Is Trump’s war against Iran liberating the Gulf from Washington?

Since February 2026, Washington has ceased to be a shield and has become a prime target of hatred and questioning of 80 years of American presence in the region and 35 years of security delegation since 1990-1991.

This is not a short-term analysis. It is a structural break. And the American media are now converging on an observation that foreign ministries had long kept quiet about: the Persian Gulf countries can no longer afford to delegate their security to Washington.

In an article published on The American Conservative website, Ted Snider sums up the equation with surgical precision: the Gulf States “thought that hosting American bases provided them with a defensive umbrella against Iran.” They discovered that these bases became “magnets for Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.”

Bases that attract missiles

The paradox is stark. For decades, the Gulf monarchies financed, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, an American military presence supposedly designed to protect them. They realized too late that these bases, far from being shields, had become magnets for Iranian strikes. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasts that “Kuwait has been fantastic in this area,” he implicitly acknowledges that this country placed its territory at the service of American operations and paid a deadly price.

The New York Times slipped in, almost in hushed tones, a revealing sentence: American forces were operating from a site within the Kuwaiti airport complex. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated it unequivocally: “Tehran struck sites that Washington was using for its own offensive operations.” Iran’s right of reply, morally undeniable, thus finds a geopolitical logic that even its Gulf allies cannot entirely dismiss.

The Arab Gulf States Institute think tank documented the stark reality: over forty days of combined strikes – ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and kamikaze drones – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar were placed on a high-intensity defensive posture. The expensively supplied American systems demonstrated their limitations against waves of inexpensive munitions. Asymmetric warfare hammered home the myth of invulnerability guaranteed by Uncle Sam.

Oman and neutrality punished

Oman embodies the tragedy of a rational actor in an irrational........

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