Transcription
Since Saturday, Iran has launched hundreds of drones and missiles at the Arab Gulf States in an unexpected and far-reaching assault. All seven Gulf countries, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Oman, have now faced attacks on their infrastructure, including non-military targets like luxury hotels, apartment blocks, airports, and oil fields, and are now faced with a difficult dilemma of either suing for peace or joining the war.
So, in this video, we'll explain why Iran has been attacking the Gulf States and how they might respond. If you love staying informed and want some of the best reporting on YouTube, then subscribe and ring the bell for more.
So, let's start with some context on Iran-Gulf State relations. Historically, relations have been rocky between the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shia majority country, and the Gulf States, which are mostly majority Sunni. This is in part because of religious differences, but also because the Gulf monarchies saw Iran and its proxy network as a threat to regional stability.
In 2020, Iranian-Gulf state relations were strained further by the Abraham Accords, which involved the normalization of relations between Israel, Iran's regional enemy, and a number of Gulf states, including the UAE and Bahrain. This was widely perceived, especially by Iran, as a way of circumventing the Palestinian question, which had historically prevented multilateral normalization between Israel and the Gulf, and creating a sort of anti-Iranian containment axis between Israel and the Arab states in the Middle East.
However, after October 7th, Gulf foreign policy shifted dramatically. Israel's attack on Gaza brought the Palestinian question back to the fore, essentially precluding further normalization. And Israel's degrading of Iran's proxy network, plus its willingness to intervene not just in Gaza, but also in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, gave way to a widespread sense in the Gulf that Israel, not Iran, had become the primary threat to regional stability. This led to a tentative rapprochement, most notably Saudi Arabia.
In April, for instance, Saudi Arabia's defense minister visited Tehran, the most senior Saudi royal to visit in decades, where the minister delivered a letter from the Saudi king to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which apparently expressed support for both a Saudi-Iran security pact and the prospective nuclear deal, which was then being negotiated between Iran and the US. Both of these would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.
As recently as 2019, it looked like Saudi Arabia and Iran might be headed for war. And diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks in 2015 suggested that during the negotiations leading up to Obama's Iran deal in the early 2010s, the Saudis sided with Israel in pushing for the US to abandon negotiations in favor of military action.
Anyway, this rapprochement is one of the main reasons that during last June's 12-day war, with the exception of some telegraphic strikes on America's Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Iran mostly refrained from attacking even military targets in the Gulf. It would also partly explain why the vast majority of Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, have apparently been counseling the US against further military action against Iran and instead urging Trump to continue with negotiations.
The Gulf States have also played an increasingly active role in diplomacy, with Oman helping to mediate recent negotiations between the US and Iran. Late last week, Oman's foreign minister, who is usually famously tight-lipped, even took the unusual step of publicly suggesting that the deal was within reach, claiming that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to dramatically dilute its existing enriched uranium. A development that the Omani foreign minister described as a "very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before."
Here, Oman was clearly trying to dissuade Trump of military action and signal to the rest of the world that if the US did go to war with Iran, it would be a war of choice and that negotiations were making real progress. Now, some of our viewers might not agree with this, and Trump has argued that the Iranians were not negotiating in good faith, but the Omani position probably reflects the consensus among the Gulf monarchies, namely that continued negotiations were preferable to military action.
In the end, however, it looks like Trump sided with Israel over its Arab allies and launched a massive military operation against Iran, which has so far hit more than 130 cities, killing at least 787 people, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. Unlike in last year's war, Iran retaliated by striking targets across the region, initially aimed at US air bases in the Gulf before launching drones towards every Gulf country apart from Oman. Iran then started targeting non-military infrastructure, including a port in Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia's biggest oil refinery, and airports in Qatar, Dubai, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
By Sunday, even Oman, the only Gulf state not to be attacked on Saturday, had also reported Iranian drone strikes on a commercial port. And on Monday evening, two Iranian drones hit the US embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
So why is Iran attacking its Arab neighbors, unlike last year? Well, as we see it, there are at least three reasons. Firstly, to impose indirect costs. The 12-day war demonstrated that Iran loses in a direct fight. So, this time round, Iran is apparently trying to impose costs via disruption to the global energy and stock markets. European gas prices have already spiked 50% after Qatar paused its production of liquefied natural gas following strikes on Monday, and oil prices went above $80 a barrel after Saudi Arabia paused operations at its biggest domestic oil refinery while assessing damage.
Second, Iran is forcing the US to prioritize. America only has so many assets in the region, so it will now have to make difficult choices regarding which allies it would like to defend most. The US was already stretched pretty thin. In August, for instance, the US had to move a key air defense system from the UAE to Israel, and it will come under more strain if the war continues to expand.
But third, and most significantly, Iran is clearly hoping that the Gulf States will start pushing for the US to end the war for their sakes. This is a big gamble. It's possible that instead of suing for peace, the Gulf monarchies decide that Iran has crossed a line and they need to retaliate. At the moment, it's not clear which way they'll go. Bloomberg reported on Monday, for instance, that the UAE and Qatar are privately lobbying the US to wind things down, while The Economist's Gareth Brown claimed the opposite, posting on X that there's a growing consensus among Gulf officials that they need to push back harder against Iran.
But while retaliation might feel like the natural response here, it would be politically risky given that it's not at all clear that Arab public opinion is behind the US and Israel on this one, and countries like Bahrain, which is majority Shia, have already seen massive anti-American protests.
As a final thing, whatever the Gulf States decide to do, it's clear that the recent strikes have probably done long-term damage to Iranian-Arab relations, and thus we're probably in for a period of tension in the Middle East after the war winds down, whatever its outcome ends up being.
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