The task is not to choose between deterrence and dialogue, nor between international partnerships and regional agency. A stable regional order is likely to require all of these elements.
The more difficult task is to connect them.
A permanent regional process - as already advocated by the diplomatically active 'Friends of the Process', rooted in the region and informed by the experience of those who have worked elsewhere on questions of security, confidence-building and institutional development - could provide one such connection.
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It would not promise immediate solutions. It would offer something more realistic: a means of making future solutions more possible.
And perhaps that is where the significance of a Muscat initiative ultimately lies-not in prescribing what the Gulf's security order should become, but in creating a setting in which the states of the Gulf can, in time, decide that for themselves.
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