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 States—a fateful arrangement, since the former retired its minehunters before the war and the latter bizarrely began operations against Iran in February with its own minehunters thousands of miles away. As ever, London and Washington made these decisions to suit themselves, not the Gulf states.
Gulf militaries must forge real warfighting capabilities. Pockets of excellence exist. The United Arab Emirates’ successful amphibious landing in the Yemeni port city of Aden in 2015 was the most complex in modern Arab military history; Gulf missile defense operators are proficient, not least because they are among the most battle-tested in the world. In the absence of international patrons to do the work for them, Gulf militaries have proved up to the job. The task now is to generalize the pattern before the next crisis exposes the gaps—and the departure of U.S. forces will concentrate minds as nothing else has.
DÉTENTE: NOW, OR LATER
Some Gulf officials are pushing for the United States to “finish the job” against Iran—a sentiment captured in the demand, voiced privately across Gulf capitals, that Washington not stop until Iran can no longer hold the Strait of Hormuz at risk, sustain its proxies, or strike infrastructure with impunity. But the Islamic Republic survived an existential eight-year war with Iraq that wrecked its economy and killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, decades of sanctions, and an Israeli campaign of assassinations of senior regime figures. Now, months into one of the most sustained bombing campaigns the region has ever seen, the regime still stands and continues to launch drones and missiles at its neighbors. Betting that it will collapse through pressure alone is a wager the historical record does not support.
All wars end. The only question is whether a settlement comes after months or years. Bitter rivals eventually seek accommodation, as Iran and the Gulf states have in the past. Before the current war becomes catastrophic, Iran and the Gulf monarchies should pursue a treaty in which the United States withdraws from its bases in the region in exchange for reciprocal concessions from Iran. Such a treaty would lay the foundation for a new regional order, one in which the Gulf states shape the terms of their security rather than relying on patrons whose interests will not always align with their own.
A phased U.S. withdrawal over five years would remove a structural cause of Gulf insecurity. This would entail the departure of U.S. forces from the major installations in the region—Al Udeid in Qatar, the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, Al Dhafra in the UAE, Ali Al Salem and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, and Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia—with infrastructure left intact and a binding treaty obligation to return rapidly should a serious threat materialize. Iranian strategic doctrine sees the American regional military presence as an existential threat and the primary target of its deterrence strategy. An Iran no longer facing existential threats from the United States and Israel would be less driven to forever expand its military capabilities. But any American pullback would be neither unilateral nor unconditional. In exchange for a U.S. withdrawal, a prize that has never before been on offer, Tehran is likely prepared to concede more than it has under any previous agreement.
The nuclear question is central. Any plausible settlement would see Iran restore cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency on terms more intrusive than those of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The Gulf states’ own civilian nuclear programs could provide the basis for a framework of mutual inspections, transparency, and trust-building. That, in turn, could constrain Israel’s unilateral operations against Iran—and a Tehran no longer under existential threat would have less reason to race for the bomb.
A phased U.S. withdrawal would remove a structural cause of Gulf insecurity.
Constraining Iran’s drone programs will be harder. Production is dispersed by design, and the technology is too diffuse and dual in purpose to be policed through traditional inspection regimes. Complete prohibition may be out of reach, but a multilateral inspections architecture that includes the Gulf states could set binding limits on range and payload, restrict transfers to nonstate actors, and monitor for large-scale deployments. Compliance would be enforced through the same logic that underpins the rest of the compact: graduated suspension of sanctions and the conditional pacing of U.S. withdrawal, so that both Tehran’s economic relief and the United States’ departure depend on verified adherence. In parallel, the Gulf states should absorb the counterdrone tactics of Ukraine: electronic warfare, layered intercept, and the fortification of critical infrastructure. Diplomacy reduces the threat over time; defense addresses it in the meantime.
Iran would also need to sign on to a comprehensive treaty of nonbelligerence that codifies limits on Iranian ballistic missile ranges and payloads, unwinds Tehran’s support for proxy groups such as the Houthis in exchange for graduated sanctions relief, and lays the foundations for regional economic engagement, giving both sides a material stake in the compact’s durability. The objective is to transform the Gulf from a contested battlefield into an integrated economic zone in which the costs of conflict would be borne by all parties, Iran included.
