Iran is losing the war against the US and Israel by the most obvious measures. Its air defenses are gone, its top leadership is dead and its already flagging economy is on the brink of collapse, with its crucial oil and gas exports stuck behind a blockade.
However, its main deterrents, namely an underground missile force and a stockpile of enriched uranium, both motives for Washington and Jerusalem to wage war, are believed to be largely intact.
That means Tehran may not win on the battlefield, but it can still prevail in the post-war security architecture against the six Gulf states that have spent the past three months lashing out in response to attacks by the US and Israel.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ barrage against Gulf allies as “indiscriminate targeting, reckless strikes”. However, the targeting has been quite deliberate in hitting strategic and economic assets and is likely to have been more effective than Tehran expected.
Roughly 85% of Iran’s air campaign hit Gulf states that had explicitly refused to support America and Israel’s Operation Epic Fury. Airports, hotels, LNG terminals, refineries, desalination plants and data centers are all targeted by Iran’s attacks.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has absorbed more Iranian missile and drone attacks than any other country, including Israel.
Across the Gulf, capitals face the same stark choice. Support Washington or remain nominally neutral and risk strikes on their refineries and other economic infrastructure anyway. Tehran is betting that hitting the Gulf states will make Washington back down.
If this is indeed Iran’s strategy, it has not yet worked. A fragile ceasefire has been held in name, although both sides have recently resumed attacks as they negotiate the terms of a bilateral agreement. Anger among Gulf states toward Iran is simmering, but the stakes are not the same on both sides.
Iran is fighting for nothing less than the survival of its Islamic regime; the ruling monarchies of the Gulf are not. For them, the main question is what new order prevails after the shooting stops. And the potential response increasingly threatens to split the Gulf right down the middle.
The United Arab Emirates, for one, has chosen to escalate rather than cower. It has absorbed the heaviest Iranian barrage of any Gulf state and, in response, has become even more closely aligned with Washington and Jerusalem.
It is said to have placed Israel’s Iron Dome air defense batteries on its soil and, according to the Wall Street Journal, has struck Iran dozens of times during the war and in the tentative ceasefire.
Dubai’s economy has suffered as it risks a bigger disaster — a drone shot by Iraq, where pro-Iranian militias operate, recently crashed near the $30 billion Barakah nuclear plant. The longer the UAE stays so close to Washington, the harder it will be to pull back later.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has responded to direct attacks on its Petroline and Ras Tanura oil infrastructure by covertly striking Iranian launch sites while at the same time launching post-canal talks.
At the same time, Riyadh refused to cooperate with the US-led Project Freedom, which called for the use of its Prince Sultan Air Base to protect naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington dropped the initiative soon after.
This dual, if not contradictory, approach has led to fewer Iranian attacks on Saudi territory. Saudi Arabia has called for de-escalation publicly, keeping the pressure private, settling on a dangerous strategic middle ground.
It is also creating rifts among the Gulf states at a time when they would benefit from a more unified response. The Wall Street Journal reported that Riyadh has asked Washington to curb the UAE attacks. This has reportedly angered the leadership of the United Arab Emirates, who have said that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have failed to coordinate a military response to Iran’s attacks.
Trump has kept the Abraham Accords and Saudi normalization with Israel on the table as a closing mechanism for a potential grand bargain. However, Riyadh cannot sell normalization with Israel at home while Iranian missiles hit Saudi refineries in response to a war largely initiated by Israel.
Qatar, meanwhile, has kept an open line with Tehran throughout the war and is now the only Gulf capital through which either side will talk outside the Pakistan channel. Kuwait, for its part, has received Iranian missile strikes and offered nothing. Neither will shape what comes next, although Qatar’s open line is the closest thing the Gulf has to a seat at the table.
The United Arab Emirates is increasingly aligning itself with the state that Iran considers its main mortal enemy: Israel. Saudi Arabia has maintained its public content but is being excluded from the talks.
Between them, the collective capacity of the Gulf to act as an independent leader has been undermined not only by their choices, but by what the war has done to each of them in turn.
The settlement now being negotiated between the US and Iran will thus be bilateral, with Gulf interests and security likely to be left to be addressed in separate, subsequent talks. This is Iran’s victory within its military defeats.
Tehran does not need the Gulf to surrender – it just needs a post-war settlement written without its participation. A bilateral deal with the US would likely leave Gulf security unaddressed and thus exposed to new rounds of pressure from Tehran.
The bigger problem, however, reaches beyond the Gulf. By lifting the blockade of Hormuz and allowing Iran to sell oil again, Washington’s main pressure point on Tehran’s nuclear file would be limited to one option: the threat of another war, which will be harder to spark convincingly as critical US midterm elections approach.
Those who thus warn that a deal would favor Iran have the mechanism right and the victims wrong. A bilateral deal that revives Iran’s economy and postpones regional security to a later date would mean the Gulf must face itself vis-à-vis Tehran.
A postwar order that relies on American promises and Iranian goodwill — both of which have proven unreliable in wartime — will not translate into a new era of regional stability.
In, say, five years, the Gulf states will either have extracted binding security guarantees from whatever solution emerges, or face a reconstituted Iran with less leverage than they have today and no credible security architecture to contain it.
Anyway, Iran is losing the war, but winning the one that comes next. None of this, of course, was by design. The Gulf’s wartime paralysis owes its divisions, leaving it without a voice to decide what emerges from the ashes of conflict.
Eric Alter is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and a former UN civil servant.
