Gulf Security is now the primary concern for regional leaders as the failure of traditional protection pacts forces a radical rethink of Gulf Security protocols. To maintain Gulf Security, nations are diversifying their defense away from a single-partner model. The geopolitical landscape of Gulf Security has shifted, making the pursuit of autonomous Gulf Security more vital than ever before for regional Gulf Security.
The Impact of Regional Conflict on Gulf Security
In spring 2024, Iran directly attacked Israeli territory for the first time, launching more than 300 drones and missiles at its adversary. U.S., British, French, and Jordanian forces rapidly intercepted them. The message was hard to miss in Gulf capitals: when Iran attacks Israel, the U.S.-led response will be immediate and collective. But there was an uncomfortable, unspoken question left lingering: What would happen if Iran attacked the Gulf? That question has now been answered.
When the United States and Israel began their war on Iran on February 28—a war that Gulf governments had lobbied against—Iran retaliated by striking Gulf Arab states’ airports, seaports, oil installations, and desalination plants. Although U.S. forces helped intercept some attacks on the Gulf Arab states, damage was done to the region’s reputation as a safe haven for global business—which, no doubt, was the Iranian regime’s intention.
And Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz—fully blocking the exports of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, and impeding those of Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). For roughly a decade, Gulf states maintained their security by trying to appear neutral in confrontations involving Iran, cultivating deep defense relationships with Washington, and keeping an open line of communication with Tehran to prevent military escalation. But now Gulf governments are reconsidering, if not abandoning, all three strategies.
Modern Challenges to Gulf Security Frameworks
They are also rejecting an assumption, held by the United States and Israel, that Gulf states could be incorporated into a regional security architecture premised on Israeli dominance—one in which Israel retains decisive military superiority over its neighbors, freedom of action across borders, and the ability to set terms that others must accommodate. Such an arrangement made sense to U.S. and Israeli leaders.
Israel and the Gulf Arab countries were united in their opposition to Iran’s nuclear program and its destabilizing allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. By working together, Israel and Gulf governments could deter their common enemy. But the current war in Iran has made it clear that Israel’s aspirations of regional dominance put the Gulf in harm’s way. Israel is too willing to wage war preemptively to get what it wants and too comfortable disregarding the interests of neighboring countries.
Many Gulf leaders are now determined to find alternative ways to protect themselves. It won’t be easy to create a new regional order, but Gulf leaders have already started diversifying their arms suppliers and security partnerships. To have a greater say over what happens to them, they will also need to coordinate better among themselves, both militarily and diplomatically.
MY ENEMY’S ENEMY
Normalization deals became one mechanism through which the United States tried to fold Gulf governments into a regional order built around the idea that Israel should enjoy lasting dominance over its neighbors.
For decades, all the Gulf states pledged that they would formally recognize Israel only if Israel withdrew from the occupied Palestinian territories.
In fact, all Arab states solidified that commitment by signing the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and by endorsing that initiative in subsequent years. But within the last decade, some Gulf countries have normalized relations with Israel (or considered doing so) while sidestepping questions of Palestinian self-determination, thereby depriving Palestinian leaders of important leverage.
For countries such as the UAE, normalization came with access to advanced U.S. and Israeli military technology, commercial deals with Israel, and the chance to embed more deeply into Washington’s regional security architecture. The first Trump administration, for example, agreed to sell the UAE F-35 fighter jets to sweeten its normalization deal with Israel.
(The sale ended up stalling under the Biden administration, but the normalization agreement went ahead.) The United States was also in talks with Saudi Arabia to sign a defense pact on the condition that Riyadh normalized ties with Israel. Nevertheless, even those Gulf capitals that were willing to normalize relations with Israel never embraced the idea they could support Israeli dominance, either directly or indirectly. Israel already had poor relations with many Arab countries and its response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack further eroded its standing in the region.
Israel killed over 70,000 Palestinians in its campaign in Gaza, moved to annex the West Bank, bombed Lebanon and Syria, and launched incursions into both countries. In September 2025, Israel violated Qatari sovereignty by launching lethal strikes on a residence in Doha. Its goal was to kill Hamas members who were there to take part in U.S.-facilitated negotiations.
