The Persian Gulf states’ policies and the assumptions that underpin them are being stress-tested as never before. Having pressured the United States not to strike Iran, they now find themselves under daily attack by Tehran’s missiles and drones. The perception of the Gulf states as an oasis of quiet stability—a product of their own careful design—has been shattered.
Commentators remain divided as to what will change first: Will the Gulf states abandon their dependence on the United States or their prolonged campaign to bring Iran from the cold through dialogue? Either way, there is growing consensus inside and outside the region that this conflict will cause Gulf leaders to “rethink everything.”
The Persian Gulf states’ policies and the assumptions that underpin them are being stress-tested as never before. Having pressured the United States not to strike Iran, they now find themselves under daily attack by Tehran’s missiles and drones. The perception of the Gulf states as an oasis of quiet stability—a product of their own careful design—has been shattered.
Commentators remain divided as to what will change first: Will the Gulf states abandon their dependence on the United States or their prolonged campaign to bring Iran from the cold through dialogue? Either way, there is growing consensus inside and outside the region that this conflict will cause Gulf leaders to “rethink everything.”
The Gulf states are indeed under unprecedented strain. But despite this, they are unlikely to fundamentally shift their grand strategies in response to the war. Instead, they will continue to deepen their security partnership with the United States while maintaining some form of engagement with Iran.
Predictably, the war has left many in the region questioning the Gulf states’ reliance on Washington. It has reinforced a feeling that they remain second-tier U.S. allies when compared to Israel. Worse still, if the U.S. bases positioned throughout the region were supposed to deter attacks on the Gulf, they now seem to have had the opposite effect.
However, disputes between the United States and its Gulf partners over how to handle Iran are nothing new. Most of the Gulf states opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq because they feared that Iran would exploit the chaos. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) then refused to back the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. When Israel attacked Iran in June 2025, the GCC states lobbied Washington to compel Israel to accept a cease-fire; in the end, the United States joined the campaign. Each of these incidents caused Gulf hand-wringing yet did not rupture ties with the United States.
Consequently, the Gulf states are unlikely to expel U.S. forces after the conflict ends. Doing so would only vindicate Iran’s attacks. There is also little evidence backing Tehran’s claim that the United States has extensively used its Gulf bases to strike Iran. Instead, most of the GCC states forbade Washington from doing so, yet Iran attacked them anyway.
This illustrates that removing U.S. bases would not necessarily insulate the Gulf from any future Iranian attack. Iran is seeking to internationalize the war by targeting GCC economic hubs to disrupt global markets and force a cease-fire. It is this logic—not solely the presence of U.S. bases—that led it to attack the GCC states. This means that if another conflict broke out in the future, the GCC members would likely remain targets with or without U.S. bases.
The Gulf states are damned if they keep U.S. forces on their soil, but more damned if they remove them. The current conflict has only reinforced U.S.-Gulf security ties. Gulf states would have borne a much higher toll without Washington’s advanced systems, such as the Patriot PAC-3 and THAAD. Working with the United States’ early warning capabilities in its local bases, these interception systems have helped shoot down around 90 percent of Iranian ordnance on average.
The potential alternatives to the Gulf-U.S. security partnership reveal the limits of hedging. After Israel struck Doha, Qatar, in September 2025, a Saudi-Pakistani defense agreement was supposed to exemplify the Gulf states’ diversification of military ties. Despite Pakistan’s rhetoric, its impact in the current conflict is negligible. Indeed, rather than focus on assisting Saudi Arabia, Pakistan secured its own shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Turning elsewhere to diversify could cause further problems. Personnel would have to familiarize themselves with dissimilar systems, as U.S. “dual use” policies forbid the sale of advanced system to states that buy competing technology from rivals. Can the Gulf rely on China when it has sat this conflict out and abstained on a GCC-backed United Nations Security Council resolution to condemn Iran’s attacks? Equally, security cooperation with Europe works best as a force-multiplier to the United States, rather than as an alternative security provider.
