The United States Could Lose the Gulf

Trump’s War on Iran is Unravelling U.S. Strategy in the Gulf There appears to be a technical issue with your browser This issue is preventing our website from loading properly. Please review the following troubleshooting tips or contact us at [email protected] . Close Skip to navigation Skip to search Skip to main content Skip to footer Analysis The United States Could Lose the Gulf Iran’s attacks on its neighbors are a reminder that the United States cannot protect them. By Marc Lynch , a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science. An Emirati flag flies next to a plume of smoke and next to a red neon sign that reads "Century Mall." A plume of black smoke rises from Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, on March 4. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN March 5, 2026, 3:34 PM Iran War Analysis and news. Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbors has inexorably dragged them into a war that they had desperately hoped to avoid. The potential entry of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia into direct war alongside Israel and the United States represents the first full-scale manifestation of America’s ambitions for the Middle Eastern order it has overseen for decades. Washington has always dreamed of Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran without resolving the Palestinian issue. Here it is. It would be no small irony if America’s Middle East reached its apotheosis just as the entire region collapsed into the abyss. But that day may be coming. The Gulf states can no longer believe that the United States can or will protect them from existential threats. And even as they are forced to openly cooperate with Israel in its war, they will increasingly view it as a threat rather than a potential ally. Iran’s targeting of the Gulf states in the face of the U.S.-Israeli attack shattered the hard-won regional rapprochement that had taken hold over the last three years. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had long been aligned with Israel on the need for a confrontational strategy toward Iran. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, early in his de facto reign, had fulminated against the Islamic Republic and signaled a readiness for military action. Gulf leaders were reliable voices for more aggressive policies toward Iran and vocal skeptics of nuclear diplomacy, as their allies and proxies did battle with Iran across a broad swath of the Levant, Iraq, and Yemen. Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbors has inexorably dragged them into a war that they had desperately hoped to avoid. The potential entry of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia into direct war alongside Israel and the United States represents the first full-scale manifestation of America’s ambitions for the Middle Eastern order it has overseen for decades. Washington has always dreamed of Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran without resolving the Palestinian issue. Here it is. It would be no small irony if America’s Middle East reached its apotheosis just as the entire region collapsed into the abyss. But that day may be coming. The Gulf states can no longer believe that the United States can or will protect them from existential threats. And even as they are forced to openly cooperate with Israel in its war, they will increasingly view it as a threat rather than a potential ally. Iran’s targeting of the Gulf states in the face of the U.S.-Israeli attack shattered the hard-won regional rapprochement that had taken hold over the last three years. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had long been aligned with Israel on the need for a confrontational strategy toward Iran. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, early in his de facto reign, had fulminated against the Islamic Republic and signaled a readiness for military action. Gulf leaders were reliable voices for more aggressive policies toward Iran and vocal skeptics of nuclear diplomacy, as their allies and proxies did battle with Iran across a broad swath of the Levant, Iraq, and Yemen. But those days have long passed. Gulf leaders were stunned by the ability of Iran and its allies to target Saudi oil refineries in 2019 without any effective defensive capability or meaningful U.S. response. A subsequent round of drones over Abu Dhabi reinforced the lesson of a real vulnerability for which the alliance with the United States could not or would not compensate. In 2023, Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations and established a broader detente under ostensible Chinese auspices, a key part of the broader regional trend toward the de-escalation of proxy wars and intramural conflicts. The detente held firm during last summer’s 12-day war, as the Gulf states stayed on the sidelines and Iran refrained from targeting them. But a different strategic logic applied this time. With Israel and the United States clearly poised to launch a massive, coordinated regime-change war, Iran understood that there could be no going back to the status quo. The benefits offered by the rapprochement with Saudi Arabia were already gone. The Gulf states, for the most part, preferred to avoid war, but they recognized that it was inevitable as the U.S. armada assembled and Omani mediators saw the Trump administration was barely bothering to pretend to negotiate in good faith. With war inevitable, the Gulf states hoped to at least shape the campaign’s geography and strategy in ways that would minimize their exposure to its fallout. They hoped for a short war that would replace top Iranian leaders with more pragmatic autocrats, presumably from the military, without shattering the state in ways that would spread instability, refugees, and uncertainty. And they hoped the conflict would remain confined to Israel and Iran, leaving the Gulf states and oil shipping relatively unaffected. Iran rejected that script, responding to the U.S.