For the better part of a year, the Gulf states had been operating in what was effectively becoming a post-Iran strategic environment in which they saw the Islamic Republic as a receding hegemon. The systematic Israeli degradation of the Axis of Resistance through the destruction of Hamas as a military force, the decapitation and disarmament of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad’s Syria in December 2024, and the June 2025 air campaign against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure had already removed most of the operational ceilings that the Iranian threat had imposed on regional politics for decades. Well before the current conflict with Iran, therefore, the Gulf capitals drew the rational conclusion that the relevant competition is now among the Gulf states themselves, and between the Gulf states and Turkey, over who would lead the region in whatever comes next.
For the better part of a year, the Gulf states had been operating in what was effectively becoming a post-Iran strategic environment in which they saw the Islamic Republic as a receding hegemon.
Saudi Arabia was the first mover. Riyadh’s strategic pivot, visible since late last year, represented a fundamental reorientation. The kingdom was no longer behaving as a conservative stakeholder, but rather a revisionist power. The signs were a consolidating relationship with Turkey, renewed investment in Islamist and anti-Zionist rhetoric as instruments of regional influence, a deliberate freeze on normalization with Israel, and open confrontation with the UAE across multiple theaters — most immediately in Yemen, where Saudi and Emirati-backed forces clashed over competing visions of the country’s political end-state, but also across the Red Sea corridor, the Horn of Africa, and the contest over Syria’s reconstruction.
The Saudi-Emirati rivalry, which had been managed and largely suppressed for more than a decade under the shared Iranian threat, was now becoming the central axis of Gulf politics. And behind it lay the fact that the two forces that had disciplined intra-Gulf competition — American hegemonic management and the Iranian counter-system — were both receding. Washington had shifted from system manager to selective participant, its interventions episodic, transactional, and decoupled from any broader order-building objectives—as exemplified in the willingness of the second Trump administration to decouple its transactions with Gulf nations from the normalization process. The Iranian axis was in ruins. With fewer external constraints, competition became direct, positional, and
increasingly difficult to contain.
This was the environment in which Iran, in its final act, did something none of its Gulf neighbors had anticipated: it attacked all of them simultaneously to stop the American-Israeli joint operation against it.
Published originally on March 16, 2026.
Read the full report at JINSA.
