Gulf Arab states explore new options as U.S. bases fail to deter Iran
Their backs against a wall, Gulf Arab officials are now trying to cobble together different ways to avoid attacks by Iran and its allies, including direct diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Gulf Arab countries have long relied for their security on the U.S. military bases that they host.
But after six months of war, the repeated pummeling of those countries by Iranian missiles and drones has made the limitations of U.S. security guarantees abundantly clear.
Iran and its allies have nearly destroyed some of the U.S. bases, set luxury hotels ablaze, and, most recently, knocked offline one of the most critical pieces of energy infrastructure in the world, an oil pipeline that stretches across Saudi Arabia.
Their backs against a wall, Gulf Arab officials are now trying to cobble together different ways to avoid attacks by Iran and its allies, including direct diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.
Even that option faces challenges. On Sunday night, a meeting that was scheduled for Monday between Iran and the Gulf Arab states was abruptly postponed. The delay came after Saudi Arabia and Iran reached an impasse in discussions about the Strait of Hormuz — a crucial route for Gulf energy exporters — according to a senior Gulf official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Analysts say the region’s leaders have no choice but to seek different security options after the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran exposed the vulnerabilities of the Gulf Arab countries and emboldened the Islamic Republic.
“We’re stuck in this position of trying to build something new while maintaining some of the old,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “We need to snap out of this external protector syndrome.”
The island nation of Bahrain, for example, has been host to a major U.S. naval base for decades in the hopes of protecting itself from Iran. But as in other Gulf countries, the base became a target instead.
The base was nearly destroyed in February, on the first day of Iran’s retaliatory attacks against the assault launched by the United States and Israel. Most of the sailors stationed there were evacuated to Florida, leaving a skeleton crew, according to a U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
Some sailors in Bahrain were evacuated so rapidly that the U.S. Navy is still trying to reunite them with their belongings, Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said at a recent town hall meeting. It is unclear when they will return, he said.
For the United States and its allies in the Middle East, the war has incurred steep costs. Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz represents a major strategic failure and an economic setback for Gulf energy exporters. The inability of U.S. forces to fend off attacks by Iran is another strategic failure, which could have significant consequences for those countries and for the United States’ projection of power.
Yet Bahrain and the other Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, have no clear, single alternative to the United States as the guarantor of their security.
Their militaries are smaller and weaker than Iran’s, despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advanced weaponry in recent decades, including American F-15 fighter jets and Patriot missile defense systems.
China and Russia have not stepped in to defend the Gulf countries, despite close ties with many of them.
Many Gulf officials are calling for greater regional self-sufficiency in defense. But efforts to bolster regional security — like a new defense pact among Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey — are unproven. It remains unclear whether any of these countries will be willing and able to come to each other’s aid.
The most realistic option for Gulf countries is to build defense partnerships that will “supplement, rather than replace, the U.S. security umbrella,” said Yasmine Farouk, Gulf and Arabian Peninsula project director at the International Crisis Group.
Gulf analysts and officials say that without U.S. assistance and American weaponry, such as air defenses, the damage to the Gulf states would have been far worse. Dozens of people were killed in the Iranian attacks, instead of hundreds or thousands. Flights carrying tourists and businesspeople were canceled and delayed but have started to resume.
Still, Iran’s campaign wreaked havoc on the energy-rich economies of the Gulf countries, cracking their images as safe havens in a volatile region.
The war proved that the Gulf’s advanced defense systems are not “leak proof,” and that Iran can “impose major costs” on the countries by using large numbers of relatively cheap drones, said Kristian Alexander, a senior fellow at the Rabdan Security & Defence Institute, a government-linked research institution in the UAE.
Facing fierce counterattacks from Iran, the United States “prioritized protecting its personnel and defending Israel,” Alexander added. “These priorities did not always coincide with the Gulf’s needs to protect airports, ports, desalination plants.”
The short supply of U.S. missile interceptors globally also posed a challenge for the Gulf Arab states in the early weeks of the war, and they have tried to fill the gap by turning to Ukraine and other European countries. But even enhanced air defenses against relatively inexpensive Iranian drones cannot provide complete protection.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said President Donald Trump is “in constant communication” with regional partners and that the United States “maintains stronger bonds with these countries than ever before.”
She dismissed the idea that U.S. military protection for the Gulf countries has been insufficient, saying that analysts who assert that “are not privy to sensitive diplomatic conversations and have no idea what they are talking about.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
