Security Alliances With the U.S. Have Made Gulf States More Vulnerable

The Persian Gulf states did not want this war, nor involvement in it. In the weeks leading up to the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, Gulf leaders worked urgently to prevent escalation. They publicly emphasized neutrality and prohibited the use of their territories to launch offensive operations against Tehran. The objective was clear: avoid becoming a battlefield in a confrontation they neither initiated nor endorsed. With U.S. President Donald Trump setting maximalist demands aimed, essentially, at Iranian demilitarization—and backing up those demands with a massive military buildup—the die was cast, and the Gulf diplomatic effort failed.

Since the outbreak of hostilities, Iran has turned its Gulf neighborhood into a central theater of deterrence. U.S. military installations across the region have come under heavy attack. More troublingly, strikes quickly expanded beyond formal military bases to include civilian and economic infrastructure. Energy facilities, ports, and logistics hubs—critical not only to Gulf economies but also to global markets—have become pressure points in an Iranian survival strategy premised on rapidly raising and dispersing the costs of the U.S.-Israeli campaign to unseat the Islamic Republic.

The Gulf states did not misread the risks. But they are now faced with the paradox of their position: politically neutral, operationally entangled.

What is unfolding is not a conventional regional war with clear fronts and fixed battle lines. It is a multidimensional confrontation in which geography itself is weaponized. Energy infrastructure, maritime corridors, intelligence networks, airspace access, and financial systems are all instruments of pressure.

For Iran, military logic is shaped by structural constraints. Tehran cannot strike the U.S. mainland. It cannot match U.S. naval and air superiority on a global scale. Its most viable retaliatory targets are Israel and U.S. assets in the region—bases, personnel, and infrastructure embedded in neighboring states. As a result, political neutrality is cast aside, and Arab territory becomes the practical theater of deterrence.

This dynamic is unique in important respects. In other conflicts, the direct adversaries absorb the bulk of the fighting. Here, the Gulf’s proximity to Iran and its integration into the U.S. security architecture make it part of the battle space. Military bases long viewed as anchors of security now carry escalatory risk. What was intended as a shield increasingly looks like a magnet.

Compounding the vulnerability is Washington’s aggressive strategic posture. Gulf governments signaled repeatedly that they opposed a broader war with Iran for precisely these reasons. Yet escalation proceeded, driven heavily by Israeli priorities and U.S. calculations that did not appreciatively internalize Gulf risk exposure. The message to Gulf leaders is unsettling: The U.S. security umbrella remains powerful, but it can be overridden by other interests that are not their own.

That realization is not entirely new. In the preceding years, after repeated Iranian proxy attacks on their soil, Gulf states recognized some of the limitations of the U.S. security umbrella. This explains the diplomatic pivot undertaken by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to repair relations with Iran, which—coupled with Qatari and Omani mediation—was intended to reduce precisely the risk now materializing. These efforts acknowledged the limits of external guarantees and sought to build direct channels with Tehran.

When Israel attacked Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, in September 2025 while Washington stood by, this realization became even more acute. The rationale for the United States’ security architecture was punctured more thoroughly as the Trump administration bowed to Israeli operational interests and allowed Israel to launch an airstrike on its Gulf ally in full view of the U.S. Central Command’s regional headquarters. Trump himself appeared to understand this belatedly and eventually moved to reassure Washington’s Gulf partners through closer formal alignments, such as the security pact with Qatar.

Yet the latest U.S. decision to engage in a war of choice, which has rapidly consumed the entire region, has emptied the security agreements of much of their meaning and crystallized their vulnerabilities.

Iran’s war strategy reflects both desperation and calculation. Operating from what it perceives as existential threat, Tehran has expanded the theater of deterrence beyond direct military confrontation with Israel and U.S. military assets engaged in offensive operations.

The targeting of Gulf-based U.S. facilities carries layered messages. To Washington, it signals that regional escalation will impose tangible costs—not just on U.S. forces, but on the stability of allied states and global markets. To Gulf governments, it is a warning: Hosting Western military and intelligence infrastructure entails wartime consequences, even absent formal participation.

The situation is further complicated by the emptying of U.S. personnel from the bases. Iran claims that it has followed and targeted defense and intelligence officials inside of civilian domains, such as hotels. Attacking these spaces is a major escalation against the Gulf states, showing that Tehran has prioritized the effort to raise the cost for the Trump administration above all else. Increasing American casualties, even incrementally, aims to shape U.S. public opinion. Tehran may reckon that with U.S. elections eight months away, sustained losses—coupled with the administration’s shifting, inconsistent rationales and objectives for the war—could undercut domestic political support for Trump and weaken his resolve.

