The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has put the Gulf states in an impossible position. The American forces they host have become the main reason their hotels and energy infrastructure are under Iranian attack. Although Iranian military assets are badly degraded, Tehran retains the capacity to strike the Gulf, and its grip on the Strait of Hormuz is undiminished. U.S. President Donald Trump is as likely to take any deal he can call a victory as he is to escalate; either way, the Gulf states lose. Gulf leaders must stop waiting for Washington to deliver an outcome that serves them and start shaping one themselves.

The way out requires abandoning the assumption that has governed Gulf security for a century: that security is a commodity to be brokered rather than a capability to be built. This requires the Gulf states to deal with Iran themselves rather than wait for Washington to do it for them. A settlement between the Gulf monarchies and Iran should take the form of a treaty in which a phased U.S. military withdrawal from its Gulf bases serves as the cornerstone of a comprehensive regional bargain. The U.S. withdrawal would not be a retreat compelled by Iranian aggression but a calculated move. Iran has wanted the United States to leave the Gulf for decades. To achieve this, along with phased relief from international sanctions, Tehran would offer wide-ranging concessions: constraints on its nuclear and missile programs, a halt to its belligerence, and moves toward diplomatic normalization with its neighbors. Such a systemic reset of intra-Gulf relations would mark the start of a new regional order—the Gulf’s Westphalian moment.

But settlement alone is insufficient. Gulf militaries must be retuned for warfighting. For decades, the monarchies have outsourced their security to international partners, and their forces reflect that arrangement: too often optimized for diplomatic signaling and partnership maintenance rather than the hard demands of regional defense. That has to end.

THE ILLUSION OF PROTECTION

External patrons often betray Gulf interests. The United Kingdom ceded two-thirds of Kuwaiti territory in 1922, abandoned its allies in Yemen in the 1960s, and when withdrawing British forces from the Gulf in 1971 (where they had been in one form or another for around 150 years) acquiesced to Iran’s seizure of three Emirati islands. Washington’s record is little better. In 1979, the United States stood by as revolution consumed Iran, its primary regional partner at the time. During the Arab Spring, Washington provided no support for partners in Bahrain and Egypt. In 2019, Washington declined to meaningfully react after an Iranian-backed attack on Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refining facility, at Abqaiq. In 2025, Qatar, a key U.S. ally, was bombed by Iran and, separately, by Israel. There is one key exception—the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi forces in 1991—but Gulf leaders give it too much weight. The United States intervened because doing so served American interests at a moment of unipolarity. The episode says little about what Washington will do when Gulf and American interests next diverge.

The failure of outside protection is just one aspect of a deeper problem. The Gulf states often suffer—much as Europe has—from a lack of seriousness in military affairs, luxuriating instead in the illusion that the United States will protect them indefinitely. No strategic rationale explains why Gulf states so dependent on maritime exports, and so long exposed to threats of Iranian mining in the Strait of Hormuz, have not developed world-class mine-hunting capabilities. This naval expertise was instead almost entirely left to the United Kingdom and the United........

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