U.S. Launches 80+ Strikes as Iran Tanker Attack Shatters Gulf Ceasefire

Airstrikes resumed on July 8 after Tehran struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a cascade of military escalations that has fundamentally altered the regional balance. The United States launched more than 80 strikes against Iranian targets and reimposed a naval blockade, with President Donald Trump declaring the 60-day ceasefire and the June 17 memorandum of understanding “over.” By July 19, the U.S. had carried out at least eight waves of strikes, progressively moving beyond military installations to target civilian infrastructure, including bridges, an airport and power plants inside Iran.

Iran’s retaliation widened rapidly. Strikes hit a power and desalination plant in Kuwait, the Bahrain Petroleum Company refinery, a military base in Jordan that killed two U.S. service members, and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and Prince Sultan Air Base. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed its first strike on a U.S. command post in eastern Syria. In Yemen, the Houthis launched their own missile barrage at Saudi Arabia after accusing Riyadh of bombing an airport under their control, ending a four-year truce. Pakistan warned Iran that any further attacks on Saudi Arabia, whether Iranian or Houthi-backed, would be treated as attacks on Pakistan itself under the mutual defense agreement signed last September.

Additional reference context is available at https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-paths-forward-for-the-gulf-states-and-iran/.

These military developments have unraveled months of diplomatic progress. In late June, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio completed a three-day reassurance tour through the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain, aimed at securing Gulf Arab support for an emerging U.S.-Iran framework while reaffirming American security commitments. On June 25, the United States and the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council issued a joint statement emphasizing that lasting peace would require addressing Iran’s ballistic missiles, drones and proxy support, while protecting “free, unconditional, and unrestricted navigation” in the Strait of Hormuz. That same day, reporting indicated that the Emiratis were engaged in unprecedented conversations with Iranians, including the IRGC. A June 12 Reuters report had detailed Abu Dhabi’s agreement to unlock billions of dollars in Tehran-linked funds in exchange for reduced Iranian attacks and support for broader stabilization talks.

The current military escalation has exposed the fundamental strategic vulnerability facing the Gulf monarchies. The U.S.-Israel air campaign confirmed what Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and other Gulf states had long feared: that any large-scale conflict with Iran, regardless of outcome, would exact enormous costs on their own security, economies and political stability. This reflects a persistent strategic paradox that has constrained Gulf decision-making for years. While these states have sought to constrain Iranian power through close alignment with the United States and, more recently, through expanding security ties with Israel under the Abraham Accords, they have also understood that they would face the most direct exposure to Iranian retaliation. This tension was evident in their deep unease over the 2015 nuclear agreement, which they feared would strengthen Iran economically without sufficiently curbing its regional ambitions, even as they recognized that the collapse of diplomacy could make war more likely.

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent regional war fundamentally complicated this calculus. The Gulf monarchies initially viewed Israel’s campaign against Hamas and its systematic degradation of Iran’s regional proxy network, including Hezbollah and contributions to the collapse of the Assad regime, as broadly consistent with their own interest in weakening Tehran. These nations have long been threatened by Iran’s destabilization of the Arab world through armed proxies, its ballistic missile buildup and its nuclear pursuits. But Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly the entire population, increasingly unsettled even its closest Arab partners. The scale of destruction strained the UAE’s Israel normalization, raised Egyptian fears of forced Palestinian displacement into Sinai, and revived Jordanian anxieties over becoming an “alternative homeland.” Israel’s military actions against Syria’s government and especially its September 2025 strike on Qatar made Israel appear less as a valuable strategic partner than as an increasingly assertive and unpredictable regional actor.

By contrast, Vice President JD Vance has sharpened his public criticism of Israel over the course of the war. In a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan that aired on July 15 and 16, Vance accused elements within the Israeli government of running an influence campaign to shift American opinion and policy away from diplomacy, saying some officials want the war “to continue indefinitely” and citing a Time magazine report on funding tied to these efforts. In mid-June, around the signing of the ceasefire memorandum with Iran, he rebuked Israeli Cabinet ministers who criticized the deal, telling them, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem,” and warning them that in their shoes he would not be attacking “the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” He separately faulted Israeli strikes on Beirut for killing civilians and jeopardizing diplomacy. According to Axios, in late March he criticized Netanyahu directly for being overly optimistic about predictions regarding the war’s trajectory. These remarks amount to an unusual and escalating rift between a sitting Republican vice president, widely seen as Trump’s political heir, and one of Washington’s closest allies.

