Turan Research Center

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

The Saudi and Emirati strikes on Iranian territory during the past two months mark a turning point in the evolution of Gulf security doctrine. For decades, the Arab Gulf states cultivated an image of cautious pragmatism, relying on diplomacy, alliances, and deterrence-by-proxy to manage their fraught relationship with Tehran. They avoided direct confrontation, preferring to outsource hard security to Western powers while hedging through economic diversification and quiet diplomacy. Reuters' reporting on Saudi airstrikes against Iranian military sites in late March and the Wall Street Journal's confirmation that the UAE struck the Lavan Island refinery on April 8 suggest a decisive departure from that tradition. Even without official acknowledgment from either capital, the evidence points to a new willingness to project force across borders — signaling capability, intent, and a recalibration of deterrence.

These operations unfolded against the backdrop of the US–Israeli war on Iran, which erupted on February 28, 2026. Iranian retaliation was swift and indiscriminate; missiles and drones struck all six Gulf Cooperation Council states, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and disrupted global trade. Tehran assumed — correctly — that Western forces had used Gulf airspace and bases to launch their campaigns. By striking back weeks later, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi moved beyond self-defense. They signaled that hosting Western infrastructure would no longer mean absorbing blows without response. The strikes were retaliatory but also symbolic, demonstrating that Gulf states would not remain passive targets in a war threatening their sovereignty and economic lifelines.

The new posture is affirmative rather than defensive. Saudi Arabia's retaliation is driven in part by a desire to protect its multi-trillion-dollar Vision 2030 portfolio from blackmail; the UAE operates under a tighter margin of error still, since a sustained drone campaign against its aviation, tourism, and financial hubs would devastate the Emirati economic model. By striking Iran directly, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are insulating themselves against vulnerability, calculating that proactive deterrence is safer than passive exposure.

This recalibration is multidimensional. Militarily, Gulf states are signaling to Tehran that aggression will be met with force. Diplomatically, they continue to engage external powers — Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Islamabad — ensuring no single actor dominates their security environment. Economically, they diversify partnerships across Asia and Europe to reduce dependence on any single corridor. Strategically, they walk a line between deterrence and diplomacy, projecting strength while leaving the door open to mediation. The strikes embody this logic of calculated maneuvering. They are not declarations of war but measured signals: enough to demonstrate capability, not enough to trigger full escalation.

To grasp how striking a departure this is, consider the long arc of Iranian-Gulf relations. Before the 1979 revolution, the relationship was shaped by a mix of rivalry, cooperation, and shifting alliances under the Shah. Iran positioned itself as the dominant Gulf power, backed by U.S. and British support and an aggressive military buildup that unnerved the smaller monarchies. Tehran's modern claim to Bahrain — pressed forcefully through the 1960s before the Shah accepted the 1970 UN referendum and recognized Bahraini independence in 1971 — left a lingering mistrust that survived the regime that produced it. Iran's seizure of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs from the UAE in 1971, also under the Shah, set a precedent for territorial assertion that remains unresolved today.

Yet the pre-1979 era was not defined solely by confrontation. The Shah cultivated ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies through shared opposition to Arab nationalist movements and the Soviet Union. Riyadh and Tehran functioned as parallel pillars of U.S. regional strategy, aligning against Nasser's Egypt and later Baathist Iraq under American patronage. Oil diplomacy ran in parallel: Iran and Saudi Arabia coordinated within OPEC to stabilize markets, though competition for influence was constant. Territorial disputes on one hand, strategic alignment on the other — an uneasy balance ruptured by the 1979 revolution, when ideological hostility replaced pragmatic rivalry.

Tehran's revolutionary export followed a consistent pattern: asymmetric pressure through proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen; periodic threats to close the Strait of Hormuz; tanker harassment during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, when the spillover into the Gulf became known as the Tanker War and threatened the lifeline of Gulf economies. Through every cycle, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait relied heavily on U.S. naval protection and avoided direct strikes on Iranian territory despite repeated provocations. The lesson institutionalized in Gulf capitals was that survival depended on external guarantees.

