The US war on Iran remains deadlocked, with President Donald Trump extending the tenuous ceasefire but indicating no offramp as he continues the maritime pressure campaign. A new analysis by Şaban Kardaş and Nesibe Hicret Battaloğlu contends that while the Gulf Arab states seek a resolution to the conflict, Washington must take seriously the reality that the future regional order will include Tehran as an enduring stakeholder. – ed.
The war on Iran has exposed a fundamental divergence between how Gulf states, the United States, and Israel conceptualize both the conflict and their desired outcomes. While Washington and Tel Aviv seek to decisively weaken or even transform the Iranian regime, the Arab Gulf views the conflict as a dangerous disruption to a shared regional order in which Tehran remains an unavoidable yet permanent stakeholder.
Until the announcement of a ceasefire on April 8, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states were direct targets of Iranian missile and drone strikes. Although officials in Tehran repeatedly asserted that US military facilities constituted their primary targets, the attacks destroyed critical energy infrastructure and civilian facilities. Of the roughly 7,900 Iran-linked projectiles launched, Gulf countries absorbed about 75 percent, compared to just 17 percent for Israel.
The pattern indicated a targeted pressure campaign to disrupt economic stability and energy infrastructure among the Gulf states. International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol reported that at least 40 energy facilities across nine Middle Eastern countries have been heavily damaged, cutting the global supply of liquefied natural gas by around 20 percent and causing one of the largest energy disruptions ever.
Despite being the key American allies in the region, the Gulf states have declined to extend wholesale support to the US operations. While they have sharply protested Iranian aggression—in some cases using a language of retaliation and exhorting Washington to “finish the job”—GCC governments have refrained from responding with offensive military action. Instead, they have demonstrated considerable strategic restraint, calling for de-escalation and advocating a return to diplomacy.
A key reason for this response to Iranian strikes is the limited number of strategies available to Gulf states, most of which carry significant risks. One option, granting the United States broader access to airspace, bases, or military facilities, would deepen GCC states’ entanglement in the conflict, exposing them to further attacks. Likewise, direct offensive military action against Iranian targets would likely trigger a cycle of escalation, inviting intensified retaliation and increasing damage to critical civilian and economic infrastructure. Both options would undermine the region’s stability and future.
‘Shadow of the Future’ and Gulf State Calculations
Beyond the enormous costs of the alternatives, a major reason for GCC strategic restraint is the shadow of the future. Drawn from game theory, the concept holds that expectations of continued interactions lead actors away from zero-sum logic. Their decisions during periods of crisis therefore tend toward cooperation. When states take into account the shadow of the future, they place greater weight on long-term stability.
Of the factors often overlooked in Washington’s thinking is how regional actors perceive the stakes of conflict. However deep its involvement in a given region, the United States is a global power that can—and, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, eventually will—disengage. By contrast, local actors are subject to substantially different dynamics. They bear the direct threats and consequences, which in turn alters their calculations and tolerance for exposure to the costs. Moreover, the reality of sharing a common neighborhood with the putative enemy shapes patterns of thinking about the future.
The United States and Israel have framed the Iran War as a rare strategic opportunity. Both have sought maximalist objectives that range from degrading the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities to instigating regime change. The overall logic is to eliminate a long-term threat or at least re-establish deterrence. The belief that Iran must be decisively confronted now prioritizes military outcomes over regional stability, even at the risk of perpetuating an escalation cycle. This strategy appears to have led to a lack of concern for the blowback facing the states closest to the front lines.
By contrast, Gulf states operate under a fundamentally different strategic and ideational framework. For these actors, the existential threat is not necessarily Iran but the war itself. With cities, economies, and critical infrastructure directly exposed to retaliation, escalation may unleash intolerable material damage and even erode state capacity, leading to risk thresholds that diverge from those of Washington and Tel Aviv. A wider war could transform the region from a hub of global commerce into a battlefield of weakening petrostates.
Beyond material vulnerability lies a deeper ideational factor: Iran is not a distant adversary but a permanent neighbor. This produces a markedly different strategic approach, one grounded not in the language of decisive victory but in coexistence. Once relations harden into enduring hostility, they are difficult to reverse, often reproducing cycles of confrontation across generations. Actions by GCC members must therefore be understood as shaped by long-term patterns of amity and enmity.
Gulf states’ discourses have thus reflected a deliberate effort to avoid crossing a threshold into a realm of irreversible enmity. Official statements have repeatedly emphasized “good neighborliness,” the refusal to be drawn into war, and the importance of maintaining communication channels. Even after being targeted, Gulf officials or experts have stressed that they will “continue talking to the Iranians” and underlined that they “do not want [Iranians to] remember at any time in the future that we fired a bullet towards Iran.” The distinction drawn between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people, and the insistence on dialogue amid damaging attacks, have signaled a forward-looking concern with how today’s actions will define tomorrow’s relationships.
Restraint, therefore, is not simply tactical; it is an attempt to prevent the crystallization of a durable pattern of conflict that would define the region’s future. A blunt, militarized response to Iran, however justified, can sow the seeds of new hostilities, which can entrap future generations in a long cycle of insecurity.
Asymmetry: Iran Fights Like There’s No Tomorrow
With its behavior since the zero hour, Iran has hardly lived up to this vision of a common future in a shared neighborhood. Regime officials have issued statements emphasizing respect for neighboring countries and even offered apologies and assurances that attacks would not continue unless provoked. However, the rhetoric has not consistently translated into restraint on the ground. Although Gulf states explicitly declared neutrality and refused to facilitate US or Israeli operations, they have nevertheless been targeted by Iranian missile and drone strikes, raising doubts about the credibility and coherence of Tehran’s strategy.
Iranian aggression was especially shocking given the diplomacy before the outbreak of the war. GCC states had engaged Tehran through a dual framework that combined external security guarantees with efforts at regional de-escalation. Despite the Arab Gulf quest for de-securitization over confrontation, Iran’s unchecked aggression deepened distrust. This not only complicated Gulf efforts to sustain a framework of coexistence but also imposed an imperative to abandon restraint in favor of greater coordination and engagement with the war coalition.
This latter path has been increasingly embraced by some Gulf officials. Anwar Gargash, a key adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, rejected the normalization of “tension, threats, and aggression,” stressing that it is “impossible to return to the previous pace” of relations with Iran without “review, candor, and guarantees.” It is possible that such a hard line, given the likely survival of the regime in Tehran, could take root as a point of divergence among the GCC nations.
Despite the potential for such divisions, the GCC’s contrast with the US-Israeli approach remains stark. Washington and Tel Aviv have pursued a war to reshape Iran; their putative partners in the Gulf have been trying to survive it without allowing the region to become a permanent conflict zone. This reflects not only different interests but also fundamentally different conceptions of the future. For the United States and Israel, Iran is a problem to be solved. For the Gulf, it is a neighbor to be managed—and, ultimately, one with whom a future must still be shared.
You can find other incisive examinations in our Spring 2026 journal, our free special issue, Washington’s War on Iran, and The Israel-Iran War, our coverage of the 2025 campaign against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. And check out the Middle East Policy Council’s website for insights from its analysts.
Middle East Policy, Spring 2026
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