Will the Gulf States Join the Iran War, and What Would Happen if They Did?

(Fadel SENNA / AFP via Getty Images)

The Burj Khalifa skyscraper (L) and the Burj al-Arab hotel (R) on March 11 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

With further Iranian provocation, several Gulf Cooperation Council states would be willing to join the war against Iran, but doing so would likely deepen Iran's targeting of their critical infrastructure, exacerbate the globally disruptive impacts of the war and potentially pull the GCC into a permanently hostile relationship with Iran. Recent reporting from The New York Times, Bloomberg and other outlets has suggested that some Gulf Arab states are considering entering the war against Iran. These reports have added new details to weeks of speculation that Saudi Arabia and/or the United Arab Emirates might join attacks on Iran in response to potential Iranian strikes on desalination or power plants in their countries. But the reports have not detailed precisely how they might retaliate, and whether that would be direct offensive action inside Iranian territory, landings on disputed islands in the Persian Gulf or something else. Either way, the reports suggest that a debate is underway within key GCC capitals over whether current Iranian strikes warrant a direct response to reestablish deterrence against Iran through conventional military retaliation, given that their diplomatic strategy of neutrality and appeasement looks increasingly unsuccessful.

Even before the war, media leaks suggested intense debate within GCC capitals over how to approach a potential war with Iran, with the Times reporting that Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman had suggested in private that, if war were to come, it would need to be expansive to deter Iran in the long run. This contradicted Riyadh's publicly stated policy of neutrality and de-escalation.
The United Arab Emirates has endured the largest barrages of Iranian missile and drone attacks in the GCC, in part because of its prominent global position in media, finance and tourism, and in part because of its membership in the Abraham Accords with Israel, hardening UAE resolve to consider entering the war. The emirates also host U.S. troops, but the United States has more in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

Historic GCC Foreign Policy Approaches to Iran
The GCC itself is largely a symbolic institution unable to create bloc-wide policies, particularly on the foreign policy front, as its members see the region and the international system differently. As a result, the GCC has never had a unified Iran strategy, with individual countries charting different diplomatic courses that broadly sought to lower the risk of direct Iranian strikes while pursuing different Iran policies based on the preferences of their rulers and political systems. Kuwait, for example, had sought a nonconfrontational policy with Iran while keeping U.S. troops in the country as a security guarantor, hoping that the U.S. tripwire force would deter future aggression against the emirate while avoiding direct confrontation with Iran. Other countries like Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were trade and even sanctions-busting partners with Iran, with Dubai hosting Iranian banks and facilitating trade. For Qatar, Iran was a key trade partner during the Saudi-Emirati-led blockade of 2017 to 2021. Saudi Arabia previously was more hawkish toward Iran, particularly during the Shiite uprising in neighboring Bahrain that began during the Arab Spring, which Riyadh blamed in part on Iranian sponsorship. But after the Iranian-backed attack on Saudi Arabia's crucial Abqaiq oil processing facility in 2019 and a political mentality shift towards neutrality in Riyadh starting around 2021, Saudi Arabia chose rapprochement with Iran that culminated in a Chinese-brokered de-escalation agreement in 2023 in an attempt to reduce regional tensions and direct threats to the kingdom. The United Arab Emirates has remained the most hawkish, led by its capital emirate, Abu Dhabi, which has seen Iran as an ideological and strategic rival and which has an ongoing territorial dispute over the control of the strategic Persian Gulf islands of Abu Musa and the Tunb Islands, occupied during the time of the Shah in 1971.

For now, the overall GCC military posture will remain defensive, using offensive systems like jets and helicopters to intercept attacks rather than to conduct counterattacks directly against the Iranians. So long as the continued trajectory of the war suggests that Iran will carry out intermittent missile and drone strikes on military, industrial and other noncritical infrastructure, GCC states will likely maintain their defensive position. This is in part because, outside of some niche capabilities, overall, the GCC states do not bring a qualitative military advantage to the U.S.-Israeli air campaign. Furthermore, GCC operations inside of Iran alongside the Israelis would be controversial with their residents and citizens, particularly given Israel's ongoing military operations in Gaza. Many citizens and residents also blame Israel for starting the current war, and though all the GCC states except Kuwait lack viable elections, rulers are sensitive to public opinion and the prospects of radicalization driven by pro-Israel policies. Additionally, the GCC states are concerned about further antagonizing the Iranians such that Iran retaliates by escalating to conduct attacks on Gulf critical infrastructure, or activates saboteurs inside their countries, or carries out harassment campaigns in their airspace and waters, even after a potential ceasefire. As a result, the GCC states are likely to loosen some of their restrictions against U.S. direct action out of their territory — such as allowing air missions and/or missile strikes — but are less likely to send their own air forces, let alone ground forces, into action against the Iranians without significant provocation or express American military and logistical support.

Saudi Arabia has the region's largest air force, with more than 300 combat aircraft, making its contribution the most significant. But Saudi Arabia remains focused on protecting its southern front across the border from Yemen's Houthis, who have not entered the war yet. Riyadh also fears that the United States, with its own heavy air campaign in Iran, might not be able to resupply the Saudis at scale should they enter the conflict soon. Meanwhile, the GCC's air forces are made up of the same type of U.S. and occasionally European hardware used by the United States and Israel, so while they would bring a fresh quantitative advantage, they would not bring a qualitative one.
Anti-Israeli sentiment has grown in the GCC since the start of the Gaza War in 2023, with the United Arab Emirates seeing soft boycotts of Israeli companies and goods, Saudi Arabia freezing normalization efforts with Israel, and countries like Qatar becoming more critical of Israel after it attacked Hamas leaders in Doha in September 2025.

