Why Iran is dragging the Gulf states into Israel's war

In January 1991, at the height of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein gave the order to fire salvos of scud missiles against Israeli population centres.

Operationally, this made no sense. Israel had not joined the US-led campaign to liberate Kuwait. It also possessed a significant military edge over Baghdad, meaning that provoking it was a high-risk gamble.

Yet Saddam Hussein's intended effect was political, not military. He sought to force Arab states and particularly the Gulf monarchies into a dilemma: if they remained part of the US-led coalition whilst Israel joined the war, they would be siding with Tel Aviv.

If they left, they would hand the Iraqi leader a moral victory and turn a multinational war effort into a US-and-Israel-led crusade.  

Fortunately for the Gulf monarchies, they never had to make that decision; the US leaned heavily on Israel to hold fire and kept it out of the war. Ironically, over thirty years later, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran - Saddam Hussein's implacable foe - that is trying to force the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states into a similar dilemma.

Iran's new military doctrine

The actors are in different roles. This time, it is Israel attacking Iran, whilst the Gulf states have sought to stay out of the war. But Iran’s attacks on Gulf countries follow a similar script. At the time of writing, Tehran has fired more munitions against the GCC states than against Israel.

It is sacrificing its regional reputation and established ties to several GCC states in order to create maximum chaos. It is also banking on no Gulf state daring to retaliate. Against all the GCC states’ wishes, then, Iran has succeeded in dragging them into a war they did not want and is attempting to use its strikes against them to force a ceasefire.

Iran’s escalatory violence represents a paradigm shift in its warfighting. Planners in Tehran know that they lack Israel’s qualitative military edge. As a result, they traditionally opt for ‘strategic patience’, forcing Israel into ‘slow bleed’ long wars that sap its national resilience.

This is why there has long been a mismatch between the bellicose rhetoric of Iran’s leaders - who repeatedly threatened to ‘raze’ Tel Aviv during the ‘12 Day War’ of June 2025 - whilst only deploying a small proportion of Tehran’s ballistic missile stocks.

This mismatch is no more. Iran has adopted a doctrine of mutually assured destruction, an ironic choice given its alleged nuclear weapons programme. This is a product of Iran’s weakness: with unprecedented challenges both at home and abroad, the regime now faces an acute existential threat. Iran’s regime is signalling that it will not go quietly into the night.

Alongside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran’s new military doctrine mimics that of another sworn enemy: Israel. In explaining their underwhelming performance in the 2006 ‘Second Lebanon War’, Israeli military planners felt that they had excessively constrained themselves to attacking Hezbollah. In future wars, Israel would employ the ‘Dahiya doctrine,’ targeting population centres and assets, such as airports and power plants.

This would allow Israel to better deploy its military’s latent destructive potential. The logic was twofold. First, this would de-legitimise Hezbollah amongst the Lebanese public. Second, it would create so much chaos that the international community would intervene sooner rather than later to force a ceasefire.

Iran has now exported the Dahiya doctrine to the Gulf. Iranian claims that they are only targeting US military installations ring hollow when international airports in Kuwait, luxury hotels in the UAE, and Saudi oil installations are in the line of fire. This is not a blip; it is part of Iran’s strategy to cause maximum chaos by expanding the zone of conflict.

It banks on the Gulf states being less resilient than Israel, easier to hit, and most likely to press for an immediate ceasefire. It draws on the GCC state’s strengths - their ties to Washington and ability to shape US policy - and their weaknesses - a desire to maintain quiet and not be seen as enabling a reckless Israeli-led initiative to reshape the region through force.

A dilemma for the Gulf states

This creates a profound dilemma for the Gulf states. The first problem is that the region’s US bases did not appear out of nowhere. The GCC states have long feared Iranian irredentism and took the controversial decision to grant the US basing rights because they calculated that the benefits outweighed the costs. Now, it is the presence of these same US bases that Iran has used to justify direct attacks on the GCC states’ population centres.

Secondly, and most pressingly, Iran’s attacks illustrate the shortcomings of many of the GCC states’ grand strategies. The Gulf states sought to occupy a middle ground in the growing Iran-Israel regional conflagration, refusing to let the US use the bases within their countries for a strike and instead pressing for a new deal between Washington and Tehran that would de-escalate regional tensions.

Qatar and Oman, in particular, took significant risks and endured growing criticism for their repeated attempts to mediate a compromise.

But all this came to nought. Israel and the US started the war; Iran escalated it. The Gulf states, by contrast, in their attempt to project autonomy, seem like passive actors playing catch-up. Worse still, it is the GCC states that are bearing the brunt of Iran’s strategy.

But Tehran’s disproportionate response risks backfiring. The Gulf states were deeply divided on how to respond to both Tehran and Tel Aviv’s destabilising regional behaviour. A more limited Iranian escalation that only targeted several Gulf states and/or was limited to US military bases would likely have exacerbated inter-GCC divides.

By contrast, Iran's consideration of every Gulf state as a target has created a united front of shared challenges.

This is also not a total failure for the Gulf states. They have invested billions in building cutting-edge militaries. This includes defensive measures such as missile interceptors, whose success rate at shooting down Iranian projectiles has been impressive across the region.

It is, however, a strategic challenge. The status quo will not last: as the deaths and disruption mount, there will be an increasing public clamour to retaliate. It is exponentially more expensive to intercept Iranian projectiles than it is to build them, meaning that time is not on the Gulf state’s side.

Gulf leaders now face an unenviable quandary: do they press for a ceasefire and fold to Iran? Or do they risk aligning with Israel and going on the offensive? There are no easy answers to these questions, and whatever path each Gulf state takes will require a significant policy shift as the entire region enters uncharted waters.

In short, though the Gulf states did everything they could to avoid being dragged into Israel’s war, Iran has forced their hand. The Gulf’s challenge is to formulate a response that maintains unity and demonstrates the bloc’s autonomy, without joining Israel’s war or deferring to the US on negotiations.

This includes maintaining contact with Tehran to de-escalate, whilst negotiating from a position of strength that involves active and not just passive defence.

The Gulf states tried to stand between Israel and Iran. Tehran responded by trying to collapse that space entirely. The challenge is not to take the bait.

Rob Geist Pinfold is a Lecturer in Defence Studies (International Security) in the School of Security Studies at King's College London. His book, Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Israeli Occupations and Exits, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023

Follow him on X: @DrRGeistPinfold

Edited by Charlie Hoyle