That lesson held into the 1990s and 2000s, as Iran expanded its proxy networks while periodically threatening Hormuz, and Gulf states deepened ties with Washington, invested in advanced defense systems, and cautiously engaged Tehran in diplomacy — including the Beijing-brokered rapprochement of 2023. The underlying imbalance remained: Iran wielded asymmetric tools of disruption, while the Gulf relied on deterrence by alliance. The 2026 strikes are the first decisive break with that pattern.

The Gulf-Washington alignment driving that break is best understood through what Russian strategic thinkers, beginning with Vladimir Lefebvre in the 1960s and later elaborated in Western analysis by Timothy Thomas, called reflexive control— the practice of shaping an adversary's perceptions through deliberate contradiction, adaptive signaling, and self-reinforcing narratives, such that the adversary internalizes a distorted picture of the strategic environment and acts against its own interests. Trump's contradictory pronouncements on Iran — alternating between threats of total war and offers of negotiation, often within the same news cycle — are the operational signature of this approach. Whether intuitive or designed, they force Tehran to plan for incompatible scenarios simultaneously, dispersing its decision-making and depriving it of the strategic monopoly on ambiguity it has historically enjoyed.

The Iranian regime is structurally vulnerable to this mirroring. On March 7, in a pre-recorded televised address, President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to the Gulf states and pledged that their territories would not be targeted unless attacks originated from them. The pledge was undercut within hours — strikes on Doha and other Gulf cities continued through the day — and within forty-eight hours Pezeshkian himself was forced into a partial climbdown after IRGC commanders and clerical hardliners denounced the apology as, in lawmaker Hamid Rasai's words, "unprofessional, weak and unacceptable." The episode revealed Tehran speaking with multiple voices simultaneously: diplomatic conciliation from the presidency, military escalation from the IRGC, ideological repudiation from the clerical establishment. Reflexive control works against an adversary whose own messaging is already fractured.

The Gulf states are not passive recipients of this strategy; they are amplifying it. Reuters reported in mid-May that Saudi Arabia carried out covert strikes on Iranian territory in late March, citing Western and Iranian officials, and noted that Riyadh's diplomatic channel with Tehran ran in parallel with the strikes — Iranian attack volume against the kingdom declined even as Saudi munitions were landing inside Iran. The Wall Street Journal followed with confirmation that the UAE was responsible for the April 8 Lavan Island strike, timed to within hours of Trump's announcement of a conditional ceasefire. Neither government has confirmed or denied. The UAE foreign ministry has invoked its "right to respond to hostile acts with military measures to protect its security" — a formulation that neither acknowledges Lavan nor permits it to be ruled out. UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash has gone further, publicly opposing any ceasefire that fails to deliver "a long-term solution for security in the Persian Gulf." Reports through March and April variously placed Gulf leaders as urging Washington to halt the war, urging it to continue, and urging postponement; the contradictions are not noise from inconsistent sourcing but a feature of how Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have chosen to communicate. The pattern — strikes paired with diplomatic engagement, action paired with official non-acknowledgment, public positioning paired with deliberately incompatible signaling — is the operational footprint of Gulf governments running their own reflexive strategy, not merely benefiting from Washington's.

For Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, this serves two purposes. It embeds their actions within a broader strategic framework, reducing the risk of isolation and ensuring their moves are interpreted as part of a coordinated effort rather than rogue initiatives. And it allows them to project agency: they are not pawns in Washington's game but co-authors of a strategy that leverages ambiguity to deter aggression. Contradiction becomes a tool of deterrence, signaling both resolve and flexibility, ensuring Tehran remains perpetually uncertain about what comes next.

The choreography rests on a deeper layer that has only recently come into public view: a sustained, private Gulf campaign to push Washington beyond containment toward a more decisive posture against Tehran. The Washington Post reportedon February 28 that Trump's decision to launch the opening strikes followed weeks of lobbying by what the paper described as an unusual pair of allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, citing four people familiar with the matter. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman placed multiple private calls to the president in the preceding month, and Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman pressed U.S. officials in Washington against inaction; U.S. intelligence assessments at the time saw no imminent Iranian threat to the mainland. The New York Times subsequently reported that MBS has remained in regular contact with Trump throughout the war, urging continued military pressure and warning against any agreement that would leave the Iranian government and its missile programs substantively intact — invoking, according to the report, late King Abdullah's 2010 phrase about "cutting off the head of the snake." The Associated Press has since reported that officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain have privately conveyed to the White House that they do not want the operation to end short of significant changes in Iranian leadership or a dramatic shift in Iranian behavior.

