After the storm: The Gulf states in a post-Iran war region

Since 28 February, the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members have been subjected to thousands of Iranian missiles and drones.

The scale and persistence of these strikes have done more than damage military installations and civilian infrastructure. This Iranian aggression has shaken the very foundations of the Gulf’s image.

For decades, the sub-region marketed itself as an island of stability in a turbulent neighbourhood. This environment drew tourists, investors, airlines, logistics firms, and global capital. Iran’s attacks, coupled with the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and strikes on the Gulf’s critical oil and gas facilities, now threaten to unravel that model.

The resulting economic shock confronting GCC states starkly illustrates how costly the American–Israeli war on Iran has become for their interests, particularly at a moment when hydrocarbon revenues remain indispensable to their economic development and diversification plans, such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.

Now in the third week of the war, it remains too soon to determine precisely how these six Arab states will recalibrate their foreign policies, particularly in relation to Iran and the United States.

What is already clear, however, is that the conflict will compel the GCC members to reassess their relationships with both Tehran and Washington. In the war’s aftermath, they are unlikely to view either power in quite the same way.

Managing relations with Iran

By now, it is evident that Saudi Arabia and other GCC states’ efforts to ease tensions with Iran - an approach that gathered momentum between 2019 and 2023 - have failed to shield them from Tehran’s retaliation after the American-Israeli alliance began attacking Iran on 28 February.

The conclusion is difficult to escape: the period of détente that had taken shape in Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s relations with Iran has effectively come to an end. The UAE’s President Mohammed bin Zayed recently calling Iran “the enemy” captures this new hostile environment.

Although the GCC states have not suffered equally from Iran’s retaliation since the United States and Israel launched their war against the Islamic Republic, it is notable that Tehran has struck all six members. Particularly striking is that even the Sultanate of Oman - known for decades as the GCC’s most Iran-friendly state - has not been spared, with Iranian drones reaching its territory as well.

“The fact that Iran struck the energy and economic infrastructure of not only Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, but also Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar, with whom it had relatively sincere relations, is likely to bring about a serious rupture in ties,” Dr Gökhan Ereli, an independent researcher, told The New Arab.

But that does not mean that the Gulf Arab monarchies will cease to engage Iran diplomatically after the dust settles.

“The lines of communication are still there. They’ve communicated with the [Iranian] ambassadors in the region, and they’ve shared with them their frustration, their objection; they sent out letters to Iran and the United Nations,” said Dr Bader Al-Saif, an academic at Kuwait University and associate fellow at Chatham House, in an interview with TNA.

“Taking those as hints as to what’s to come, I believe wisdom will prevail. It has been a difficult relationship. We’ve been in a similar situation in the Iran-Iraq War, where we were on different sides, and we ended up managing the relationship forward, and I think that’s what needs to be done because we can’t have a combative relationship on our shores. It just doesn’t make sense, and it’s not part of our ethos as Gulf states,” he added.

It is notable that, within the GCC, only the UAE has so far closed its embassy in Iran and withdrawn its ambassador from Tehran. The five other Gulf Arab monarchies have refrained from taking similar steps. This restraint suggests a continued desire to preserve diplomatic channels. As Dr Mira al-Hussein, a fellow at the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh, told TNA, these states “do not wish to escalate or completely sever all diplomatic channels.”

She explained that this instinct to avoid a potentially catastrophic war is both understandable and, in many respects, prudent. Yet it also raises a deeper question: how far would the GCC members go to defend their sovereignty? Equally important, though far less frequently examined, is how such restraint might be perceived by domestic audiences across the Gulf.

“How quickly reconciliation becomes possible will depend in part on how much each country has absorbed. Saudi Arabia and Oman appear to have sustained less damage than their neighbours, which will shape their calculus differently. Perceptions of Israel's role and its longer-term threat to regional stability will complicate things further, with each Gulf state running its own balance sheet,” noted Dr Hussein.

“The uncomfortable conclusion is that this war might not produce the convergence that many Gulf analysts are hoping for. A collective remapping of Gulf security perceptions, an integrated response to shared threats - I think these will remain more aspiration than prospect,” she added.

The future of GCC–Iran relations will hinge largely on the character of Tehran’s post-conflict leadership. Despite the early hopes of those who have long opposed the Islamic Republic and sought its overthrow, all signs suggest that the Iranian government is far from collapse, even in the face of extreme pressures and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Observing that the Gulf Arab monarchies neither desired the United States and Israel to wage this war, nor seek conflict with any state, particularly a powerful and proximate neighbour like Iran, Dr Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, spoke to TNA about the genuine threats Iran poses to the Gulf amid the ongoing conflict.

A central reason for the GCC members’ opposition to the US and Israeli attack on Iran, as Dr Ibish explained, was “not only their belief that they would be targeted no matter what they did to stay out of it, which has certainly proven to be even more of the case than they had feared, but also because they did not believe that the US and Israel could engineer regime change from the outside based on airpower alone and they did not believe that either Israel or Washington was going to dispatch ground troops to secure a change of government inside Iran.”

Even before the outbreak of war, the Gulf Arab states worried that this conflict could produce “what is looking increasingly likely: the survival of a new iteration of the ‘Islamic Republic’ that is battered, bruised and severely degraded militarily, but more extreme, more enraged, and looking for opportunities for vengeance and nuclear breakout,” noted Dr Ibish.

