For decades, the Gulf states perfected a delicate policy: keeping one foot in the American security umbrella while extending the other toward Tehran. Neutrality declarations, back-channel diplomacy and carefully worded public statements served as the instruments of this balancing act. It has now been decisively shattered.
Since the United States, Israel and Iran entered open conflict on February 28th 2026, the Gulf has discovered—at grievous cost—that it cannot stand apart from a war being fought, in part, across its skies and through its waters. Iran has launched thousands of missiles and drones at Gulf targets, exploiting the presence of American bases as both a pretext and a target list. Civilian infrastructure across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar has been struck. Most devastatingly, Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes, using it as its most potent weapon.
The economic damage has been severe. Gulf states that built their prosperity on hydrocarbon exports have watched tanker traffic seize up, sovereign wealth funds mobilise emergency reserves and foreign investors reassess their exposure to the region. Iran, under its present regime, has thus crossed a threshold.
A DILEMMA WITH NO CLEAN EXITS
The Gulf states now face a dilemma. To neutralise the immediate threat they must avoid actions that invite further Iranian retaliation, a logic that counsels restraint. But restraint alone cannot arrest the long-term deterioration of their security position. If Iran emerges from this conflict in a way that allows it to rebuild its arsenal, the Gulf will be faced with a far more dangerous neighbor for years to come.
There is also a temporal dimension that concentrates minds in the Gulf capitals. President Trump has shown little appetite for military entanglements. When American forces eventually draw down, as they inevitably will, the Gulf states must be capable of defending themselves, or they will have purchased only a temporary respite.
UNITY AS PREREQUISITE
The first essential task is internal. Gulf Co-operation Council solidarity, long more aspiration than reality, must finally become operational. The Qatar crisis of 2017-21 and the residual friction between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi over regional influence have demonstrated how easily the bloc fractures under pressure. Oman’s tradition of independent foreign policy, useful in calmer times as a back-channel to Tehran, now risks becoming a liability if it prevents unified responses to Iranian pressure.
A genuinely integrated GCC security architecture would serve several functions simultaneously. It would enable a joint military response to Iranian aggression against shared infrastructure, distribute the economic risks that come with dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, and create the political preconditions for the construction of alternative export routes. The Arabian Peninsula contains the geography for pipelines and terminals that could bypass Hormuz entirely; what has been lacking is the political will to build them collectively.
BEYOND WASHINGTON
The second requirement is external diversification. The Gulf states have long understood that dependence on any single patron is a vulnerability; the events of recent months have made the lesson concrete. Expanding partnerships with other major powers is not a retreat from the American alliance—Washington remains irreplaceable as a security guarantor, particularly in nuclear deterrence—but rather a form of strategic depth.
India presents the most natural opportunity. Its proximity, its vast and growing economy, its strategic interests in stable Gulf energy supplies and its desire to counterbalance Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean all align with Gulf priorities. A connectivity corridor linking the Gulf to Europe via India, conceived as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is already under discussion. The precise routing remains contested: through Jordan to a port in Israel, or through Jordan into Syria. The technical choice is also a geopolitical one.
China is a more complicated proposition. Beijing has cultivated Gulf relationships over the past decade, and Gulf sovereign wealth funds have diversified into Chinese assets. But deepening security ties with China would create severe friction with Washington at precisely the moment the Gulf most needs American backing. For now, Gulf governments appear to recognise this constraint, even if they are reluctant to say so publicly.
THE TURKEY-ISRAEL QUESTION
The choice of routing for a Gulf-to-Mediterranean corridor encodes a deeper strategic question: with whom should the Gulf align most closely among its regional interlocutors?
Turkey commands the approaches to Syria, has substantial military capabilities, and has demonstrated operational depth — most visibly in Qatar, where Ankara deployed troops during the 2017 blockade. Yet its policy of backing Muslim Brotherhood-aligned movements sits uneasily with both Gulf powers: the UAE regards political Islam as an existential threat and tolerates no ambiguity on the matter, while Saudi Arabia, though more pragmatic, maintains an arm’s-length wariness that produces a pattern of rapprochement and withdrawal with Ankara. Compounding this is Turkey’s appetite for regional hegemony, which makes it a complicated partner rather than a straightforward one.
The structural problems run deeper still. The Saudi-UAE split means any Gulf-Turkey alignment would deepen an already widening intra-Gulf rift rather than paper over it — Riyadh is drifting toward Ankara while Abu Dhabi moves in the opposite direction. Turkey’s key geographic asset, its dominance in Syria, is simultaneously its key liability: it cannot guarantee stability there, which makes any corridor through Syrian territory a hostage to Turkish influence rather than an independent route.
Israel offers a different calculus. Its advanced offensive and defensive military capabilities — put on dramatic display during the war with Iran — have not gone unnoticed in Gulf capitals, and the conflict may have quietly fast-tracked security cooperation that would once have been unthinkable to announce. The Abraham Accords normalised relations with the UAE and Bahrain, and the UAE-Israel relationship is already substantial in practice: trade, investment and intelligence ties have grown well beyond the diplomatic. India, which has major investments in the port of Haifa, might actively prefer an Israeli terminus for any new connectivity corridor. Yet a Gulf-Israel axis carries its own weight. The Gaza war means Gulf governments — Saudi Arabia above all — face domestic pressure against any open embrace of Jerusalem. Israel’s demonstrated willingness to act unilaterally and aggressively, impressive as a signal of capability, marks it as a potentially escalatory ally rather than a reassuring one. The biggest prize — Saudi normalisation — remains the missing piece; the war with Iran has made the strategic logic more compelling and the domestic politics more difficult, simultaneously.
There is no costless answer. Each alignment implies constraints as well as capabilities. Gulf leaders, accustomed to keeping all options open, will find the current moment unusually demanding of genuine choices.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The Gulf monarchies have survived previous moments of regional upheaval by combining fiscal largesse with adroit diplomacy. Both instruments remain available, but their effectiveness has limits in a conflict that has demonstrated Iran’s willingness to inflict direct physical harm regardless of diplomatic temperature.
The path forward requires three things in roughly sequential order: an internal reconciliation of GCC rivalries sufficient to underpin genuine collective defence; a decisive investment in Hormuz-bypassing infrastructure that reduces the leverage Iran can extract from geography; and a calibrated expansion of partnerships—with India above all, and with Israel and Turkey in ways that do not foreclose each other—that gives the Gulf greater strategic depth when American attention eventually wanders.
None of this is straightforward. Regional politics rarely rewards clarity. But the illusion of managed neutrality has been destroyed, and the debris it leaves behind requires something more substantial to replace it. How the Gulf states navigate this reckoning will shape the security and economy of the broader Middle East for a generation.