-Israeli attack with a massive and escalating bombardment of every Gulf neighbor. While Iran’s drones and missiles concentrated on the UAE and Bahrain in particular, it has also attacked Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even friendly Qatar and Oman. Its targeting patterns suggest a clear strategy that is far from the random spasms of atavistic violence portrayed in much of the media. Iran has targeted civilian centers at the heart of the Gulf states, signaling their unprecedented vulnerability to their people and leaders. Highly publicized visits by Gulf leaders to local shopping malls and public places show how seriously they take public shock and fear. The benefits of attacking across the Gulf outweighed any residual benefits of restraint, especially since Iran did not feel that it got any rewards from holding back the last time around. Iran set out to quickly cause global economic pain to build pressure for a cease-fire. It closed the Strait of Hormuz without much effort, simply by making threats that oil tankers did not care to test. Saudi oil refineries and Qatari liquefied natural gas production have shut down even without direct Iranian attacks. Oil and gas prices are rapidly rising, and the United States seems unprepared to respond. All of this, and the Houthis—who effectively blocked Red Sea shipping in defiance of U.S. and Israeli attacks during the Gaza war—have not joined the fight so far. Iran is already imposing significant global costs while making it clear that it retains the ability to escalate (after an intercepted drone damaged a Saudi oil refinery, Iran made sure to explain that it had not targeted the refinery but that it could). And finally, as it does with Israel, Iran seeks to exhaust Gulf and U.S. missile defense systems with wave after wave of cheap, easily produced drones and Shahed missiles while systematically targeting the radar and communications systems that enable those defenses. No one should be fooled by high rates of missile defense success early on in a conflict like this one, as expensive defense systems repulse inexpensive attacks. The real test comes as interceptors run out and higher-quality missiles begin to launch. Despite the extremely high levels of aerial bombardment that Iran has endured, and the decapitation of its top leadership, all three levels of Iranian strategy toward the Gulf seem to be working as intended. Those attacks may well draw Gulf military assets into the fray (though Saudi Arabia seems keen to avoid taking the bait), but it isn’t obvious that they would add much militarily to what Iran already faces. Many Israelis and Americans celebrate the Gulf states’ moves toward open military cooperation, but from Iran’s perspective, pushing its regional adversaries into an open alliance with a deeply unpopular Israel instead of veiled tacit cooperation has significant regional and political benefits. What Americans and Israelis see as a major cost Iran is paying for its strategy doesn’t necessarily look the same from Tehran. Even more troubling for the Gulf leaders, though, is that Washington also rejected its script. The entire Gulf order has long been based on U.S. security guarantees against Iran. Gulf leaders had felt that they enjoyed better relations with Trump than with any previous U.S. administration. They appreciated his bottomless interest in Gulf financial opportunities, his preference for autocracy over democracy, and his personalistic style that mirrored their own. They also noted his seeming alignment with their views against Israel on the Gaza cease-fire and support for the new Syrian regime. That makes their sense of betrayal right now even more acute. Gulf leaders have good reason to believe that the United States and Israel launched a war, which directly impacts not just their interests but their survival, without serious consultation. They are deeply uncomfortable with the Israeli regime-change strategy, which involves the destruction of Iranian state institutions, since they understand that they (unlike Israel) cannot be immune from the catastrophic fallout. They can hardly believe U.S. impotence at protecting oil installations and shipping, and the United States’ inability or unwillingness to rapidly refresh their dwindling stocks of interceptors. There is a profound sense that U.S. military bases have become a source of threat rather than security. This insecurity is a shocking realization for a region that has been an oasis of stability and prosperity in an otherwise collapsing Middle East. Iran has, for the first time, shattered the illusions of Gulf citizens about their immunity from regional politics. The wealthy Gulf states and their people had good reason to feel that they were detaching from the region’s problems, that they had more in common with wealthy Asian states than with the shattered Middle East. The human price of regional power politics was supposed to be paid by Syrians, Sudanese, Lebanese, and Yemenis—not by them. But Iran has brought them firmly, and likely permanently, back into geographical reality. The potential for Iranian targeting is no longer abstract. If the Iranian regime survives or is replaced by a comparable autocratic alternative, it will remember well the coercive power that it gained by attacking the Gulf and oil shipping. If the regime falls and the state collapses, the Gulf states will be exposed to all the refugee flows, shipping disruptions, radicalization, and armed spillover that they fear. And they no longer believe that they can count on the United States for defense. One unexpected byproduct of Iran’s attack is that it has stopped the emergent Saudi-Emirati conflict in its tracks, for now. Saudi Arabia’s efforts to assemble a new strategic alliance incorporating Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Pakistan, and more, while pushing back on every front against the UAE—and, by proxy, against Israel—had been the most significant reshuffling of regional order in years. Had Iran only targeted the UAE and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and its new partners might well have thrown the Abraham Accords states to the wolves. Instead, the Gulf has reunified under existential threat, its differences set aside in the name of collective security. But the underlying issues that drove the split have not been resolved. Indeed, the ferocity and unrestrained nature of Israel’s war—and the United States’ active participation—will only exacerbate those fears. Arab regimes that feared Israel’s expanding military operations and unchecked ambitions will not be reassured watching its destruction of Iran. They will worry that they could be next, understanding that the United States cannot be relied upon to protect them. And that could very well be the harbinger of the rapid unraveling of America’s Middle East. This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage . Read more here . This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage . Read more here . This post appeared in FP's The Reading List newsletter. Sign up here . United States Iran Middle East and North Africa Marc Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science. His most recent book is America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region . X: @abuaardvark Read More On Alliances | Bahrain | Iran | Israel | Middle East and North Africa | Qatar | Saudi Arabia | United Arab Emirates | United States | War Join the Conversation Commenting is a benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription. Subscribe Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log In . View Comment s Join the Conversation Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now. Subscribe Subscribe Not your account? Log out View Comment s Join the Conversation Please follow our comment guidelines , stay on topic, and be civil, courteous, and respectful of others’ beliefs. 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