqi arena tilted in Tehran’s favor.
Over time, “stability” in Iraq came to mean preserving a distorted balance for fear of something worse. This was one of Iran’s most effective tools. Tehran persuaded rivals at home and abroad that the alternative to the current order was not reform, but collapse. Fear of civil war became a shield for structural imbalance.
The Gulf Arabs, meanwhile, treated Iraq for most of the past two decades as an American file, rather than as a country directly tied to Gulf Arab national security. By the time Gulf states returned through diplomacy and economic engagement, Tehran had already shaped the balance of power in Baghdad. Even then, Iran did not allow Gulf Arab outreach to produce a meaningful shift. The atmospherics improved. The structure did not. Militia power remained intact. Tehran still held firm at decisive moments.
The recent war exposed the failure of that Gulf Arab approach. The attacks and threats that emerged from Iraq were not isolated incidents, but rather, the product of a governing order that Gulf Arab states neither helped shape nor tried consistently to influence. That order allowed armed groups to operate from within the state, and sometimes in its name, while leaving Iraq open to Iranian political, security, and economic use.
Gulf Arab capitals have enough access to this U.S. administration that silence or diplomatic protest would be diplomatic negligence.
Gulf capitals need to move from absorbing the consequences of this order to trying to influence its direction. The Gulf Arab states have a rare opportunity to change the status quo with Donald Trump in the White House and Marco Rubio at the State Department. The war with Iran has created room to reorder priorities. So has growing U.S. anger over attacks on American troops, diplomats, and interests linked to Iraqi territory. Gulf Arab capitals have enough access to this U.S. administration that silence or diplomatic protest would be diplomatic negligence. Washington should hear a simple message: Iraq’s continued subordination to Iranian influence is no longer an Iraqi issue that can simply be managed. It is a direct threat to Gulf Cooperation Council security and to U.S. interests.
The government now taking shape in Baghdad should not become another extension of the same order. It should be the beginning of pulling Iraq away from Tehran. If the next four years pass under the same formula, Iran will only deepen and entrench its influence further.
For that reason, Gulf states should stop watching coalition talks from the sidelines. The shape of power in Iraq, the forces that control it, and the limits on militia influence now lie at the core of Gulf national security. With the presidency settled, the premiership being decided, and Qaani already intervening, Gulf Arab capitals should use their weight and their ties to Washington to push for a government that curbs militia power, prevents Iraq from being used against its neighbors, and begins moving the country out of Iran’s sphere, whatever the political cost.