For Gulf leaders, the war in Iran is the latest, and perhaps clearest, evidence that their interests do not align with Israel’s. Many of them believe that Israel persuaded the Trump administration to attack Iran on February 28—ultimately forcing Gulf countries to pay the price of a war they never wanted. In the months leading up to the conflict, Gulf governments advised the United States to refrain from attacking Iran and to instead negotiate with Iranian leaders.
Gulf countries clearly communicated, both publicly and through backchannels, that they would not let their territories be used as a staging ground against Iran. In fact, they had worked for years to improve relations with Iran to prevent escalation. Riyadh, for example, signed a détente with Tehran in 2023, after nearly a decade of tensions.
But such efforts did not translate into protection from Iranian strikes. Within hours of the first U.S.-Israeli salvos, Iran attacked every Gulf country. What mattered to Tehran was not the intent of Gulf governments—nor whether the initial strikes were launched from Gulf territory—but the position of Gulf countries within a security architecture that, as far as Tehran sees it, enables U.S. and Israeli operations.
A neutrality not acknowledged by the relevant actors is, in practice, inoperable, even if sincerely offered. To Iran, Gulf countries cannot be neutral if they host U.S. bases, jointly train with the U.S. military, and buy American weapons. As the conflict hardened into a war of attrition, Gulf states separated into three broad camps. Oman’s approach most clearly reflects restraint.
Despite Iranian strikes on the port of Duqm, Muscat formally congratulated Iran’s new supreme leader, who took over after his predecessor was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes, and issued a statement condemning attacks from all belligerents. The UAE, on the other hand, facing the highest volume of Iranian strikes of any Gulf state, appears to have concluded that its many efforts to reengage Tehran before the war were ultimately futile.
It has banned most Iranian passport holders from entering or transiting its territory, signaled an openness to joining U.S. military efforts to secure the Strait of Hormuz, and has made clear its intention to deepen bilateral ties with the United States and Israel. Bahrain, which also normalized relations with Israel, has broadly aligned with the UAE’s more assertive posture.
Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have taken an approach that lies in between those of Oman and the UAE. These divergences are not new. They reflect long-standing differences in threat perception and risk tolerance, as well as intra-Gulf rivalries. Their divergences also stem from the fact that Gulf governments are in some ways internally conflicted over what they want to come next. Leaders are desperate for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen and for business to return as usual.
But they also worry that if Iran is left in its current state, it will remain willing and able to strike the Gulf in the future. The Gulf states’ unity has historically peaked during acute crises and rarely extended to long-term strategic alignment. But this latest crisis has exposed more fundamental questions about Gulf security than any in recent history.
Strategic Autonomy and Future Gulf Security
The attacks from Iran could be a catalyst for the Gulf states to overcome their discord and create a security architecture of their own. For decades, they defended themselves through a tradeoff with Washington: Gulf countries provided the United States with energy, capital, and basing in exchange for at least the implicit presumption of protection, rooted in a patchwork of legal documents. U.S. officials have designated Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia as “major non-NATO allies.
” Oman provides the United States with access to different military airfields under a 1980 facilities agreement; Bahrain hosts the United States’ Fifth Fleet under a 1991 agreement. After Israel bombed Qatar in 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order committing the United United States to Qatar’s defense. Although none of these arrangements legally bind the United States to defend its partners with force, they created a reasonable expectation of assistance against external aggression.
Ever since U.S. President Barack Obama announced in 2011 his intention to “pivot to Asia,” Gulf countries have been concerned that U.S. support for their defense will wane. Yet other governments can’t provide for Gulf security as Washington can. The region relies on the United States for arms, planes, naval vessels, maintenance, training, and, crucially, the most advanced military technology.