While U.S.-GCC relations will likely remain resilient, Gulf perceptions of Iran are shifting. Before the conflict, many GCC states’ pronouncements called Iran a “brotherly” nation. Even if this was mere rhetoric, the United Arab Emirates has long been Iran’s second-largest trading partner, and 2023 saw a Saudi-Iranian detente. As Iran continues to fire barrages of missiles at their cities, the GCC states’ language is becoming harsher. They have repeatedly denounced Tehran’s “heinous” actions, while an influential Saudi think tank official referred to Iran as an “enemy,” rhetoric that would have been beyond the pale before the current conflict.
In spite of this, the GCC states will not stop engaging with Iran. Many of the Gulf states already regarded Iran as a threat. Yet they opposed the conflict because they assumed that Iran could be better contained by engagement than through kinetic force. The Gulf states’ continued refusal to go on the offensive suggests that this assumption remains in place.
Absent regime change, Iran can indefinitely wreak havoc at the Strait of Hormuz. Interceptor systems are critical for damage limitation, but they cannot stop Iran’s capabilities or willingness to launch drones and missiles. The Gulf states remain prisoners of geography: They are suspicious of Iranian irridentism in their own backyard but also dependent on relations to maintain regional stability and keep trade flowing. This is likely why, the UAE notwithstanding, every other Gulf state has kept their embassies in Tehran open.
One undeniable change is a growing feeling of unity among the people of the Gulf. The pre-war Saudi and Emirati mudslinging that dominated Gulf social media and official pronouncements has abated. The fact that Iran has attacked every Gulf state—including Oman, with whom it had particularly close ties—has produced a feeling that the Gulf is in this together. This has led to calls for a “Gulf NATO”: a security alliance that could project pan-Gulf unity to deter any threats without the need for external security partnerships.
So far, at least, there are not signs that popular solidarity will translate into this level of political alignment. Serious political divergences and varying threat perceptions still scupper unity. Oman officially congratulated Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. No other GCC state followed suit. While the UAE has been attacked by nearly 2,000 Iranian missiles and drones, Oman has reportedly faced less than a dozen. With Red Sea access that does not rely on the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia may simply strengthen its long-running campaign to attract foreign energy investment, while the UAE, whose Jebel Ali and Fujairah hubs were repeatedly disrupted by Iranian strikes, has a bigger challenge. Ultimately, Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline kept the oil flowing, while other Gulf states remain extremely vulnerable to disruptions.
This does not mean that there will be no changes. The Gulf states may deepen their military cooperation—which the United States has been pushing for years—or join an international coalition to secure the Strait of Hormuz. Yet they likely will stop short of creating a genuine local version of NATO, instead bolstering their existing Unified Military Command (formerly the Peninsula Shield) which is supposed to integrate the GCC states’ armed forces into a joint structure for collective defense. They will likely invest further in localized defense industries, with an emphasis on home-grown missile defense system that is less dependent on external parties.
Grand strategic change is rare and difficult. Seen through a U.S. lens, it often requires a mass casualty attack—such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11—or a systemic transformative event—such as the Soviet Union’s collapse. While the Gulf states are at an inflection point, the current crisis has not yet crossed this threshold. Iran’s attacks are an economic challenge, but they have not generated mass casualties.
In 2003, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud bin Faisal Al Saud warned that the kingdom would not let the United States use its local bases to attack Iraq. He also preemptively deemed the upcoming conflict an act of “aggression.” The Saudis may have felt vindicated in their claims that the conflict would only cause instability and entrench Iranian influence. They did not, however, rethink their relationship with either Iran or the United States.
The stakes are much higher in the current war. But once the dust settles, the GCC states will likely opt to tweak their existing policies, rather than pursue root-and-branch change. Although the United States may be a major part of the problem, it remains a major part of the solution. Ironically, the same is true for Iran.
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