The second message is directed at the Gulf states themselves, warning that the cost of hosting Western military and logistical infrastructure will inevitably rise in times of war, and that the presence of such facilities is considered, in Iranian calculations, as implicit participation in the confrontation.

To add to the complexity is the UAE’s and Bahrain’s unique relations with Israel, which have matured into significant security and intelligence cooperation. In Iranian assessments, Israeli intelligence presence in those states is virtually certain. This blurs the distinction, in Tehran’s view, between neutral host and active partner. In this multilayered context, neutrality becomes incomplete. A Gulf state may forbid offensive sorties from its territory yet still be perceived as part of the adversary’s integrated security network.

Within this framework, Iran’s targeting of Gulf energy infrastructure and threats to navigation through the Strait of Hormuz can be understood as part of an internationalized pressure strategy. These tactics have already led to the closures of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production and the largest Saudi oil refinery at Ras Tanura. By spiking energy prices, unsettling financial markets, and disrupting shipping routes, Tehran is betting that major powers will pressure Washington toward de-escalation before economic damage becomes intolerable.

But this is a high-risk gamble. Severe disruption could compel industrial powers to intervene more directly to secure supply lines, widening the conflict rather than containing it.

The Gulf states now confront two unpalatable options.

The first is deeper operational alignment with Washington—expanding coordination, integrating further into defensive and potentially offensive frameworks, and accepting the escalatory consequences. It could include operationalizing the U.S. bases in the Gulf. This would almost certainly cement their status as primary targets. It would also shift budgetary priorities from long-term economic transformation toward sustained military expenditure, with lasting developmental costs.

The second path is calibrated deterrence combined with strategic restraint. This means strengthening air and missile defenses, hardening critical infrastructure, and responding decisively to attacks—while resisting steps that would formally integrate Gulf states into the offensive campaign against Iran.

Qatar, in particular, could call on its crucial military alliance with Turkey, as it did in 2017 when it was threatened by its immediate neighbors. Turkey’s membership in NATO could be a further deterrent to Iran. The United Kingdom and France are also signaling the possibility of coming to the Gulf’s defense.

Still, the risk of a prolonged war of attrition looms large. Today’s Gulf economies are more globally integrated and therefore more exposed. Sustained instability would ripple through sovereign wealth portfolios, investor confidence, maritime insurance markets, and energy contracts. The opportunity cost—delayed diversification, stalled megaprojects, eroded fiscal reserves—could be as damaging as direct military losses.

At the same time, the notion that airstrikes alone could engineer regime change in Iran remains strategically dubious. Experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza demonstrate that aerial campaigns degrade capabilities but rarely produce stable political outcomes. The collapse of Iran as a functioning state would not serve Gulf or broader interests. State failure would open dangerous political and security vacuums that could lead to civil war, unleashing militia proliferation, border insecurity, humanitarian disaster, and transnational spillover.

Here, regional motivations diverge. For most Arab states and Turkey, stability—even with a hostile Iran—is preferable to collapse and fragmentation. Israel’s calculus may differ. Israeli strategy has historically favored weakened adversaries over cohesive regional states capable of projecting force. Iran is the most formidable such power remaining. This divergence further complicates Gulf calculations about the war’s endgame.

The central challenge for the Gulf is preventing operational exposure from becoming strategic entrapment.

Neutrality in this environment cannot mean passivity. It must be layered with credible defensive capacity, active diplomacy with Tehran and Washington alike, and economic resilience against maritime or energy coercion. But it must also avoid the reflex of full integration into an escalation cycle whose trajectory Gulf states do not control.

The war is unfolding in real time. Missile exchanges are testing regional air defenses. Energy markets are reacting to each new incident. Political timelines in Washington are shaping strategic decisions. The Gulf states cannot dictate the broader course of the conflict. They can, however, shape how deeply they are absorbed into it.

Their objective is not to determine Iran’s fate, nor to arbitrate U.S.-Israeli strategic ambitions. It is to prevent their territory, infrastructure, and development futures from becoming the primary arena through which this war is fought.

In a conflict defined by intertwined alliances and weaponized geography, the task is extraordinarily delicate: deter without provoking, defend without escalating, and maintain enough strategic composure to deny others the regional conflagration they may be prepared to risk.