Gulf States Diverge on Iran Strategy After Leadership Transition

Ali Khamenei was buried on July 9, just over four months after being killed in a joint American-Israeli military strike. The attendance patterns at his funeral immediately mapped the region’s fracturing assumptions. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman sent official delegations. The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain did not. Those absences signaled which Gulf capitals were willing to acknowledge Iran’s durability as a regional power, and which were not.

Before the conflict erupted, the Gulf states had bet heavily on a different future. They were diversifying their economies beyond oil, positioning themselves as islands of stability in a turbulent Middle East. That wager depended on a stable security environment underwritten by American power. President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran, despite their opposition, exposed the fragility of that entire calculation. The conflict did not unfold as a distant confrontation. It came directly to the Gulf’s doorstep.

Additional reference context is available at https://time.com/article/2026/09/14/gulf-uae-saudi-arabia-qatar-iran-war/.

War-risk insurance costs soared. Iranian attacks followed. Saudi facilities at Abqaiq and Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas complex were hit. The UAE intercepted barrages for weeks. Bahrain and Kuwait were not spared. In response, Saudi Arabia and the UAE struck Iran, as did Qatar according to some accounts, though Doha denies it. In private conversations, Gulf officials confirm that most Gulf Arab states retaliated, meaning the conflict became a direct military engagement across the entire region.

The operational reality differed from what many expected. Gulf states managed to intercept the overwhelming majority of what Iran fired at them. Rashid Al-Mohanadi, a Qatari analyst, observed that “restraint backed by functioning defenses is not the same as restraint born of vulnerability.” The Gulf Cooperation Council, created in 1981, never formally invoked its collective-defense clause, but member states reaffirmed their commitment to it as the war progressed. Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment recommended that GCC states share air-defense stockpiles during the attacks, and Gulf officials say that genuine, if discreet, coordination did take place.

Meanwhile, the war revealed something else: the American security umbrella could no longer be taken for granted. Washington was willing to start a regional war alongside Israel despite Gulf objections, and then proved unable or unwilling to manage what followed. Objectives shifted by the week. An administration in a hurry to exit, even as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, left the Gulf Arab states feeling they had been taken to war without being warned, consulted, or protected.

The conflict produced unusual strategic convergence among the Gulf monarchies, even as it exposed the limits of that convergence. Officials broadly agree on three points: Iran remains a long-term threat; the U.S. security umbrella is no longer dependable; and regional stability has become an existential priority. Yet consensus on diagnosis only sharpened disagreement over the prescription. Competition among the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, means that convergence remains a trend rather than a settled fact.

Most Gulf states reverted to a preference for containing and de-escalating rather than confronting Iran. Qatar and Oman pressed Washington toward a memorandum of understanding with Tehran. Saudi Arabia backed the Pakistan-brokered track that produced it. The UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain wanted to fight on but came on board within weeks. Even that agreement highlighted the Gulf’s limited influence; it raised the possibility of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran financed by “regional partners” who were not consulted.

For more than a decade, the Gulf states had been working on a diversification strategy to insure against an unreliable Washington and a threatening Tehran at once. This approach gained momentum after the 2015 nuclear deal eased Tehran’s isolation even as Syria and Yemen deepened fears of Iranian regional reach. The strategy hardened into doctrine after Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018. Not every Gulf state draws the same conclusion about how to navigate a region that will see less American dominance over time, and that debate remains unresolved.

The strategic alignments within the GCC have shifted repeatedly. The Saudi-UAE-Bahrain blockade of Qatar, imposed in 2017, has largely given way to a different configuration, with Riyadh now closer to Doha and Muscat than to Abu Dhabi. Beneath these differences, a growing Gulf consensus is taking shape: a rejection of both an Iranian-led axis and Israeli regional paramountcy, coupled with a willingness to engage pragmatically with both countries. Israel’s pursuit of regional paramountcy has revealed a fundamental divergence over the shape of postwar regional order and helped stall wider normalization in the absence of meaningful progress on Palestinian statehood. Qatar and Oman have maintained channels to Tehran throughout, while Saudi Arabia has adopted a similar posture of strategic restraint, refusing to let its territory be used against Iran and sending a delegation to Khamenei’s funeral.

Every Gulf state is now pursuing some version of the same wager: no single external guarantor can be trusted on its own, so the safer course is to pursue several policies at once rather than commit to a single tack. The UAE does it most visibly, striking Iran directly while also trading with it when convenient and walking out of OPEC without consulting Riyadh. Saudi Arabia finds exasperating the UAE’s preference for early, unilateral action rather than waiting to see whether a deteriorating situation might resolve itself. That gap between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi is the clearest sign that the Gulf states remain a considerable distance from genuine strategic cohesion.

Geography constrains every strategy the Gulf has tried. Iran and the Gulf share the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows. Decades of mutual suspicion have never severed their economic interdependence; Qatar and Iran still jointly exploit the world’s largest gas field. None of that produces trust, but it hasn’t produced pure passivity either. Escalation was available to every Gulf Arab capital, and each chose restraint and diplomacy instead.

Tehran has learned a new kind of leverage from this war, chokepoints rather than proxies, and demonstrated how much strategic leverage control over Hormuz can provide. It has also survived the attempt at regime change, emerging with an economy contracted by 6.1% and inflation near 69%. It cannot sustain an open-ended war against most of its neighbors, and it knows it. That argues for a bargain, unless Tehran’s new leadership judges ending the war on Washington’s terms the greater risk.

The ceasefire that paused the direct U.S.-Iran fighting, brokered largely by Pakistan, never bound Israel at all. Tel Aviv was not a signatory; it kept striking Hezbollah in Lebanon throughout the negotiations and treated the deal’s promise to end hostilities on every front as somebody else’s commitment. Washington backed Israel’s argument. The ceasefire itself came apart on its own terms: talks in Islamabad over access to Hormuz collapsed, and by July, Iranian strikes on commercial vessels that had bypassed Tehran’s approved shipping lane brought the fighting back in earnest.

What is emerging is an uneasy accommodation among adversaries that distrust one another but have run out of cheaper alternatives: an Iran too weakened to sustain war but unable to walk away from it unbeaten, and Gulf states too exposed to keep outsourcing their security to a Washington whose steadfastness in their defense has proved limited. Tehran’s leverage over Hormuz, perhaps its only tangible gain, will last, and it leaves the Gulf states with a long-deferred choice between credible collective defense and continued diversification.

The challenges for Saudi Arabia have increased after the Houthis in Yemen took control of Perim Island in the Bab El-Mandeb strait, which would allow them to disrupt maritime traffic through the Red Sea and weaponize it as a chokepoint. Saudi Arabia has signed the Mecca Pact, a mutual defense agreement with Turkey and Pakistan, though its strength remains untested. Oman is still negotiating to restore navigation through the strait, and a meeting on the subject between Gulf Arab states and Iran was postponed on Sunday.

These initiatives suggest the emergence of not one alliance but overlapping partnerships: a diminished but enduring American partnership; Turkish and Pakistani security ties; bilateral arrangements among Gulf states; and channels of engagement with both Iran and Israel. The Gulf Arab states are not trying to replace Washington but are layering relationships to prevent domination by a single power. Coordination, though, is not collective security. The Gulf needs standing mechanisms for integrated air and missile defense, intelligence-sharing, maritime security, and mutual assistance. The GCC already has much of the institutional skeleton; what it has lacked is the political trust and strategic consensus to make it work. Whether the war has finally generated enough of both is the question that will define the region’s next decade.