Addressing the prospect that GCC members may soon confront an “Islamic Republic 2.0” that is far more “extreme” and “dangerous” than the Iranian government that existed from 1979 until last month, Dr Ibish told TNA that the Gulf Arab states “are going to have to create some kind of difficult and dangerous modus vivendi with a regime in Tehran that is even more unpleasant and threatening, albeit in the meanwhile reduced in capabilities, than it has been since 2003.” He added that this “is not an appealing or reassuring prospect in the least.”

Even if less probable under current conditions, another scenario that deeply alarms all Gulf Arab states is Iran’s potential fragmentation along ethnic lines.

“Iran could disintegrate into chaos, particularly on the ethnic-minority margins, but potentially also in the Persian heartland. It would then become a country that radiates chaos, instability, violence, weapons, and refugees into its surrounding environs. That is probably the worst scenario of them all,” explained Dr Ibish.

Unfortunately for Iran’s neighbours, both scenarios - the rise of a more hardline “Islamic Republic 2.0” and the potential collapse of the Iranian nation-state - are “more likely than an upbeat regime change scenario in which a more friendly government takes root in Tehran that seeks positive engagement with the West and its Gulf Arab neighbours,” he added.

Shattered confidence in the United States

These questions about the Iranian threat are made all the more urgent for GCC states by their complete lack of confidence in the United States as a reliable security guarantor.

“We can’t even use the words ‘security’ and ‘guarantor’ and firmly tie them to the US given all that’s been happening,” said Dr Al-Saif, emphasising that this concern long predates the events of 28 February.

Indeed, doubts about Washington’s ability and willingness to provide a protective umbrella over the GCC states have been growing for years, rooted in numerous earlier regional developments that left the Gulf feeling vulnerable.

“Gulf scholars and commentators have been vocal about their disappointment with the US performance. But in all fairness, neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE arrived at this moment without warning,” Dr Hussein told TNA.

“The 2019 Abqaiq strikes and the 2022 attacks on the UAE were dress rehearsals of a kind. These incidents exposed the limits of US protection and, over time, tempered expectations,” she added.

What complicates matters for the GCC states is the absence of an alternative power both willing and capable of replacing the US as a security guarantor. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to expect that the Gulf Arab monarchies will continue striving to diversify their defence partnerships, seeking greater autonomy from Washington.

“The drive toward strategic diversification in all its different facets, which has been underway for the past 20 years at least, will only be intensified by the current conflict in which the US appears to be acting in a manner that is capricious, irrational, self-contradictory and completely without regard for the interests of the Gulf Arab countries,” said Dr Ibish.

“They are not going to turn away from the United States, because there is no alternative to United States - just as Washington is not going to turn away from them either - but they will continue to look to develop stronger ties to other global powers like China and Russia, towards each other, and with regional powers such as Turkey, Israel and others, depending on the circumstance and each individual Gulf Arab country's specific requirements,” he added.

As Dr Ibish explained, this is not the end of an era, but a major step closer to it. Although Washington could reverse the movement in this direction, doing so would require a fundamentally different attitude from the United States than what we have seen for many years - arguably since George W. Bush’s first term. “That's a long time ago, and it's only getting worse, from a Gulf Arab perspective,” he added.

Despite the tensions, the trajectory of US-GCC relations in the upcoming period remains uncertain. A key question will be whether the Gulf Arab monarchies attribute their grievances primarily to President Donald Trump or to the United States as a global power seen across the GCC as largely responsible for plunging the region into a war that the Gulf Arabs and Turks had worked hard to prevent in the months leading up to 28 February.

“If the Gulf implements institutional and common policies against the US based on this sentiment and ‘moment,’ the process could evolve from GCC-Trump mistrust to a period of institutional GCC-US mistrust,” Dr Ereli told TNA.

However, he stressed that this will require a “serious consensus” within the GCC. “There are still elites and segments in the Gulf who believe that staying close to the US - the dominant power of the international system - could be ‘advantageous’ to some degree,” noted Dr Ereli. “The question is, who will prevail? Tradition or the current conjuncture?”

A chaotic future

The current war has reinforced a decades-old threat posed by the Islamic Republic - seen by Saudi Arabia and others in the GCC as a predatory actor since soon after its inception in 1979 - and further exposed the risks of depending so much on the United States as a security guarantor.

With the US-Israel-Iran conflict now in its third week, the Gulf Arab states are navigating a chaotic environment in which there are no easy solutions to their serious security dilemmas. It will be difficult for these six Arab countries to find ways to coexist with a hostile or unstable Iran while navigating an increasingly complicated relationship with Washington.

Rather than producing a clearer regional order, it seems reasonable to conclude that this conflict will lead to a less stable Middle East in which states have to face increasingly dangerous threats.

Gulf Arab efforts to diversify partnerships with powers such as China, France, Russia, Turkey, and others may expand the Gulf’s options, but they are unlikely to produce the kind of cohesive security framework that the region currently lacks. The region’s future order, if it can be called that, may therefore be characterised less by stability than by prolonged unpredictability.

“Instinct suggests the broader order that emerges will be more multipolar, more transactional and less tethered to international law or the UN Security Council than anything we have known. Those frameworks were already fraying, and the Gaza genocide accelerated the process considerably,” explained Dr Hussein.

“This war may simply be the moment that redefines how diplomacy is conducted: with missiles and drones.”

Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics

Follow him on X: @GiorgioCafiero

Edited by Charlie Hoyle