The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman — find themselves navigating the most severe security crisis in a generation, as the US-Israeli war on Iran launched on February 28, 2026, has reduced them to unwilling participants in a conflict their decades-long alliances with Washington were meant to prevent. Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli military campaign that assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in its opening hours and targeted missile infrastructure across Iran, triggered an immediate Iranian retaliatory campaign that struck US military bases and civilian infrastructure across at least seven regional countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The fallout has ignited a fundamental debate across the Gulf about whether the security architecture built around American power can be trusted.
The Alliance That Didn’t Hold
For decades, the presence of US military bases across the Gulf served as both a physical deterrent and a psychological guarantee. American facilities in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait — some of the largest US forward operating positions in the world — were understood to make the region too costly for adversaries to target. That calculus collapsed in the first 48 hours of Operation Epic Fury.
According to a CNN investigation published on May 1, 2026, at least 16 American military sites across the Middle East sustained damage during the conflict, with multiple bases rendered “all but uninhabitable” in the war’s early weeks. The Pentagon’s initial public statements describing minimal damage were, according to the report, at odds with classified damage assessments and satellite imagery from companies including Airbus Defence and Planet Labs. Strike damage was confirmed at Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, affecting fuel storage, hangars, and medical facilities. Qatar’s AN/FPS-132 early warning radar — a system valued at approximately $1.1 billion — was reported damaged. Building and radome destruction at the US Fifth Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain was confirmed by Planet Labs imagery from March 1 and 6.
Iran’s retaliatory campaign under what it designated Operation True Promise IV extended the geographic footprint of the war to seven countries within 48 hours of the initial US-Israeli strikes. NBC News reported that Iran struck over 100 targets across 11 bases in multiple countries. One of the war’s most revealing tactical episodes, confirmed by multiple military analysts, saw a decades-old Iranian F-5 Tiger II aircraft penetrate US and coalition air defenses over Kuwait to bomb Camp Buehring during a simultaneous saturation attack using drones and missiles — exploiting a roughly 120-second detection-to-impact window.
Critically, Gulf governments were not warned in advance. According to reporting by the San Diego Union-Tribune, GCC states expressed frustration at Washington’s failure to provide timely notification before the strikes — time that could have allowed them to prepare coordinated defensive measures. As the conflict escalated, US diplomatic staff began evacuating the region, according to the New York Times, leaving Gulf populations exposed to a sustained barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.
Voices from the Region
The sense of betrayal has found sharp expression among Gulf public figures and analysts.
Nayef bin Nahar, a Qatari academic, captured the regional frustration in a widely circulated post on X, writing that US President Donald Trump had left Gulf states to “face their fate alone” against Iran’s missiles. In bin Nahar’s assessment, Gulf societies were viewed by Washington as “barely worth a single barrel of crude” — a critique that resonated widely across the region.
Hind Al Ansari, a visiting researcher at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Gulf International Forum, wrote in Middle East Eye on May 7 that the war had “laid bare the asymmetrical nature of this alliance, where one side leverages the partnership to reinforce its regional ambitions and dominance, while the other pays an astronomical price.” Al Ansari, whose research focuses on Gulf geopolitics and state-society dynamics, argued that the events since February 28 had proved that “Gulf exceptionalism was always a fragile illusion.”
From a different vantage point, Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute in the United Kingdom, told Al Jazeera that the on-again, off-again diplomatic messaging from Washington had created “unwelcome frenzy in the Gulf,” reflecting what she described as “highly fraught and almost frantic diplomatic backchannelling” to extract concessions from Tehran on the nuclear issue.
The Economic Cost
The war’s economic consequences for the Gulf extend well beyond the immediate destruction of infrastructure. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil and 20 percent of its liquefied natural gas normally transit — has been the single most consequential economic event of the conflict. Iran announced the strait “closed” on March 4, prompting commercial tanker traffic to drop by more than 90 percent within days, before declining to near zero. According to the International Maritime Organization, by late April approximately 20,000 mariners and 2,000 ships were stranded in the Persian Gulf.
Brent crude oil prices surpassed $100 per barrel on March 8 for the first time in four years, reaching a peak of $126 per barrel — a faster rate of increase than during any other conflict in recent history, according to market analysts. Aviation and tourism hubs across the UAE and Qatar were disrupted. Smoke plumes from Iranian strikes were visible above Dubai International Airport as early as March 16, according to AFP footage that circulated internationally. Iran-aligned Iraqi militias, operating as the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq,” launched at least 400 strikes against targets in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan, according to SOF News.
