Every bill eventually arrives. And this one carries 50 years of interest. Unresolved sovereignty is never dormant.
Fifteen years ago, I analysed the legal foundations of a dispute the world had chosen to treat as “contained”. The occupied Arabian Gulf islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs belong, by every measure of international law, to the UAE. A key finding was straightforward: territorial disputes left without a legal or political framework for resolution do not quietly fade. They accumulate pressure, shift in form and eventually manifest in ways that extend far beyond their original dimensions.
The logic I traced in that dissertation is being played out in the Gulf today. That is not a claim to foresight. It is a recognition of how international law actually works: disputes that are left unresolved do not disappear. They crystallise.
The historical and legal case for UAE sovereignty over Abu Musa and the Tunbs is not contested by serious scholars. Arab connection to the islands is long-running and well-established, dating back centuries to the Arab Kingdom of Hormuz’s dominion over them, with documented evidence of governance from at least the 15th century. The islands were governed by the Qawasim tribe ruling Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah even before Britain formalised its presence in the Gulf in 1820. The populations living there until their expulsion during Iran’s forcible takeover of the islands in 1971 were also Arabs of the same community as Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah.
Tax records, lighthouse grants, pearling concessions, oil exploration licences and British diplomatic correspondence all confirm this. Captain David Seton, the British Resident in Muscat, recorded in 1801 that the islands were frequented by Arab inhabitants “left undisturbed in their possession” – undisturbed, notably, by "Persia". In the language of international law, that is not a minor observation. It is evidence of sovereign title.
Iran invaded all three islands in November 1971, on the eve of the British withdrawal from the Arabian Gulf, and has occupied them since.
The Memorandum of Understanding on Abu Musa that allowed Iranian soldiers to occipy certain parts of that island, signed by Sharjah under explicit Iranian threat of military action, is void under Article 52 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: a treaty obtained through the threat of force has no legal standing. What made that threat irresistible was not Iran’s military superiority alone. Britain, which was at the time in the process of withdrawing from the Arabian Gulf, let it be known in no uncertain terms that it would not defend the territory if Iran chose force. Sharjah had only a choice between occupation with an agreement and occupation without one.
From its very first federal statement on December 2, 1971, the UAE condemned the occupation and sought resolution through the Arab League, the UN and the International Court of Justice. Iran declined every multilateral path.
The world accepted the occupation as a manageable reality. It was not. It was a failure of legal will whose consequences are now fully visible on a global scale.
This distinction matters. Iran holds legitimate sovereignty over several islands in the Arabian Gulf, among them Qeshm, Hormuz and Kish. It did not need Abu Musa and the Tunbs for territorial completeness. These three islands were not seized for their size or their populations. They were seized for their position: at the precise approach to the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which much of the world’s energy economy breathes. What the world called a bilateral territorial dispute was, from the beginning, a strategic claim on a global chokepoint.
Since the start of the Iranian attacks at the end of February, UAE air defences have engaged hundreds of ballistic missiles, more than a dozen cruise missiles and more than 2,000 drones. The UAE has not escalated. It has intercepted, held its position and continued to engage diplomatically at every level. This is the expression of a doctrine established by the UAE’s Founding Father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, that durable security rests on economic depth, institutional legitimacy and the accumulation of deterrence capability that makes aggression, over time, cost more than it is worth. Restraint is not a gap in resolve. It is a strategy that has been tested across five decades and has not changed.
Dr Anwar Gargash, Diplomatic Adviser to UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, has been precise on what that strategy now requires: solutions that guarantee sustainable security for the region, addressing Iran’s nuclear threat, missiles, drones and what he has called “the bullying of the straits”. A ceasefire, in his words, is not where the UAE’s thinking stops.
The historical record is unambiguous on this point. The 1971 Memorandum of Understanding on Abu Musa was itself a form of managed ceasefire. What followed was five decades in which Iran systematically violated its terms, constructing roads, an airport and military facilities in Sharjah’s zone of the island. In time, that translated into the steady expansion of Iranian strategic capacity, anchored in part on illegally held UAE territory, until that capacity became the threat the region now faces. Managed ambiguity, left in place long enough, becomes a weapon.
There is also a question of custodianship that the world has been too polite to ask directly. Which of these two states is the more reliable steward of such consequential territory? One has spent five decades building a model of openness, legal governance and economic integration. The other has spent the same 50 years trying to undermine it. Restoring sovereignty over these islands to the UAE is not merely a matter of legal justice. For a world that depends on the stability of this waterway, it is the rational choice.
Any serious post-conflict order must confront three realities that the international community has long preferred to treat as separate. The first is Iran’s offensive military capacity: its nuclear programme, ballistic missiles and drones and the proxy networks through which it has projected violence across the region for decades.
The second is freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. It carries approximately 20 per cent of the world’s seaborne oil and gas and is vital for the transportation of fertiliser inputs, humanitarian aid and other critical goods. It is not Iran’s to bargain with. A binding international framework guaranteeing its openness is not optional in any sustainable post-conflict architecture.
The third – less discussed but foundational – is the legal status of UAE territory under Iranian occupation. International law is clear: illegal occupation does not acquire legitimacy with time. Iran’s decades of presence on Abu Musa and the Tunbs do not ripen into sovereignty. The UAE’s legal claim remains strong, documented and unextinguished. A regional order invested in durability must create a credible pathway for that claim to be adjudicated, whether through the ICJ, binding arbitration or another internationally recognised process. To build a peace settlement on top of an unresolved territorial violation is to build on the same foundation that produced the current crisis.
There is a concept in international law: the critical date, the moment at which a dispute crystallises and subsequent actions by either party cannot alter the underlying legal claims. The UAE’s claim crystallised long before 1971. Nothing that has happened since has changed it.
But there is a dimension to this dispute that legal scholarship alone does not fully capture. Bilateral conflicts involving territory of exceptional strategic value rarely remain bilateral. When global players absorb illegal occupations into a broader architecture of regional management, rather than insisting on legal remedy, they do not neutralise the dispute. They defer its cost. And deferred costs, in geopolitics as in law, accumulate interest.
What was once framed as a contained disagreement between Iran and a newly established state has evolved into a global crisis that cannot be treated as peripheral. The Strait of Hormuz is not a bilateral concern. It is a global one. When it is weaponised, the consequences travel far beyond the region, into energy markets, shipping lanes and the supply chains that underpin the prosperity of nations that have never once considered the islands of Abu Musa and the Tunbs their problem. They are now. Managed ambiguity, in a waterway this consequential, is not a neutral position. It is a choice with a price, and the world is now holding the invoice.
The UAE understood this from the beginning. For 50 years it chose the path of law, diplomacy and strategic patience, not because it lacked alternatives, but because it recognised something that is now self-evident: that absorbing an illegal act into the architecture of regional convenience does not extinguish the underlying claim. It transfers the cost to the future, compounded.
That judgment has been vindicated. The question before the international community is no longer whether to resolve this. History, and the markets, and the rerouted shipping lanes have already answered that. Fifty years of deferred reckoning have produced the crisis the world is now struggling to contain. What remains is not a question of law or evidence. It is a question of a wider recognition of the need to resolve this issue based on clear international law.
