The U.S.–Israel war against Iran is not just another Middle Eastern confrontation. It marks the moment when America’s Gulf partners stop treating Washington as their ultimate insurance policy and begin imagining a future in which U.S. power is optional rather than presumed. A campaign intended to reassert Western dominance has instead exposed the fragility of the very security order it sought to defend.

On February 28, Washington and Tel Aviv launched Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, deploying some of the most advanced weapons in modern warfare. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening hours. Thousands of strikes hit targets across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, and beyond. By any measure of openingday firepower, the assault was overwhelming.

And yet Iran did not collapse.

Its leadership architecture—designed precisely for this scenario—absorbed the decapitation strike and reconstituted within hours. A threeperson interim council emerged, and a successor to Khamenei is already being named. The Revolutionary Guard continues to fight. A system engineered for crisis has demonstrated that it can function under direct attack, and Tehran has made unmistakably clear that it does not intend to seek a cease-fire. “We didn’t ask for a cease-fire even last time,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC News this week. “That was Israel that asked for an unconditional cease-fire.”

What followed the opening strikes has proven even more consequential for the regional order.

The supposedly “untouchable” American bases scattered across the Middle East became highvalue targets overnight. Iranian missiles and allied militias struck U.S. installations in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, and Iraq with a reach and volume that shattered the myth of invulnerability. American soldiers have been killed on the ground. The U.S. Embassy in Kuwait was hit and closed indefinitely. Key nodes in America’s regional military network have been degraded or paralyzed, freezing movement and planning across the theater.

For Gulf rulers, the message is brutally simple: hosting American power no longer guarantees protection. It may instead paint a target on your territory.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi—cities that built their global brands on stability and neutrality—have taken Iranian missile and drone strikes. Jebel Ali port, the commercial heart of the United Arab Emirates, has been hit. Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, the operational nerve center of U.S. Central Command, has been targeted. These are not abstract geopolitical signals. They are craters in cities that once believed themselves “too global to bomb.” Most uncomfortably, the UAE—having normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords—now finds its showcase cities under Iranian fire because of a war driven by its new partner.

Investors are drawing their own conclusions. Oil prices have spiked. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a crawl. Insurers are repricing the Gulf as a war zone rather than a safe haven. The presence of U.S. forces, long treated as political risk insurance, suddenly looks like the risk itself.

Israel faces a parallel reckoning. Its celebrated air and missile defenses have struggled against waves of Iranian drones and missiles. Strikes have landed near Jerusalem. At least a dozen Israelis have been killed. Each successful penetration does more than physical damage—it erodes the psychological foundation of deterrence that Israel has spent decades constructing. The costexchange ratio is tilting in ways planners feared privately but rarely acknowledged publicly.

Across the Gulf, a quiet but profound strategic reassessment is underway. Wealthy Arab states that outsourced much of their security to Washington are confronting an uncomfortable reality: if American forces can be struck this easily, and if U.S. air defenses can be saturated or bypassed, then the old assumption—that alignment with Washington guarantees survival—no longer holds with certainty. Gulf monarchies are not waiting for Washington to draw conclusions on their behalf; they are drawing their own. This is not a future risk. It is a present condition.

The irony runs deep. Washington and Tel Aviv chose this confrontation while Iranian officials were telling reporters that a “historic” agreement was “within reach.” They launched while talks were active—a sequence Iran’s leadership will not forget and will use to argue, for years, that American diplomacy is a tactical holding action rather than genuine engagement.

The deeper danger for the United States is not military but structural. If Gulf states conclude that relying solely on American protection is a liability—that proximity to U.S. bases invites rather than deters attack—they will redesign their security and economic architecture accordingly. That means more regional diplomacy that bypasses Washington, more diversification toward Asian partners, and greater willingness to resist American pressure when it conflicts with domestic stability.

This realignment was already in motion before the first bomb fell. The Saudi–Iran rapprochement brokered by China in 2023 signaled that Beijing could deliver what Washington would not. The Gulf’s studied neutrality on Ukraine showed that energy producers were no longer willing to fall in line behind Western sanctions policy. Deepening ties with Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Moscow reflected a growing conviction that the unipolar moment was over in practice, if not in rhetoric. The strikes on Iran did not create this trend. They accelerated it.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reshaped Europe’s strategic landscape and pushed Moscow into partnerships few would have predicted a decade ago. The U.S.–Israel confrontation with Iran is forcing a parallel realignment in the Middle East—toward a more nonaligned posture, with Gulf monarchies hedging between powers rather than anchoring firmly in the Western camp.

Washington will, of course, adapt. Pentagon planners are already debating more dispersed basing, greater reliance on standoff platforms and missile defenses, and new forms of “hostnation risk sharing.” But these adaptations all begin from a weaker bargaining position if Gulf rulers believe the American security guarantee is no longer unique—and no longer free of blowback.

The question Washington has not yet answered—and may not be asking—is what it wins if it succeeds militarily but loses the region strategically. Gulf rulers will not forget what they have seen. And they are already acting on it.

© Eurasia Review