ABU DHABI and KUWAIT CITY—Eight months after the Iran war began, it should surprise no one that the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have grown further apart. Although every Gulf state has been targeted by the same country, Iran, each is emerging from the conflict with different conclusions about how to protect itself and deal with Tehran. For the United States, this outcome has raised an urgent question: If the GCC cannot be treated as a unified bloc, how should Washington engage with the council and with the region?
Washington’s diplomatic focus on the GCC in recent years suggests a persistent hope that the council could be a single lever to help move the region as a whole on a range of issues. In part, this hope was born out of an earlier period when the GCC was more unified. But the idea of the GCC as a single strategic actor has been unraveling for some time. Normalization with Israel, relations with Tehran, and varying levels of engagement with Beijing were already pulling member states in different directions even before the start of the Iran war, and the conflict has only made those differences harder to ignore.
Before this year, the GCC’s biggest fault line was arguably the 2017 Gulf crisis, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain joined a blockade of Qatar that unraveled the bloc’s internal trust and severely eroded the GCC’s institutional utility. The war in Yemen also ranks high on the list of earlier fault lines. With the UAE and Saudi Arabia supporting competing Yemeni factions, the conflict recalibrated the bilateral relationship, which eventually shifted the internal GCC dynamics around this rivalry. Lastly, while Bahrain followed the UAE into the Abraham Accords, Saudi Arabia declined to follow that path, while Oman and Kuwait have continued to reject normalization with Israel.
The war with Iran did not create these regional trends. Rather, it has accelerated them. After months of absorbing missile and drone strikes and watching one diplomatic initiative after another fall short of a lasting settlement, many Gulf capitals have come out of the conflict with a sharper sense of their own interests and far less hesitation about acting on them.
The war has affected Gulf states unevenly, and their governments have drawn different lessons from it. In the first seven weeks, the UAE faced more than 2,800 Iranian drones and missiles, Kuwait more than 1,200, and Qatar fewer than three hundred. Those experiences have reinforced Abu Dhabi’s preference for a conclusive outcome and Doha’s and Muscat’s preference for mediation. Across the Gulf, the different experiences have also reinforced doubts about relying indefinitely on any single outside guarantor. The conclusion for US policymakers is straightforward: The GCC is unlikely to adopt a unified position on Iran.
That point came through clearly at a closed-door October 1 Track II diplomatic dialogue in Abu Dhabi, convened by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. Meetings with officials, diplomats, and analysts in Kuwait City the following week only reinforced the notion that the war had hardened differences among the Gulf states.
Importantly, Gulf alignment with the United States was not in doubt in any of these conversations. Yet, many officials and experts I spoke with continued to wonder whether US policy has yet been able to catch up with a multi-speed Gulf in which members routinely take different positions on Iran, defense cooperation and procurement, and regional diplomacy. Dealing with the GCC as a single one-voice actor, they stressed, would put US policy at risk of incorrectly assessing the geopolitical situation.
Stop treating the GCC as a bloc
The European Union is the perfect example of a multilateral institution that Washington already works with and whose members disagree on major issues. Whether on China, migration, energy security, or defense spending, its members usually take different positions, and yet they still operate within a shared framework that the United States seems to find much easier to navigate.
Nevertheless, the GCC rarely gets the same treatment. When Gulf states disagree on an issue, Washington often appears to assume the council is unable to operate within a shared framework, instead of recognizing that six governments with different economies, security issues, and threat perceptions will not always want the same things.
More than one official during my meetings in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait described this as a recurring blind spot among outside partners: The expectation that the GCC should speak with one voice, and that its failure to do so is an institutional error rather than a reflection of geopolitical reality.
The Mecca Agreement, signed in August, illustrates how differences among GCC states are manifesting themselves in the security sphere. The agreement among Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan has effectively translated into implementing collective defense commitments, with Pakistan already having forces on the ground and Turkey ready to pull the trigger on troop deployment, pending parliamentary confirmation. Notably, however, the UAE was not included in the agreement, just as it has distanced itself from earlier proposals of a “Middle East NATO” and the Red Sea coalition. The UAE’s absence matches Abu Dhabi’s reluctance to join any bloc framed against a single country, as well as its more recent tensions with Riyadh.
A changing relationship with Washington
There is plenty of talk in Washington about China, but I heard very little in either Abu Dhabi or Kuwait City to suggest anyone wants Beijing to replace the United States as the Gulf’s main security partner. Most officials have moved past that debate and are now most concerned about whether their existing security relationships can deliver the capabilities they need at a pace that matches the threats they face. American influence is not fading quickly either, since most Gulf forces still rely on US hardware and remain tied into the integrated air and missile defense network built under US Central Command, which has held up remarkably well against Iran’s mass attacks.
