How Donald Trump’s Iran War Is Destabilizing the Gulf
Since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, over a week ago, more than one thousand Iranians have reportedly been killed, and Iran has responded by attacking various Gulf states—such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—which are allied with the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel has also been relentlessly bombing Lebanon, with the intention of disarming or wiping out Hezbollah, a paramilitary group backed by Iran which fired rockets at Israel earlier in the war. (Almost seven hundred thousand people have been driven out of their homes in Lebanon since Israel began its campaign, per the U.N.) Although many of the Gulf states have worked to counter Iranian influence in the region, often by way of military conflicts waged through proxies, there is no strong evidence that they supported the decision by the U.S. to attack Iran.
I recently spoke by phone with Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the British think tank Chatham House, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to understand how countries in the Gulf were balancing animosity toward the Iranian regime with concerns about what a wider war could mean for the region and the global economy. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Before the war started, there was a lot of talk that many of the Sunni states in the Middle East, which had historically been opposed to Iran, were nevertheless concerned that Israel was on the verge of becoming the regional hegemon. How do you look at that question now, after more than a week of the United States and Israel’s waging an extremely aggressive war with shifting goals?
First of all, I would perhaps recharacterize the states you’re talking about, so as not to refer to them as Sunni states. I think the sectarian prism is a bit of a dated way to categorize the region, and is frequently the way Israel goes about dividing a region that is much more of a mosaic and a tapestry of different identities that don’t fit cleanly in these sectarian blocks. But most of the countries around Iran are really caught between two destabilizing regional states.
Iran has been a historical threat for most of its neighbors since 1979, but even before that, under the Pahlavi monarchy, it did exert hegemonic influence. And since October 7th, as Israel revised its security strategy away from what it calls “mowing the lawn,” or containing Iran-backed threats, Arab states have seen Israel as an actively destabilizing regional force. This is not because they don’t understand Israel’s security concerns, or because they support Hamas or Hezbollah. They see these groups as extremists, obviously Iran-backed, and responsible for weak governance in Palestine, in Lebanon, et cetera. But, in tandem, they see Israel’s behavior across the region as having gone far beyond degrading these groups and moving into regional destabilization, which is a serious challenge for Arab states.
I think the biggest example of this, which shows this challenge for regional states, particularly Gulf Arab states, is what took place in Qatar just last year. An American airbase in the country was hit by Iranian missiles as part of the twelve-day war last June, in which America and Israel attacked Iran, and then Qatar was also hit by Israel later that year, when the Israelis targeted Hamas leaders in Doha. Those attacks really exemplified and amplified the challenge for a lot of Arab states across the region. They don’t have the ability to manage or contain Israel or Iran.
There has been conflicting speculation and opinion about how the Gulf states, mainly Saudi Arabia, view this conflict, and especially how they viewed the possibility of conflict before it started. Do you have an understanding of whether they were in favor of the United States and Israel attacking Iran?
I think that the entire region knew that a war was inevitable in 2026, because the twelve-day war last June didn’t fully address the security issues from the perspective of the U.S. and Israel. And for the Gulf states, in particular, they were very acutely worried that this war would produce a massive destabilization that would end up with them as the targets. Why did they think that? Well, first of all, Iran had been messaging and warning them, making clear that this would be their response strategy. And, second, the Gulf states have been on the front line of past wars in the Gulf, going back to the Iran-Iraq War in the nineteen-eighties, and obviously the 1990 Gulf War. They collectively and individually lobbied the Bush Administration not to go into Iraq in 2003. And again, going into 2026, they pursued the same strategy. They recognized that this war would risk creating a conflict that spilled over into other countries in the region. So, bilaterally and collectively, they first pursued a strategy of trying to implore the Trump Administration to pursue diplomacy with Iran.
The Washington Post has reported that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was in favor of the war, for example, although the Saudis have denied this. But you are skeptical of the claim that they were in favor?