The Pentagon estimated the cost to the US military at $18 billion as of March 19, with a further $200 billion supplemental request submitted to Congress. By comparison, the Gulf states absorbed damage to civilian and commercial infrastructure without a corresponding compensation mechanism from their American partner.
Regional and Global Impact
The military and economic disruption has forced a strategic reassessment across the GCC that analysts describe as unprecedented in its directness. Multiple Gulf states moved to restrict US access to their airspace and bases prior to the start of Operation Epic Fury, according to Middle East Eye reporting — a development that US military planners later acknowledged had constrained the operational scope of “Project Freedom,” the follow-on US mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force.
The dual blockade that resulted — the US Navy blockading Iranian ports from April 13 while Iran continued to control transit through the Strait of Hormuz — has turned the Persian Gulf into an arena of sustained economic attrition with global consequences. Fuel shortages and rationing emerged across parts of Asia east of the strait, which depend heavily on Gulf oil flows. The Persian Gulf also accounts for roughly 30 to 35 percent of global urea exports and 20 to 30 percent of ammonia exports, with fertilizer supply chains feeling downstream pressure.
On the political level, the UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf states, but the condemnation produced no tangible protective response for GCC populations. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Soufan Centre collectively concluded, according to reporting in Small Wars Journal, that the United States achieved tactical damage during Operation Epic Fury but could not eliminate the Strait threat, reach underground infrastructure, or produce the political outcome it sought.
Background: Decades of Dependency
The security architecture that has now come under question was built over more than four decades. US military presence in the Gulf expanded dramatically following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, with Operation Desert Storm establishing American basing rights across the region that were subsequently formalized and expanded. Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US air base in the Middle East and the forward headquarters of US Central Command. Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Kuwait and the UAE host significant additional deployments.
The theoretical basis of this arrangement was mutual deterrence: US presence would prevent Iranian aggression, while Gulf states provided basing rights, intelligence cooperation, and economic alignment with Washington. GCC states invested heavily in US political networks, committing to hundreds of billions of dollars in arms purchases and infrastructure investment through the Trump administration alone. President Trump received what American media described as an extravagant welcome during his visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE in 2025, a reception Gulf leaders designed as a demonstration of strategic alignment.
The broader context of the conflict reaches back further. The United States withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, reimposing sanctions and adopting what it called a maximum pressure strategy. Failed nuclear negotiations in Geneva, followed by a 12-day air conflict between Israel and Iran in 2025, set the conditions for the February 28, 2026, escalation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied President Trump directly for a joint military strike, and Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury following high-level meetings in February — with Israeli intelligence cited as a decisive factor, according to multiple reports.
What Happens Next
The immediate trajectory of the conflict hinges on whether the ceasefire extended on an open-ended basis in late April holds, and whether diplomatic negotiations can produce a durable agreement. On May 6, Trump announced a temporary pause in “Project Freedom” — the US Navy’s mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force — citing “great progress” toward a potential agreement with Iran. Trump simultaneously warned that if Iran did not agree to terms, the US would “escalate bombing significantly in terms of intensity and level.”
Ozcelik of RUSI told Al Jazeera that Iran, for its part, wants guarantees that any pause represents the end of the war rather than a temporary suspension. The diplomatic backchannelling she described — aimed at locking Iran into nuclear commitments that exceed previous conditions — suggests the final terms of any settlement remain distant.
For the GCC, the immediate security calculus has already shifted. Analysts expect Gulf states to pursue three parallel tracks: accelerated investment in indigenous air and missile defense capabilities, a renewed push for security arrangements that do not depend solely on a single great power patron, and cautious diplomatic engagement with regional actors — including, potentially, Iran itself — to reduce the risk of being caught again in a bilateral conflict they did not start and cannot control.
Al Ansari, writing from Georgetown, framed the challenge in existential terms for Gulf policymakers: the myth of being protected from the outside is over, and the real task is to build a future in which Gulf societies are “no longer treated as expendable backdrops for someone else’s war.” Whether the political will exists across the GCC to convert that aspiration into a coherent new security doctrine remains the defining question of the post-Epic Fury order.