Riyadh has publicly denied the lobbying reports — embassy spokesman Fahad Nazer issued a statement within forty-eight hours of the Post account saying that "at no point" did the kingdom urge the president "to adopt a different policy." The denial is itself the pattern: private pressure paired with public moderation, action paired with disavowal. The UAE has run the more affirmative line. Emirati officials have publicly criticized regional partners for failing to respond more forcefully to Iranian attacks, executed the Lavan strike, and moved to exit OPEC during the conflict — a posture noticeably closer to Washington and Jerusalem than to its Gulf neighbors. Saudi Arabia has been more dual-track, balancing private advocacy for sustained American pressure with public emphasis on diplomacy, covert strikes against Iran with back-channel diplomacy that produced documented reductions in Iranian fire against the kingdom. The visible divergence between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi — over OPEC, over the Houthi question, over Red Sea exposure — does not weaken the reflexive doctrine. It refines it. Two distinct Gulf signaling strategies, neither cleanly disavowable, leave Tehran modeling not one adversary but several, each operating on a different axis of plausible deniability.

Crossing the threshold of striking Iranian soil alters deterrence dynamics. Iran has long warned that any Gulf state hosting U.S. bases or facilitating attacks would be treated as a legitimate target; by acting directly, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have removed any plausible-deniability cover from Tehran's targeting calculus. Oil infrastructure, ports, and religious gatherings such as the Hajj could become politicized and vulnerable. The Strait of Hormuz blockade already threatens energy security worldwide, and Gulf strikes deepen uncertainty in oil markets. The escalation also dismantles the diplomatic architecture cultivated by Beijing, effectively tearing up the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement and forcing China to choose between its principal energy suppliers. Prolonged conflict risks drawing in Russian electronic warfare and air defense support for Tehran, and extends the theater to the Bab al-Mandab Strait, where Iranian leverage through Houthi proxies could close a second chokepoint on global trade. Preventing a dual maritime stranglehold — Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — is now as central to Gulf strategy as deterring direct strikes.

Several trajectories are possible. Continued Gulf strikes could transform the region into a full theater of war, with Iran escalating against oil fields, ports, and religious gatherings; for Riyadh, this carries existential domestic risk as the Hajj season approaches. Halting direct strikes and pursuing diplomacy would reduce risks to Gulf infrastructure but force Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to accept limits on their newfound assertiveness. The hybrid approach already in evidence — covert or deniable operations alongside public diplomacy — allows Gulf states to project strength without full escalation, though ambiguity carries dangers, as miscalculation could trigger Iranian retaliation regardless of deniability.

The Gulf's awakening is not a simple rupture, nor a fleeting tactic of deception. It is the codification of ambiguity into doctrine. By striking Iranian soil while issuing contradictory signals, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have transformed reflexivity into the architecture of deterrence — projecting strength while preserving deniability, signaling resolve while retaining flexibility. The historic transformation is not the use of force across the Gulf; it is that deterrence is no longer outsourced, but redefined through the strategic manipulation of doubt.

The implications run past the immediate conflict. The Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement of 2023 is functionally dead, overtaken by a Gulf posture that treats Tehran as an active adversary rather than a manageable rival, and that China cannot mediate without choosing between its principal energy suppliers. The post-ceasefire architecture now being negotiated through Pakistani mediation will have to accommodate not just American security guarantees and Iranian red lines, but Gulf governments that have demonstrated they will act on their own — and that may keep acting, deniably, when their interests demand it. The smaller GCC states — Qatar, Oman, Kuwait — face the consequences without having joined the action, a divergence within the bloc that the previous era of collective hedging concealed. Whether the new doctrine produces stability or a more dangerous equilibrium will depend less on Iran's response than on whether Riyadh and Abu Dhabi can sustain controlled ambiguity without losing control of it.

Ahmed Khuzaei is the managing partner of Political Consultancy firm “Khuzaie Associates LLC.” He also serves as an expert with the N7 Foundation, contributing analysis on Gulf affairs and the evolving landscape of the Abraham Accords. He is an Ambassador for BPUR at the United Nations and the White House.