Yeah. There could have been some sort of eleventh-hour effort at convincing the Trump Administration that, if they were going to attack Iran, to try to do it properly and execute a war that wouldn’t leave the region vulnerable. But I think the fears of Gulf states have been borne out even worse than they imagined, because, obviously, the Iranians have struck more than just military installations, with strikes on infrastructure, energy sites, and civilian spaces. The diversity of these targets has exposed the weakness in the security architecture of Gulf states, and the reality of their geography being their destiny. And the strikes have also brought up a host of other issues. For example, the United States actually didn’t protect Gulf interests and prioritized protecting Israel’s interests. So the war has brought up a lot of security challenges that cannot be quickly or easily resolved. And I think the worst-case scenario for the Gulf states is playing out, because they’re seeing a U.S.-Israeli operation being executed very effectively, perhaps, on a military level, but with no day-after planning, and they recognize that President Trump has a short attention span and, as pressure mounts, could abruptly exit this war, leaving the region both paying the price for the war, and also exposed to what version of the Islamic Republic remains.
Does that mean you think the Gulf States hope that the Americans and the Israelis only stop the war after there is regime change in Iran and the Islamic Republic has come to an end, or do you think they just want the war to be over quickly?
I think that they want both things, but they’re very aware that the former is unachievable. You cannot fully dismantle this regime. That’s the reality. It’s heavily institutionalized and bureaucratized. And, even if you eliminate chains of command by killing and decapitating, there will still be bureaucrats, technocrats, and security officials who have been part of this regime. I think that they want this war to end as soon as possible, but they remain very anxious about the day after. And they think that a weakened, fragmented, divided Iran is going to be equally hard on its neighbors, from a humanitarian perspective, from an economic perspective, and from a security perspective. And we should also, obviously, say very clearly that the populations of these states have been watching the Gaza war for over two years and have become heavily politicized, and are now living through this war which has punctured the image of the Gulf as a safe haven for economic interests and as a destination for tourists. And they look vulnerable to Iranian attacks, even though they have mounted very effective defensive operations. That defense is a silver lining, but vulnerabilities have still been revealed.
You mentioned the Gulf states trying to convince the Bush Administration that invading Iraq was a mistake, and I’m thinking about how the relationship between the Gulf states and America has changed since then. One factor that feels very different from 2002 or 2003 is that some of the governments of the Gulf states have been paying Trump and his family. The Wall Street Journal reported that a U.A.E. government official invested half a billion dollars in the Trump family’s crypto company. Qatar basically bought Trump a plane. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is involved in business opportunities throughout the Middle East. And yet all of this added up to very little for the Gulf states. Does that make you question the relationship going forward?
I think this is a really important point, because the Gulf states were quite enthusiastic about Trump returning to office. They obviously were so deeply frustrated, if not angry, with President Biden for his position on the Gaza war, and for his overly indulgent position toward Netanyahu during the war. And so they saw President Trump as being more pragmatic, transactional, and they hosted him very early on in his second term in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, where he made this famous speech criticizing the idea of regime change and promised that the era of neoconservative American-funded operations in the region would be over, and this was a new America that with the Middle East was going to focus on “commerce, not chaos” and exporting “technology, not terrorism.” And this was wholly celebrated across the Gulf, that they would continue to be able to do business with the President and his family, and that the U.S. respected them, saw them as stable partners.
And I think, unfortunately, since then, they’ve been deeply disappointed by the Trump Administration. They’ve invested in the United States financially, and, I would say, they are still deeply committed to, and invested in, their security relationship with the U.S. Qatar, before this, had doubled down on its relationship with the U.S. It’s not just Qatar—each Gulf state has its own offering to the U.S., if you will, be it tech, be it a regional role, et cetera. Going forward, I don’t think this style of relationship is going to change right away, but there are certainly deep frustrations across the Gulf that this war has exposed, and concerns that it has made them vulnerable, that America hasn’t had their back. And I think there will be a tail to this.