Some may object that Iran will not honor such a compact, arguing that the Islamic Republic is driven by doctrinal imperatives that no incentive structure can modify. A more pragmatic reading of Iran casts it as a rational, if ruthless, state actor pursuing legible strategic objectives: the removal of U.S. military power from its neighborhood, recognition of its regional standing, the survival of the Tehran regime. On that view, its behavior is sensitive to pressure and inducement.
The historical record suggests that neither of those views is completely correct. Iran is ideologically motivated, which explains its sustained investment in proxy networks across the region and its refusal to abandon anti-Zionism, a founding tenet of the revolution, even when doing so would have eased its international isolation. But it is also strategically flexible; its foreign policy has been shaped by incentives and deterrents. Iran has often been practical, trading with Israel in the 1980s, enjoying eras of regional détente in the 1990s and 2000s, adhering to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for over a year after Washington’s 2018 withdrawal and then continuing to comply in part, and restoring relations with Saudi Arabia in 2023.
The question is not whether Iran is trustworthy but whether the incentives on offer are sufficient to make compliance the path of least resistance. On that question, the architecture proposed here—sanctions relief at transformative scale and the removal of the U.S. military presence—places more on the table than any previous negotiating framework.
WIN-WIN-WIN
The Gulf states have the most to gain and the most to lose, and any settlement that excludes them risks becoming a narrower Washington-Tehran bargain that serves the two capitals’ interests rather than those of the monarchies. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE must be principals to the treaty, not observers. They must define the verification architecture, drive the mutual inspections regime, and lead the pursuit of economic engagement that would make the compact durable.
But for that to work, the Gulf states require a renewal of U.S. commitments, codified in treaty, with military infrastructure left intact and a binding obligation for the United States to return should a serious threat materialize. The current war has demonstrated the U.S. capacity to mobilize significant forces into the region in a matter of weeks. This arrangement is a clear win for the Gulf monarchies, providing assurance and deterrence without the provocative U.S. military presence Tehran finds unacceptable.
As a settlement takes shape and the United States gradually withdraws its forces, Gulf states must build up their own capacities to deter Iran. They are far from defenseless; they possess world-class missile defense systems and conventional capabilities that are patchy but maturing. The harder question is what cooperation looks like among states whose recent history includes a three-and-a-half-year blockade of one of their own. Full integration is implausible, but that is not the only model. Bilateral coordination, as well as coalitions of the willing built around specific functions, can deliver much of the practical effect without demanding a political union the region has shown it cannot produce. Cooperation can take many forms: maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz, shared early-warning data on Iranian launches, joint exercises for port and refinery defense, drone-swarm interception, and mine clearance. This does not require every Gulf state to participate in every initiative, only enough of them to participate in enough of the right ones.
For Washington, a phased withdrawal backed by a comprehensive regional settlement offers what the current trajectory cannot: a dignified exit that looks like statesmanship rather than retreat. A settlement that verifiably constrains Iran’s nuclear ambitions, ends decades of forward deployment, and produces a durable Gulf compact would address several problems at once: the fiscal burden of permanent presence, the energy market disruption that regional instability generates, and the American public’s exhaustion with open-ended entanglement in the Middle East.
Gulf states must build up their own capacities to deter Iran.
The prize for Iran is what 40 years of revolutionary posture and nuclear brinkmanship could not deliver. Sanctions relief sufficient to restart growth matters more to the regime than any external military victory; the internal threat from a young, educated, alienated population is more dangerous to the Islamic Republic than a foreign coalition. Having survived the most intense military pressure in its history, the regime now has the credibility to make concessions to its external adversaries and to its own citizens without humiliation—to convert endurance into a settlement and economic recovery.
For Gulf states, the instinct to remain within the U.S. security embrace reflects a century of institutional habit, elite socialization, and the sunk cost of an architecture that has occasionally delivered. But security cannot be purchased from abroad; it must be built at home. The United States will leave the region eventually, regardless of what the monarchies prefer. The only question is whether the Gulf countries shape the terms of that departure or are shaped by them.
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