Gulf states fear an unrestrained Israel will hurt fragile ties with Iran

ISTANBUL – Iran’s missile strike targeting a U.S. air base in Qatar this past week could have imperiled the effort by Persian Gulf monarchies in recent years to ease Tehran’s isolation on the grounds that it would make the region more secure.

But the attack – retaliation for U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities – came after Iran had provided a warning, and the 19 missiles did no damage to Qatar or the air base. The missile barrage prompted full-throated condemnations from gulf states, but not much more, suggesting that their warming ties with Iran had provided some protection, and might endure.

“I hope the good relationship with Iran comes back to normal as soon as possible,” Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told reporters Tuesday, even as he condemned the attack. “The Iranian people are our neighbors, and we wish them peace, growth and development.”

The episode provided a vivid illustration of how the gulf’s view of regional threats and how to meet them have shifted since President Donald Trump’s first term, when a fear of Iran helped prod some Arab states to normalize relations with Israel, and caused others to consider doing so. But Trump faces a different reality now, as his administration presses for more such agreements, including between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

For one, the danger the gulf once perceived from Iran has eased. Despite a long history of rivalry and antipathy, the gulf states during the past few years have tried to bring Iran closer, betting that engagement could blunt the threat posed by its network of proxy militias and pay other dividends, including economic benefits.

At the same time, some of the Arab monarchies have grown increasingly wary of Israel, viewing it as a belligerent and unpredictable regional player for its military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israel, analysts said.

The main source of regional instability, Al Thani said, was the “conflict taking place in Gaza.”

For a long time, gulf countries saw “Iran as the biggest destabilizing force in the region,” and a threat they needed to counter, said H.A. Hellyer, senior fellow in geopolitics, international security and Middle East studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London.

“That calculus has changed. The most destabilizing actor is Israel,” he said, because of its military actions around the region. Those concerns are colored in part by “how little resistance and how much empowering” of Israel’s actions came from the United States and Europe. That worried the gulf “tremendously,” he said.

Mohammed Baharoon, the director general of B’huth, a Dubai research center, said he had viewed the normalization agreements with Israel, including one signed by the United Arab Emirates during Trump’s first term, as positive for a variety of reasons, including the prospect that the UAE could help bring about Palestinian statehood.

But events during the past two years, leading up to the June 13 assault on Iran, “indicated to me at least that Israel does not look at peace, it looks at security. Not only security but its perception of it,” he said. Israel’s rolling military campaign in the region – in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran – was unprecedented, he said.

Israel’s war in Gaza and the government’s opposition to Palestinian statehood have stymied U.S. efforts to secure normalization with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has repeatedly said it will not normalize relations with Israel absent progress toward establishing a Palestinian state.

But after the ceasefire with Iran, American and Israeli officials suggested there would be a peace dividend. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, said that more normalization agreements could be announced soon. Netanyahu, in a post on X, wrote of working with Trump to quickly “expand the circle of peace.” Their optimistic statements reflected an assessment that the attacks on Iran could lead to a breakthrough.

But the strikes instead had added to the sense of anxiety, at least in the gulf. They also disrupted nuclear talks that were scheduled to reconvene in Oman between Iran and the United States – “a meeting a lot of people thought was a milestone,” Baharoon said.

Gulf states, which also fear Iran getting a nuclear weapon, have been rooting for the success of the talks. Israel’s attack against Iran appeared intended not just to scuttle those talks but were an “attempt” to interrupt the development of Tehran’s ties to the gulf, he said.

The U.S. was “engaged in a negotiation process and the Israelis start bombing in the middle of that process,” Hellyer said. “It sends a particular sort of message to the gulf.”

While Trump has said his administration would return to talks, Tehran has signaled a more hard-line position, saying Iran would suspend cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog until it receives assurances that Iranian nuclear facilities and scientists would be safe.

Different countries have pursued ties with Tehran for their own reasons. Saudi Arabia’s effort, which started in earnest four years ago, followed attacks on the kingdom in 2019 that it blamed on Iran.

The UAE’s outreach to Iran fit with its preference for “investing in statehood,” Baharoon said, referring to the strategy of putting a priority on ties with governments, whatever their outlook, while strongly opposing non-state movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist group.

The gulf’s outreach to Iran amounted to a “reversal of a strategy that the U.S. has invested in for 30 years, which is a strategy of isolation,” and had not achieved anything, he said. The policy “was supposed to stop its nuclear program; it’s increasing. It is supposed to limit the impact of the missile program. It didn’t. It is supposed to curtail” Iran’s reliance on proxy forces, but “it’s doing the opposite,” he said.

“We need Iran to deal with us in the same way we deal with other countries,” he said.

Even after Qatar was attacked, he pointed out, it quickly turned to mediating between Iran and the United States to win a ceasefire.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian also took pains to downplay any prospect of a rupture. He said an Iranian missile barrage “should not be interpreted as a confrontation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and its friendly, brotherly neighbor, Qatar,” Pezeshkian told Qatar’s emir, in comments carried by Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

The Gulf condemnations that followed the attack “matter a lot,” said Anna Jacobs, a nonresident fellow at the Gulf States Institute. There would likely be a “cooling off period,” but the gulf states remained “very committed to relations with Iran for the purposes of regional de-escalation,” she said.

“I think they really do believe that the right strategy is maintaining ties, is maintaining dialogue – especially when the region is in such a precarious position.”