You said that the Gulf states were fed up with Biden over Gaza. Saudi Arabia was also fed up at the beginning of Biden’s term, over what it perceived to be his moralism about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But I always assumed that the reason people like Mohammed bin Salman were angry about Gaza was not the reasons many of us were angry about Gaza but, rather, because he hoped that, after some sort of fig-leaf peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, you could have normalization agreements between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Saudi business in the region would go more smoothly, while the Palestinian problem would be pushed to the side, and this was how the Middle East could function. And October 7th and the Gaza war made clear that that was a fiction, if it ever had been truly possible. And then what the past few years have revealed is not just that these countries can’t align with Israel, because their publics would be very angry about it, but that Israel is also now being so aggressive in the region that they have to rethink that entire idea. Is that too cynical?
No. The cynicism prevails. Many Gulf leaders were clearly flirting with the idea that normalization could, through stronger economic ties and security partnerships, lead to greater regional integration, with or without the Palestinians. But there were two missing pieces in this vision for the region. One was the very clear sidestepping of Palestinian sovereignty, and the second was the issue of Iran. And I think these issues were ignored because people were taking too much of a zero-sum approach to the idea of normalization.
What do you mean?
Israelis see normalization as support of Israel at the expense of Iran. But the Abraham Accords weren’t an overt security arrangement. Israel has not come to the defense of those states, for example. Certainly, the U.A.E. and Bahrain—which signed the Abraham Accords—and Israel share a view that Iran is a destabilizing regional threat, but they diverge on how to manage Iran as a regional threat, right? And for other Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia or beyond, their alignment with Israel on seeing Iran in a negative way aside, they couldn’t publicly allow themselves to be perceived as pro-Israel, given the war in Gaza. And so, in addition to the challenge of the Palestinians, this has led to an abrupt halt in talking about normalization, at least for now. It doesn’t mean it can’t resurface in the future. Right now, Israel is seen as aggressive and destabilizing, and normalizing relations would be a real challenge.
So you’re essentially saying that the Israelis saw normalization with the Gulf states as part of a strategy to contain Iran.
A hundred per cent.
But the Gulf states saw it differently? What was their rationale, then? The Saudis would get access to nuclear technology from the United States, which the Biden Administration implied it would help them with in return for normalization?
I think that there were many reasons for the Gulf states to move forward with normalization. It made sense to integrate; it made sense to share technology and build and benefit from Israel’s strong defense capabilities. But I think, ultimately, for many of the countries, this was also about the United States. It was about anchoring the U.S. as a partner in the accords to keep the United States engaged and present in the region. I think there were multiple motivations, and maybe, behind the scenes, there was this thought of, O.K., well, we’ll work together to share intelligence. We’re going to eventually integrate our air defenses—but it wasn’t going to result in this immediate anti-Iranian alliance, as the U.S. has tried to pitch it, or as many sorts of strategists would have hoped it would be.
In your first answer, you said that looking at the region through a lens of Sunni versus Shia is misleading in some way, especially when it comes to Iran’s poor relations with some of its neighbors. But, certainly, many of the proxy conflicts that Iran and these states have got involved in, from Syria to Lebanon, have had this through line. So, can you explain why you don’t like that framing?
First of all, their populations are much more diverse. Second, not all Shia groups are the same, nor are they aligned. Third, we are post-sectarian in the Middle East, and that has been a sort of ideological shift that we have seen over the past ten years as well. As countries have normalized, they’ve moved away from instrumentalizing religious rhetoric. All the way down to Saudi Arabia, there’s been a step away from this religious language. The problems between these states are structural, about competition, and about power. I don’t think that religion and identity explain the tensions, even if they are sometimes used by leaders to justify competition and regional interventionism, for example. Yes, Iran has had a greater degree of success in working with Shia groups like Hezbollah, but Iran also has a broad array of non-state relationships that don’t align that way.
Such as Hamas.
Hamas, yes, and some non-state-actor groups in Iraq. And the Assad regime wasn’t a so-called Twelver Shia state. The commonality of these groups is less about religion and more about resistance to the U.S. and Israel. But, second, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia have been embracing more liberal interpretations of Islam and less exportation of Islam across the region, which has been received well internationally as well as regionally. Just look at the competition with, and eventual blockade of, Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and others, which started in 2017. So many of these issues are driven by issues of governance, economic competition, and various regional rivalries, which sometimes play out through proxy groups. It’s much more complicated now than Sunni vs. Shia. ♦