The oil and gas monarchies of the Gulf throw riyals and dirhams at almost everything money can buy: artificial intelligence companies and hedge funds, football clubs and futuristic cities, golf and grand prix, think tanks and universities, pop stars and American politicians.

Yet all the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf Arabs can’t wash away their primal fear of being caught in the middle between their security guarantor and their regional rival: the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

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The very thing they feared most finally happened: On June 23, Iran fired ballistic missiles at the sprawling Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in retaliation against the U.S. joining Israel’s war against Tehran and bombing three Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranian strike was carefully calibrated but it was unprecedented: it targeted an American military base in a Gulf Arab state. 

The Islamic Republic of Iran, partly out of its isolation after the 1979 revolution, invested in building a multi-layered security state and resumed the Shah’s nuclear program after the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The Gulf Arabs, to overcome their human capacity constraints, did the opposite: they externalized their security and relied on an American security umbrella. 

The Iranian strike on the American base in Qatar demonstrated how beholden the Gulf Arabs are to the United States despite their efforts to diversify their partnerships. Qatar, which has good relations with Iran and shares with it the ownership of the largest gas field beneath the Persian Gulf, had to rely on American Patriot anti-missile batteries to defend itself, in an operation jointly-run with the United States. 

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The powerlessness of the Gulf Arabs was starkly illustrated as Iran didn’t even inform Qatar, the United Emirates, and Saudi Arabia about the attack or include them in any discussions and planning. Iran shared the timing, the target, and the nature of its retaliation with the United States. Qatar was only notified of the Iranian strike at the same time as American citizens and personnel were—and it wasn’t even the intended target.

The Gulf Arabs position and pride themselves on being havens of stability and engines of commerce and finance in an unstable region. The health of their economies and their ambitious plans to diversify beyond oil depend on a sense of security. The brief American war with Iran and the Iranian retaliation against a Gulf state under American protection demonstrated that irrespective of their nascent engagement with Iran, they can’t escape the perils of geography in times of conflict. The airspace over the Gulf was temporarily

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