On paper, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the United States are on the same side. Every GCC member hosts US military infrastructure. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among the largest buyers of American defence equipment in the world. Bahrain has been home to the US Fifth Fleet for decades. And all six GCC states view Iran — its nuclear ambitions, its missile arsenal, its network of regional proxies — as the single most destabilising force in their neighbourhood.
But alignment is not alliance, and interest is not loyalty. The relationship between the Gulf states and Washington has been under slow, structural pressure for years — and the Iran conflict has become the sharpest lens through which those pressures are now visible. Understanding where the GCC states actually stand, and what could change that, is one of the most consequential analytical questions in the current regional order.
Start with the basics. Iran has a missile arsenal that can reach every capital in the Gulf. It has demonstrated the will and capability to project force through proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militia networks in Iraq — in ways that directly threaten GCC interests. And its nuclear programme, now at a level of uranium enrichment that puts weapons capability within a relatively short technical sprint, represents an existential risk that no Gulf state can counter unilaterally.
Against that threat, the US provides something no other partner can currently match: a credible extended deterrence umbrella backed by carrier strike groups, pre-positioned forces, theatre missile defence, and the implicit guarantee that an attack on a Gulf partner is an attack that Washington cannot ignore politically. The Abraham Accords-era diplomatic architecture reinforced this by bringing Israel into a de facto alignment with the Gulf states — adding another layer of deterrence against Iranian aggression that did not exist five years ago.
For the UAE specifically, the 2021 F-35 deal negotiations — stalled but not dead — and the broader defence technology relationship with the US represent capabilities that no other partner could substitute at equivalent scale or quality. For Saudi Arabia, the Vision 2030 economic transformation programme depends on a stable security environment that only American regional presence can guarantee over the medium term. The GCC states are not naive about this calculus. They know what they are buying when they buy American.
"The Gulf states don't want to leave the US alliance. They want the US alliance to work the way it used to — predictably, reliably, and on their terms."
None of the above means the relationship is unconditional. The GCC states have watched the US relationship with deep and growing unease across three specific dimensions.
The nuclear deal question. Every time Washington has moved toward diplomatic engagement with Tehran — the 2015 JCPOA, the 2022 revival talks, the back-channel discussions that have periodically surfaced since — the Gulf states have felt simultaneously consulted and ignored. They were briefed but not given a veto. The core anxiety is not that the US will strike Iran, but that it will make a deal with Iran that legitimises the regime, lifts sanctions, and restores Iranian economic capacity without adequately addressing the missile programme or the proxy networks that most directly threaten GCC security. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi do not trust Washington to prioritise their interests in any eventual Iran negotiation.
The reliability question. The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 landed differently in the Gulf than it did in Washington. To GCC leaders watching the fall of Kabul, it read as confirmation of a fear that had been building since at least 2019 — that the United States, under pressure, will prioritise domestic politics over alliance commitments. The Saudi oil facility attacks at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019 — almost certainly Iranian-directed — produced a US response that amounted to strongly-worded statements and the deployment of additional troops that were not actually used. Gulf capitals drew conclusions from that non-response that have not been erased by subsequent reassurances.
The autonomy question. The GCC states — especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE — have spent the years since 2020 conducting a deliberate hedging strategy. The Saudi-Iran diplomatic normalisation brokered by China in 2023 was not a repudiation of the US relationship, but it was a signal. The UAE's complex balancing act — deepening Abraham Accords ties with Israel while simultaneously maintaining significant economic relationships with China and carefully managed diplomatic channels toward Iran — reflects a deliberate policy of strategic autonomy that is incompatible with the kind of exclusive alliance the US relationship once implied.
| Country | US Alignment Strength | Iran Threat Perception | Hedging Behaviour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | Conditional | Very High — direct proxy, missile, nuclear threat | China brokered Iran deal; OPEC+ production decisions that angered Washington; pursuing Chinese investment and Huawei 5G |
| UAE | Conditional | High — Houthi attacks on UAE soil in 2022; IRGC networks in Dubai | Paused F-35 deal citing Huawei concerns; maintained trade with Russia post-2022; Abraham Accords while pursuing Iran back-channels |
| Bahrain | Strong | Existential — Shia majority population, Iranian interference history | Minimal — most dependent on US security guarantee of any GCC state; Fifth Fleet presence is non-negotiable for Manama |
| Kuwait | Moderate | High — shares land border approach to Iraq with Iranian proxy presence | Historically neutral posture; has pursued quiet diplomatic dialogue with Iran; reluctant to host offensive military operations on its soil |
| Qatar | Transactional | Moderate — hosts Al Udeid but maintains Iranian gas ties and Hamas political bureau | Shares North Dome gas field with Iran; has hosted Hamas leadership; Al Jazeera editorial line frequently diverges from US policy preferences |
| Oman | Independent | Low — has historically maintained neutral Iran relationship | Has repeatedly served as back-channel for US-Iran talks; maintains open diplomatic relations with Tehran; consciously non-aligned posture |
One of the clearest ways to read GCC strategic intentions is through where they are spending their defence budgets. And the current pattern tells a complicated story. American platforms — F-35s, Patriot batteries, THAAD systems, advanced naval vessels — still dominate the major acquisition conversations. The UAE's $23 billion in defence contracts signed at IDEX 2023 leaned heavily toward Western suppliers. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 goal of 50 percent domestic defence production is predicated on technology transfer from Western partners.
But alongside those headline US-aligned purchases, the diversification trend is unmistakable. South Korean K9 howitzers and Redback IFVs have entered Gulf procurement discussions. Turkish Bayraktar drones found enthusiastic Gulf customers. China's CH-4 and Wing Loong UAVs are operational in several Gulf states. The message is not abandonment of US hardware — it is the construction of a portfolio that reduces single-supplier dependency in ways that give Gulf states genuine leverage in their relationship with Washington.
For the defence industry, this creates a window that is likely to remain open for the better part of the current decade. Gulf procurement budgets are at historic highs. The threat environment — Iranian missiles, Houthi drones, potential nuclear escalation — justifies continued spending increases. And the GCC states' deliberate diversification strategy means that qualified suppliers from non-US sources have a genuine opportunity that was structurally unavailable ten years ago.
The honest answer is: not as a formal act, and probably not in any scenario short of a catastrophic US failure to defend Gulf territory. The dependencies are too deep, the US military infrastructure too embedded, and the alternatives too immature to make a clean break either feasible or desirable. What is happening instead is a slower, more structural shift — a GCC that is simultaneously more reliant on US military capabilities for hard security and more determined to reduce its strategic vulnerability to US political unpredictability in every other dimension.
That combination — deep military integration plus aggressive economic and diplomatic diversification — defines the Gulf states' actual strategy. It is not a path toward leaving the US alliance. It is a path toward making the US alliance one pillar of a broader security architecture rather than the only one. Whether Washington accommodates that evolution or tries to resist it will go a long way toward determining how stable the Gulf order remains over the next decade.
The Iran conflict is the accelerant. Every escalation — every Houthi attack, every IRGC naval incident, every centrifuge-spinning announcement from Tehran — forces GCC capitals to ask the same fundamental question: if this gets worse, will the Americans actually be there? The answer to that question, repeated across enough crises, will ultimately determine the future shape of the most strategically consequential alliance in the Middle East.