On February 28, after the launch of major combat operations against the Iranian regime by the United States and Israel, Tehran threw away over a decade of sustained effort to persuade its Arab neighbours that it sought to co-exist peacefully. By launching hundreds of ballistic missile and drone strikes against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Jordan, the Iranian regime demonstrated indisputably that its assurances of non-belligerence cannot be taken seriously.
Although much of the mainstream media has referred to these Iranian attacks as “retaliation against US bases in the region, ”in fact they targeted both US bases such as the US Navy’s regional headquarters in Bahrain, as well as urban residential neighbourhoods, Dubai hotels, the Abu Dhabi airport and targets in and around Riyadh, among many other civilian targets located in non-belligerent, neighbouring countries.
With these strikes against Arab states that had openly declared their unwillingness to allow the United States to use their territory to attack Iran, Tehran showed its true face. Although Oman, alone among the GCC, as of February 28 was still offering its good offices and lamenting the US decision to use force, there are reports that Iranian drones struck the Omani port of Duqm on the Arabian Sea.
In response to Iran’s targeting of the Gulf states, Riyadh “expressed its strongest condemnation of the blatant and cowardly Iranian attacks targeting the Riyadh and Eastern province regions..” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman held phone consultations with the leaders of the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan, affirming “the Kingdom’s full solidarity … with the brotherly countries” and declaring the Kingdom’s readiness to place “all its capabilities at their disposal.”
Of course, it remains to be seen what this statement will mean in practice, but what is clear is that Iran in one day turned the Gulf states from a posture of neutrality to a revived understanding of the threat Iran poses to the region and the world. Far from intimidating its Gulf neighbours, Iran’s indiscriminate attacks have reunited a badly divided GCC, much to the strategic advantage of the United States and Israel.
A look at recent history shows just how badly the Islamic Republic has miscalculated. The Arab Gulf States established the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981 with the stated objective of coordinating policy and deepening cooperation. But in the background loomed the recently established revolutionary regime in Tehran, which maintained a publicly stated goal of spreading its Shiite Islamic revolution across the region, thus posing a direct threat to the largely Sunni GCC members.
Over the years, GCC member states developed differing policies toward Iran. Saudi Arabia viewed Iran as a strategic competitor for leadership of the Islamic world. Oman and Qatar took a different view, regarding Iran as a large neighbour to be accommodated when possible, and perhaps a balance against Saudi dominance of the Gulf. Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE all had specific issues with Iran, ranging from maritime boundaries to Iran’s seizure of three small Emirati islands, to Iranian sponsorship of Shiite terrorist organisations. Yet as the revolutionary regime in Iran consolidated power in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, Iran also became an economic partner and a fellow energy exporter to which the Gulf adapted. Expatriate Iranian communities established themselves alongside other expatriate groups in the Gulf, in particular in Dubai and Oman. By the 2000s, overlapping areas of competition, conflict and cooperation characterised the GCC’s relations with Iran.
The Obama administration’s Iran policy caused Saudi Arabia and the UAE to question the GCC’s reliance on Washington for security. After the Saudis and Emiratis complained that the United States had not kept them updated about the nuclear negotiations with Iran, President Obama told a journalist in May 2015 that the Saudis and Iran should learn to “share the neighbourhood.”
The JCPOA was signed soon after, with Obama’s spokespeople declaring that it represented a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, when more sober analysis showed that it merely capped Iran’s enrichment program for a decade while ignoring Iran’s development of ballistic missiles as well as Iran’s regional network of heavily-armed proxy militias ranging from Yemen to Iraq to Lebanon to Gaza.
In 2016, Saudi Arabia led the GCC in suspending diplomatic relations with Iran following mob attacks on Saudi diplomatic facilities in Iran. All of the GCC member states followed the Saudi lead except for Oman, which declared itself “the Gulf’s (remaining) window on Iran.” Internal Gulf affairs soon focused on the Saudi/Emirati/Bahraini/Egyptian boycott of Qatar, in part over allegations that the Qatari Emir was working with Iran to undermine Gulf security, but more substantively due to Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in the region.
During this period, Kuwait and Oman sought to mediate GCC relations with Iran, developing a series of commitments that they presented to the Iranian side. The commitments included assurances Iran would cease its interference in the Gulf states’ internal affairs and drop its claim of responsibility for the security and well-being of Shiite minorities. Iran reportedly provided various responses that always fell short of GCC expectations, even if they may have been acceptable to some member states.
By the time Joe Biden entered the White House in January 2021, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had decided to resolve Saudi involvement in various conflicts, including the rift with Qatar and the war against the Houthis in Yemen. In March 2023, China hosted the final stage of Saudi-Iranian negotiations, producing a comprehensive Saudi-Iranian agreement on bilateral relations, including assurances of “good neighbourly relations,” and “resolving disagreements through dialogue and diplomacy.”
Although I was told by a senior Saudi official that the agreement was a matter of "buying time” for Riyadh to focus on its Vision 2030 economic modernisation program, the Chinese-brokered agreement marked both a high water mark for Chinese diplomacy in the region and led to the rest of the GCC to restore relations with Tehran (with the notable exception of Bahrain, which considered but did not accept several Iranian offers to restore relations).
In late 2025, tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi erupted over differing political and military approaches to several regional conflicts, including in Yemen and Sudan. Saudi Arabia launched air strikes against UAE-backed forces in southern Yemen, attacking their former allies against the Houthis. In tandem with Saudi use of military force, Riyadh launched a media campaign against the UAE, including attacks on the Abraham Accords, the UAE’s relations with Israel, and the UAE’s openness to growing Jewish and Hindu resident communities.
Meanwhile, as Iran continued to defy President Trump’s demand that it abandon the remnants of its nuclear program and give up its development of ballistic missiles, Saudi Arabia led the Gulf states in opposing the use of force and declaring their territories off-limits for use in a potential military conflict involving Iran.
If Iranian-Saudi rapprochement began in Beijing as an effort to lower tensions and give Riyadh space to pursue domestic development, by the end of 2025 there were elements of cooperation and coordination that appeared to go well beyond the traditional limitations on Saudi-Iranian engagement. Iran appeared on the cusp of a strategic advantage in the Gulf.
Iran has now blown its strategic opportunity to exploit the Saudi-UAE tensions. Renewed GCC solidarity against Iran, possibly including Oman following the drone strike on Duqm, reshuffles the regional cards and reopens the possibility of broad-ranging Gulf security cooperation, led by the United States and excluding China.
The Iranian regime may have thought that missile and drone attacks would force the Gulf states to demand the United States end the military campaign with Israel. Instead, it has stiffened their resolve to stand up to Iran and perhaps even to accept the logic of regime change that they had previously opposed.
A classic case of unintended consequences.
Marc Sievers is a former US Ambassador to Oman and a senior American diplomat with over three decades of experience in Middle East affairs. He later served as the founding Director of the American Jewish Committee’s Abu Dhabi office
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