The United States Is Now a Guarantor of Last Resort
Every administration since President Barack Obama’s first term has promised to look past the Middle East. Under Obama and later President Joe Biden, that meant the Indo-Pacific; under President Donald Trump, it means bringing the United States back home—the Western Hemisphere first and the Indo-Pacific second. Each was pulled back in by a crisis it could not avoid.
The 2026 Iran war suggested a different outcome. The Gulf states, working with Turkey and Pakistan, showed they could carry the diplomatic burden of managing Iran themselves, and a share of the security burden, too, provided Washington stayed guarantor of last resort, not manager of first resort. That distinction is what would let Washington’s real priorities survive the next crisis instead of being shelved by it.
The war produced a division of labor. Doha, Riyadh, and Islamabad handled the diplomacy with Tehran that no U.S. administration can do credibly. Pakistan, bound to Saudi Arabia by a defense pact signed five months earlier, supplies a conventional backstop that lets Riyadh treat its deterrence as a regional job. Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have floated a consortium to manage Hormuz without U.S. ownership. What is left for Washington is deterring an existential strike, keeping naval power within reach, and selling the weapons that make everyone else’s deterrence credible.
Look back to 2015 for the contrast. That May, as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was being primed, many Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) rulers skipped Obama’s Camp David summit and sent deputies instead, widely read as a snub over a nuclear deal Washington handed them rather than shaped with them. In May 2026, Trump said he held off on fresh strikes because Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates asked him to give negotiations more room. This marked the moment when the Gulf arrived as an independent player. When the war threatened to spiral, the Gulf, Turkey, and Pakistan built the off-ramps that helped Trump end it.