Iran is losing the war against the US and Israel by most visible measures. Its air defenses have been obliterated, its senior leadership dead, and its already flagging economy is on the verge of collapse, with its crucial oil and gas exports stuck behind a blockade.
Yet its core deterrents, namely an underground missile force and an enriched uranium stockpile, both motivations for Washington and Jerusalem to wage the war, are believed to be largely intact.
That means Tehran may not be winning on the battlefield, but could yet prevail in the postwar security architecture vis-a-vis the six Gulf states it has spent the last three months attacking in response to US and Israeli strikes.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has dismissed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Council’s barrage on Gulf allies as “indiscriminate targeting, flailing recklessly.” However, the targeting has been quite deliberate in hitting strategic and economic assets and has likely been more effective than Tehran anticipated.
Roughly 85% of Iran’s aerial campaign struck 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 have all been targeted in Iran’s strikes.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has absorbed more Iranian missile and drone hits than any other country, including Israel.
Across the Gulf, capitals face the same stark choice. Back Washington or stay nominally neutral and risk strikes on their refineries and other economic infrastructure anyway. Tehran is betting that hitting Gulf states will eventually cause Washington to back down.
If that’s indeed Iran’s strategy, it has not worked yet. A fragile ceasefire has held in name, though both sides have recently resumed attacks as they negotiate the terms of a bilateral agreement. Anger among Gulf states at Iran is seething, but the stakes are not the same on both sides.
Iran is fighting for nothing less than the survival of its Islamic regime; the Gulf’s ruling monarchies are not. For them, the main question is what new order prevails once the shooting stops. And the potential answer increasingly threatens to divide the Gulf straight down the middle.
The UAE, for one, has opted to escalate rather than cower. It has absorbed the heaviest Iranian barrage of any Gulf state and, in response, has tethered itself even more tightly to Washington and Jerusalem.
It has reportedly put Israel’s Iron Dome air defense batteries on its soil and, according to the Wall Street Journal, struck Iran dozens of times during the war and into the tentative truce.
Dubai’s economy has suffered while risking a bigger disaster – a drone fired from Iraq, where pro-Iran militias operate, was recently downed near the US$30 billion Barakah nuclear plant. The longer the UAE stays this 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 secretly striking Iranian launch sites while simultaneously initiating back-channel talks.
At the same time, Riyadh refused to cooperate with the US-led Project Freedom, which sought the use of its Prince Sultan Air Base to protect naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington scrapped the initiative soon thereafter.
This two-pronged, if not contradictory, approach has led to fewer Iranian attacks on Saudi territory. Saudi Arabia has called for de-escalation in public while keeping the pressure on in private, putting in a perilous strategic middle ground.
It’s also creating cracks among Gulf states at a time when they would benefit from a more unified response. The Wall Street Journal reported that Riyadh has urged Washington to rein in the UAE’s strikes. That has reportedly angered the UAE’s leadership, who have carped 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 to a potential grand bargain. However, Riyadh cannot sell normalization with Israel at home while Iranian missiles hit Saudi refineries in response to a war Israel largely initiated.
Meanwhile, Qatar has kept a line to Tehran open throughout the war and is now the only Gulf capital through which either side will talk outside of the Pakistan channel. Kuwait, for its part, has taken Iranian missile hits and offered nothing. Neither will shape what comes next, though Qatar’s open line is the closest thing the Gulf has to a seat at the table.
The UAE is increasingly fused to the state that Iran considers its primary mortal enemy: Israel. Saudi Arabia has preserved its public restraint but is being written out of the talks.
Between them, the Gulf’s collective capacity to act as an independent principal has been undermined not only by their own 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 left to be handled in separate and later conversations. This is Iran’s win inside its military losses.
Tehran does not need the Gulf to surrender – it needs only a postwar settlement written without its participation. A bilateral deal with the US would likely leave Gulf security largely unaddressed and thus exposed to new rounds of Tehran’s pressure.
The bigger problem, however, reaches beyond the Gulf. By lifting the Hormuz blockade and allowing Iran to sell oil again, Washington’s main pressure point on Tehran’s nuclear file would narrow to one option: threatening another war, which will be harder to brandish convincingly as critical US midterm elections near.
Those who thus warn that a deal would favor Iran have the mechanism right and the victim wrong. A bilateral bargain that revives Iran’s economy and puts regional security off for a later date would mean the Gulf must fend for itself vis-à-vis Tehran.
A postwar order resting on American promises and Iranian goodwill — both shown to be unreliable in a time of war — 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 settlement emerges, or they will face a reconstituted Iran with less leverage than they hold today and no credible security architecture to contain it.
All told, Iran is losing the war but winning what comes after. None of this, of course, was by design. The Gulf’s wartime paralysis owes to its own divisions, leaving it without a voice in deciding what emerges from the conflict’s ashes.
Eric Alter is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and a former UN civil servant.