Weeks of missile and drone attacks have, however, exposed vulnerabilities Gulf officials have warned about for years. Buying more interceptors only goes so far when new weapons keep getting cheaper, easier to acquire, and simpler to launch. The harder task now is building defenses that are affordable and can scale as quickly as the threat.
When US delivery timelines fall behind operational needs, Gulf states feel a need to shop elsewhere. Too often, Washington reads this as the Gulf states hedging. But most of the Gulf officials present in these conversations in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait saw it as a practical answer to immediate security needs—not as strategic realignment. In Abu Dhabi, for example, it was clear that the Emirati leadership cares less about balancing between partners than about building the country’s sovereign capacity to act through defense companies such as EDGE, the advanced technology and defense conglomerate launched in 2019 to boost domestic production. That helps explain Abu Dhabi’s emphasis on co-developing capabilities with countries such as South Korea and on expanding its domestic defense production, even as it continues to buy from traditional suppliers.
In addition, several experts in Abu Dhabi pointed to growing frustration with policymaking processes in Washington. Vacant ambassadorial posts, a weakened interagency process, and export restrictions were frequently cited as examples of a system that struggles to move at the speed many Gulf partners now expect.
Kuwait as a test case
Kuwait shows why Washington cannot infer a common Gulf response from a shared threat. It absorbed more than 1,200 Iranian drones and missiles in the first seven weeks of the war, second only to the UAE. Yet Kuwaiti leaders avoided unilateral moves and insisted on working through the GCC, choosing a very different path from their neighbors.
Kuwait faces one of the toughest threat environments in the Gulf, sharing contested Gulf waters with Iran and an unstable border with Iraq, where Iran-aligned armed groups have grown more aggressive toward Kuwait in recent months. Kuwait’s exposure has continued to grow as the US military posture in the region shifts. The damage to US facilities struck in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, coupled with the completed US withdrawal from Iraq this year, all point to a leaner US military presence near the armed groups Kuwait worries about most.
At home, Kuwait’s problems are no less serious. The country faces fiscal strain and a heavy dependence on oil revenues, along with severe social tension over civil rights and the revocation of citizenship for thousands of people. A country that must spend heavily on defense while managing such domestic strains has far less room for error than its larger and wealthier neighbors.
What struck me most in Kuwait City was a level of concern that rarely comes through in the wider conversation about Gulf security. Officials kept coming back to the combination of rising regional threats and a shrinking profile in Washington. While the larger Gulf states tend to dominate any discussion of the region, many of the Kuwaitis I met felt their own security picture was getting more difficult at exactly the moment US attention was drifting elsewhere. Yet Kuwait remains one of the most reliable US partners in the region. It has hosted US forces since its liberation thirty-five years ago and rarely presses Washington for attention (a restraint that has too often left it overlooked, which is why US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit in June landed as such an important signal).
What Washington should do differently
None of this means the GCC is becoming irrelevant. The council remains, arguably, the best-functioning forum for coordination in the Middle East. But Washington should give it the same room for internal disagreement it already gives the European Union, working through the council where member states’ interests align and engaging bilaterally where they do not.
Procurement belongs firmly in the second category. Speed and cost now drive Gulf acquisition decisions. Washington needs to shorten the path from request to delivery for air and missile defense and counter-drone systems, and approach co-development as a strategic investment rather than a concession.
Moreover, the United States should continue consultation on shared threats from Iran through the GCC, even if Gulf governments disagree on how to approach Tehran diplomatically. Any durable arrangement with Tehran will be tested against Gulf-wide infrastructure. GCC partners should therefore be consulted early and collectively rather than briefed after the fact, especially on the missiles, drones, and proxies the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iran nuclear deal, left out.
If there is a single takeaway from the conversations in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, it is that Gulf states are not drifting away from the United States, though many are wondering whether Washington has fully registered how much the Gulf itself has changed.
Washington is unlikely to recover a level of Gulf cohesion that has probably been gone since 2017. Its time would be better spent building policies around the region as it looks today rather than the one it dealt with a decade ago. Gulf states are becoming more selective about how they pursue their security, more willing to build capabilities outside the traditional frameworks, and more comfortable going their own way when their national interests call them to do so.
But Washington should not wait for the GCC to agree in order to engage constructively with what is increasingly a multi-speed Gulf. The recent attacks on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport appeared to have restored the appetite for revitalized security cooperation among Gulf states—which the United States should use to revive a regional collective security framework. After the attacks, Anwar Gargash, presidential adviser to the Emirati president, called for reviving joint Gulf action and described Gulf security as “indivisible” after a period of “grave neglect.” Recent developments with the Houthis in Yemen seem to be accelerating the need for the UAE and Saudi Arabia to seek common ground and prioritize joint Gulf defense cooperation despite ongoing disagreements.