Two developments could lead some GCC states to shift to a more offensive posture: an Iranian strike that results in significant civilian casualties or the destruction of critical infrastructure that underpins Gulf societies, or U.S. ground troops beginning landings on Iranian territory. Public and political anti-intervention sentiment would rapidly change in reaction to a direct Iranian strike that resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties and/or the destruction of a critical piece of infrastructure necessary for daily life in the region, such as power plants or desalination facilities, or even an inadvertent strike on a nuclear facility. Such strikes could be extremely threatening to Gulf states' economic viability and political stability, especially if repeated, and encourage them to adopt a more offensive posture in retaliation against the Iranians, seeking a combination of revenge, public appeasement and effort to reestablish deterrence. The retaliation would likely be scaled to the impact of the Iranian provocation, meaning that limited attacks on critical infrastructure might only provoke limited counterattacks by one or more GCC states. Additionally, given the GCC's lack of a formal defensive mechanism, an attack on a single GCC state would not trigger a bloc-wide response, but rather responses from individual states. In this case, more hawkish states like the United Arab Emirates would be more likely to retaliate, while less hawkish ones, like Oman, would be reluctant to get involved. But if Iran begins a campaign of strategic destruction against GCC critical infrastructure, deliberately destroying power plants and/or desalination facilities at scale, the GCC as a bloc would be more likely to join in an extended campaign to retaliate and deter the Iranians. Iran might switch to this strategy of a strategic destruction campaign against GCC energy and/or other critical infrastructure in an extended conflict, trying to force an energy shock that would push the United States to impose a ceasefire in Iran's favor. Meanwhile, if the United States begins landing on Iranian islands to strangle its oil exports and/or restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, the United Arab Emirates, potentially with Saudi and/or Bahraini support, would likely be tempted to send its own forces to reclaim its islands in the Persian Gulf. This becomes particularly more likely if Washington actively encourages the United Arab Emirates to recover these islands and offers logistical and military support in this mission.

Internal divisions and different political orientations would probably shape the GCC response as well, with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain more likely to join solidarity retaliation campaigns, and Kuwait, Oman, and, potentially, Qatar less so.
Regular Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia did not trigger bloc-wide responses during the Saudi intervention there in 2014 onward, nor did Houthi attacks on Abu Dhabi in 2022, as GCC states lack full defensive alignment.
Emirati special forces have long trained for landings on Abu Musa and the Tunb Islands, though the United Arab Emirates has no history of conducting these operations under fire, and it would likely need sustained U.S. air and naval support as well as the ability to endure Iranian counterattacks from the mainland.

If a GCC country (or countries) enters the war, it would spur Iran to increase its targeting of the GCC's critical energy and civilian infrastructure, potentially provoking a humanitarian crisis, deepening the energy shock emerging from the war, lengthening the period of reconstruction and recovery needed for the GCC, and pushing some, if not all, of the GCC to coalesce as an anti-Iran bloc for years to come. With the entry of one or more GCC states into the war, Iran would have a strong incentive to break the political will of the GCC states to remain inside of the offensive coalition against it by targeting their key vulnerabilities, such as energy exports, access to affordable water, food and electricity, and potentially even entertainment and tourist targets designed to fundamentally reshape the perception of safety in the region. With the supply of regional air defense munitions uncertain, Iran might increasingly be capable of striking such targets intermittently, particularly with more basic weapons such as Shahed drones, resulting in significant damage to critical infrastructure and potential interruptions of food, fuel and water within the GCC. Such interruptions would likely accelerate the exit of foreign workers from these countries, denting their economies, which rely to varying degrees on migrant labor, while potentially causing enough damage that reconstruction might take years to complete. This long-lasting damage would create enduring energy and logistical shocks to global supply chains, depending on the targets chosen by Iran. Meanwhile, in a more extreme scenario, the Iranians may deliberately target civilian tourists and entertainment facilities, attempt to scare away foreign workers and remaining tourists, and create a perception of instability with long-term economic implications for the GCC. But such an extreme cycle of retaliation and counterattacks would likely leave the bloc more hostile to Iran in the long term and supportive of future military campaigns against it. In this more extreme scenario in which the Iranians enter into this cycle of escalation against the GCC, most, if not all, GCC capitals would see Iran as a new, permanent regional threat that they cannot trust. This would make it harder for Iran to reestablish diplomatic and economic ties with the GCC after a ceasefire, leaving it largely isolated from key trading partners. Moreover, GCC states would be more open to potential isolation and military campaigns against the Iranians in the future, becoming more hawkish on their drone and missile programs that are direct threats to the bloc, while at the same time being less critical of U.S. and/or Israeli military operations in the future against Iran to remove and weaken such threats. In addition, some GCC countries may become more willing to become staging posts for further ground incursions into Iran, making it easier for the United States to potentially land more troops inside Iran as part of a wider campaign to secure the Strait of Hormuz or even to inflict a massive conventional defeat on Iran's military on its own soil. In the most extreme cycle of escalation, some GCC states would be likely to send troops to join a U.S.-led ground campaign, similar to how they joined the U.S. coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Iran has not deliberately targeted tourist or entertainment locations except those it claims are associated with U.S. troops; the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, in particular, have amusement parks, malls and other entertainment facilities that have not been directly targeted as of yet.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 turned Kuwait from a supporter of Baghdad into an Iraqi rival. In 2003, Kuwait became the sole country to support the U.S. ground invasion into Iraq, serving as a critical land corridor for the operation.