The Iran War Has Remade the Gulf

May 26, 2026

The guns have not yet fallen silent over the Persian Gulf, but the governments of the Gulf Cooperation Council are already doing what they have always done in moments of upheaval: calculating, hedging, and preparing for a world that looks nothing like the one that existed before. The Iran war has been the most disorienting event in the region since the 1979 revolution. It will produce an equally consequential rearrangement of the region’s political geometry. The GCC states will not lurch toward any single power or alignment. They will do what small states with large sovereign wealth funds and acute memories of betrayal always do. They will spread their bets.

Before they do, however, they will have to reckon honestly with something that their public statements have carefully avoided: Iran, for all the punishment that it has absorbed, has not lost this war in any strategic sense. That conclusion is uncomfortable, but it is the one that Gulf policymakers are drawing in private.

Consider what Iran demonstrated. It went to war against the United States and Israel simultaneously. It absorbed significant strikes on its nuclear infrastructure, lost senior military commanders, and watched its conventional forces sustain serious damage. And yet it still managed to close the Strait of Hormuz for weeks, cutting off roughly one-fifth of global oil supply. It rained missiles and drones on every GCC state, hitting airports, hotels, and oil infrastructure.

Iran exposed, in the starkest possible terms, the limits of U.S. deterrence as a protective shield for its Gulf partners. For a country operating under decades of sanctions with a defense budget that represents a fraction of what the United States spends in the region in a single year, that is not a conventional defeat. It is a demonstration of strategic resilience that Iran’s neighbors will not forget.

Full piece in Foreign Policy