The Trump administration’s emerging global geostrategy compounds Gulf Arab anxieties further. This approach replaces the post-World War II U.S.-led security order with one centered on burden-sharing and burden-shifting. Rather than serving as the primary guarantor of regional security, Washington increasingly expects allies and partners to assume the lead role in managing threats within their own neighborhoods, with the Middle East relying principally on Turkey and Saudi Arabia as its key Muslim powers. For Riyadh, this represents a profound strategic adjustment. The kingdom has long depended on American military guarantees, and its decision to sign the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Pakistan last September suggests an effort to acquire additional military capacity and strategic depth by drawing the South Asian nuclear power more directly into Gulf security planning.

The strategic calculus is further shaped by an increasingly open divergence between the United States and Israel over the desired end state in Iran. The war dramatically weakened the Islamic Republic but fell well short of toppling the regime. The Trump administration has consistently pursued a negotiated settlement centered on Iran’s nuclear program and curbing its long-standing strategy of exploiting the Palestinian issue and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict to undermine the regional security architecture. Israel, by contrast, has signaled a preference for maintaining sustained pressure on Tehran beyond a narrowly defined nuclear agreement. Israeli officials have repeatedly argued that the strategic opportunity created by the degradation of Iran’s regional position should be exploited to further weaken the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities rather than traded for a limited nuclear accord. This contrasts with the Trump administration’s apparent emphasis on securing verifiable nuclear restrictions, even if doing so leaves issues such as Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and its long-term ability to regenerate its network of regional partners unresolved. For the Gulf Arab states, the implication is that any agreement, even one limited in scope, is likely to provide the Iranian regime with sufficient economic relief to survive, even as uncertainty over Tehran’s future posture remains exceptionally high.

The operational reality facing the Gulf monarchies is unambiguous: they must contend with the enduring fact of sharing the Gulf with a more strategically consequential Iran. The war transformed what had long been a theoretical concern into an operational fact. Geography gives Tehran the ability to threaten Gulf infrastructure, population centers and military facilities through missiles and drones whenever it chooses to escalate. Over the medium to long term, the Gulf monarchies can reduce one of Iran’s principal sources of leverage by diversifying energy export routes and lessening their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz. By expanding pipelines, overland transport networks and alternative export terminals that bypass the strait, these states can reduce this vulnerability, weaken Iran’s coercive leverage and enhance the resilience of global energy markets. Over time, such diversification would shift the regional balance by depriving Tehran of one of its most potent tools of strategic coercion, making threats to disrupt maritime commerce increasingly costly and less effective as an instrument of statecraft. Yet no amount of infrastructure investment can alter geography, leaving the Arab states with the fundamental strategic challenge of devising a durable working relationship with their Persian neighbor without compromising their own security or strategic autonomy.

The Gulf Arab states now face a strategic predicament analogous to that confronting the Central Asian republics following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021. Led by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Central Asians have largely adopted a pragmatic policy of engagement with the Taliban, not out of affinity but from the calculus that sustained economic ties and political dialogue are the best means of mitigating threats emanating from an unavoidable neighbor. Rather than attempting to isolate the new rulers in Afghanistan, Astana and Tashkent have steadily expanded diplomatic contacts, trade and infrastructure cooperation. Uzbekistan has pursued the proposed Trans-Afghan Railway to secure access to Pakistani ports while increasing electricity exports to Afghanistan; Kazakhstan has resumed grain exports, hosted Taliban representatives and removed the movement from its terrorist list to facilitate commercial engagement. These policies reflect neither ideological endorsement nor formal recognition of the Taliban government, but rather the judgment that integrating Afghanistan into regional trade networks and maintaining open channels of communication offers the best prospect for containing cross-border militancy, managing migration pressures and preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a source of regional instability.

For the Gulf monarchies, the logic is similar, even if the stakes are considerably higher given Iran’s vastly greater military capabilities and regional reach. That same logic helps explain why the Trump administration’s preliminary framework includes a proposed 300 billion dollar reconstruction fund for Iran: economic stabilization is viewed not simply as an inducement for Tehran, but as an investment in a more manageable regional order. Whether that investment can hold against the pressures now bearing down on it from multiple directions remains the defining open question for every government bordering the Gulf.