And thus once the dust settles in the Middle East, Gulf governments will be stuck with few good options. They will not succumb to Iranian demands to expel U.S. bases or give up U.S. security cooperation because they have no other way (in the medium term) to defend themselves, and Iran’s own behavior proves that they need protection. Across the Gulf states, antipathy to Iran is genuine, rooted in what Tehran and its allies have done to Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and compounded by the recent direct strikes on Gulf soil. It’s likely that many will adopt a much more aggressive form of containment of Iran.
But Gulf countries also don’t want to go along with Israel’s plans for the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he believes that the war will change “the balance of power in the Middle East” and has even floated the idea of building pipelines across the Arabian Peninsula to Israeli ports as a way to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz.
Most Gulf states will not build their security on a foundation of Israeli dominance because they see Israel as at least as much of a threat as Iran. Since 2023, Israel has repeatedly invaded its neighbors and occupied more territory in Lebanon and Syria.
The International Criminal Court has warrants out on Israeli leaders for war crimes committed in Gaza, and the world’s leading association of genocide scholars has concluded that Israel committed genocide in the occupied territory. Israel’s aggression has upended the region, and the country is so unpopular it is untenable for most Gulf leaders to cooperate with it.
Even before U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran led to devastation in the Gulf, Oman’s foreign minister said that “Israel—not Iran—is the primary source of insecurity in the region.” There is scant appetite for signing up to a regional order dominated by Israel. (Though the UAE is prepared to deepen operational cooperation with Israel in response to specific threats.) Many Gulf citizens regard Israeli aspirations of regional dominance as fundamentally incompatible with their own sovereignty—a dimension consistently underestimated by those who have treated Gulf-Israeli normalization as a substitute for resolving the Palestinian question.
Diversifying Alliances to Bolster Gulf Security
Although Gulf states will likely increase their cooperation with the United States because of their vulnerability to more attacks, they do not see Washington as their sole long-term security guarantor because of its close relationship with Israel, its disregard for Gulf interests, its failure to effectively deter Iran, and its poor track record of protecting Gulf states.
As a result, Gulf governments are diversifying their partnerships. In 2024, the UAE formed joint ventures with Turkish drone manufacturers. Last year, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement. Gulf governments are also starting to seek alternatives to American materiel: Turkish fighter jets, South Korean missile defense systems, Ukrainian drones, Japanese Patriot interceptors, and British low-cost antidrone missiles. In April, the president of the European Council said that Europe was a “reliable partner for the Gulf countries” and “ready to contribute.”
The EU is negotiating a free trade deal with the UAE and could sell the Gulf drone technology. Gulf states will probably pursue economic and technology deals with China but avoid explicit defense guarantees so as not to cross U.S. redlines. By having more partners to turn to, Gulf states will have more leverage in dealing with any one country.
GULF CLUB
But as the Oman Daily Observer put it, “reliance on external guarantees, however powerful, does not grant the Gulf states genuine sovereignty over their security.”
Thus, to carve out real autonomy, Gulf states will need to strengthen defense ties with one another—for example, by sharing early-warning radar data, coordinating air defenses, and pooling stockpiles of common anti-drone technology. On paper, the Gulf Cooperation Council, a body made of up the six Gulf states, has a unified military command, but rivalries among the members have blocked meaningful defense integration.
The Gulf should also improve its indigenous defense industries, focusing on air defense in particular. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have already made efforts to form state-owned defense companies, such as Saudi Arabian Military Industries (which aims to localize 50 percent of the kingdom’s military spending by 2030) and Edge Group, an Emirati conglomerate that has already begun to produce large numbers of precision-guided munitions. But throughout the war, Gulf countries have faced acute shortages of interceptor missiles that no domestic industry can yet fill. Gulf countries also need to band together diplomatically to have enough weight—and enough leverage over Washington—to influence the decisions that determine their fate.
Washington has long framed its regional strategy around the claim that Israeli and Gulf security are complementary, and that U.S.-backed normalization produces stability. But the past year has exposed the hollowness of that assumption. The chasm between Netanyahu’s vision of a remade Middle East and the aspirations of Arab states is far too wide to bridge. What Gulf states want is a security order that takes their interests seriously on their own terms—not as a corollary of Israeli or Iranian ambitions.