For decades, the Gulf monarchies operated under a seemingly unquestionable assumption: that U.S. military power guaranteed their security. The war with Iran is shattering that certainty.
Less than an hour after the initial attacks by the United States and Israel, Iran retaliated by hitting U.S. military facilities across the Middle East with precision strikes. Successive waves of missiles and drones forced the evacuation of bases and the dispersal of troops. Civilian infrastructure — roads, ports, airports, power plants, and even hotels — began to be struck, while the Strait of Hormuz was effectively paralyzed.
The message was stark for the Gulf monarchies: Washington not only failed to prevent the Iranian attacks but also appeared incapable of fully protecting its own bases in the region.
This shock did not come out of nowhere. In 2019, drones and missiles targeted key facilities in the Saudi oil industry without a significant response from the United States. Attacks on Abu Dhabi reinforced the same lesson: even the wealthiest Gulf states were vulnerable. What once seemed like an isolated incident now appears to be the prelude to a deeper crisis: the unraveling of the security system that has structured the region for nearly half a century.
The Gulf Order: Oil, Security, and U.S. Hegemony
Since the 1980s, after the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, the political balance in the Gulf has relied on a relatively straightforward arrangement: the oil monarchies ensured a stable flow of energy to the global economy while the United States protected them against regional threats, particularly Iran, which had disrupted the regional balance with the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
This system combined U.S. military bases, massive arms sales, intelligence cooperation, and the implicit promise of military intervention in times of crisis. The result was an exceptionally stable regional environment amid a turbulent Middle East. Recall that the United States maintains a network of bases, naval facilities, and forward operating bases in at least 19 locations across the Middle East, with eight permanent bases in the region, including those in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Gulf elites grew accustomed to living under that strategic umbrella. Even as regional tensions escalated — such as during the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — the Gulf states perceived themselves as relatively immune to the turmoil devastating other Arab countries.
In recent years, however, cracks have begun to appear. The diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023, facilitated by China, reflected a growing perception that regional security could no longer depend exclusively on Washington. The current war has transformed this doubt into a full-blown crisis.
The Mirage of the Gulf as the New Center of Global Trade
Before analyzing the consequences of the current war, it is worth recalling what this region had become in recent years. Until recently, the Gulf Cooperation Council states seemed to have found a formula to escape the instability of the Middle East. Their ambition was to transform themselves into a central hub for global trade, finance, and logistics. As journalist Francisco Carrión notes,
For two decades, the capitals of the Persian Gulf sold the world a futuristic promise that captivated many. They boasted of being cities risen from the desert where skyscrapers gleamed atop artificial islands; destinations for luxury tourism; global financial hubs; and a playground for armies of influencers, trained and prepared to broadcast a life of perpetual wealth. Dubai, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha presented themselves as the modern face of the Middle East, a sort of oasis of stability in a region marked by conflict.
The figures seemed to confirm that narrative. The UAE alone attracted about $45.6 billion in foreign direct investment in 2024, nearly 50 percent more than the previous year, ranking among the world’s top 10 investment destinations. Dubai, the epitome of this transformation, established itself as one of the planet’s largest tourist and financial hubs. In 2025, it welcomed more than 17 million international visitors and aimed to attract 20 million in the coming years. It also became one of the world’s leading hubs for new investment projects, with over 1,100 foreign direct investment projects in a single year. Meanwhile, its airport is now the world’s busiest in terms of international traffic and one of the key hubs of global aviation.
Saudi Arabia is undergoing a similar transformation. The kingdom attracted more than $30 billion in foreign investment in 2024 and welcomed around 122 million visitors in 2025, generating some $80 billion in tourism spending. This is all part of its Vision 2030 strategy, which seeks to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil.
The region has also become a magnet for global capital. In 2025 alone, the UAE attracted nearly 10,000 new millionaires, marking one of the largest migrations of wealth in the world. Gigantic projects such as the NEOM megacity — valued at about $500 billion, though recently scaled back — and the Red Sea tourism developments symbolize this ambition to turn the Gulf into a global hub for investment, technology, and logistics. Even in economies still tied to hydrocarbons, diversification is advancing rapidly. In the UAE, non-oil sectors already account for roughly three-quarters of real GDP.
Even more important for the global economy, the Gulf countries have become key providers of capital to the international system. The sovereign wealth funds of the Arab monarchies hold assets worth $6 trillion. They are an indispensable source of investment; based on the volume of capital they mobilize, they would rank as the world’s third-largest economy. This is why the Gulf Cooperation Council, emerging as the connecting hub between European and Asian markets, participates in summits with the EU and ASEAN.
But the current war is revealing an uncomfortable truth: this project depended on a precondition that is now disappearing. The Gulf was able to become a global platform for trade and capital because it was protected by the geopolitical order of a unipolar world dominated by the United States. As that security structure begins to crumble, so does the illusion that the region can remain untouched by the geopolitical turbulence of the Middle East. The “new Singapore of the desert” was, to a large extent, a byproduct of the U.S. strategic order.
The impact could be profound. As Frédéric Schneider, a researcher at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs (cited in the Carrión article referenced above), warns:
The timing is particularly inopportune for Gulf countries because they are undergoing the greatest economic transformation in their recent history. The Vision strategies, already fragile, are based on the premise that they can combine hydrocarbon wealth, geographic centrality, and the expansion of domestic markets to attract foreign talent and capital, diversify beyond oil exports, and build world-class knowledge economies. All these premises rest on a perception of stability that the events of recent days have placed under severe and perhaps lasting question.
The Strategic Consequence: The Collapse of the Myth of U.S. Security
But the deepest effect of this war is neither economic nor military; it is strategic. For decades, U.S. power rested not only on its actual military capability but also on its reputation as the ultimate guarantor of its allies’ security. That strategic prestige was the core of the alliance system that sustained the post–Cold War international order. Today, that perception has begun to crack.
In the Gulf, regional leaders are watching as U.S. military bases come under attack, missile defense systems rapidly deplete their interceptors, and Washington appears unable to fully protect critical infrastructure or global energy transport. The message is unsettling: the United States cannot even fully guarantee the security of the strategic space that has been the heart of the global energy system for half a century. For many Gulf capitals, U.S. bases no longer appear solely as a protective shield but also as potential magnets for enemy attacks.
This psychological shift may be one of the war’s most lasting effects. A phrase attributed to former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has resurfaced in the region: “Those who wrap themselves in the United States are naked.” In other words, those who rely on U.S. protection eventually discover the limits of that guarantee.
At the same time, this new strategic awareness is pushing the Gulf monarchies toward another increasingly visible goal: the need to rearm. The current crisis has confirmed what many leaders in the region were beginning to suspect: military dependence on external powers poses a strategic risk in itself.
In this context, even traditionally cautious countries like Oman have begun urging Gulf states to reconsider their defense doctrines. According to Omani officials, there is already a growing debate in the region about the effectiveness of existing security agreements.
Fear is bordering on panic in light of uncertainty about the war’s ultimate outcome and doubts regarding U.S. determination to see it through to the end. Some analysts suggest that the region could be more dangerous after the war than before. Privately, diplomats and regional analysts acknowledge that the most feared scenario is not necessarily Iran’s defeat but the kind of Iran that might emerge from it. According to Eli Levita, former deputy director of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission,
A new leadership led by Mojtaba Khamenei may say, “We tried to be a nuclear threshold state, and it didn’t deter the world. We tried to rely on a large and sophisticated missile array, and that didn’t deter, either. We threatened to expand the war to the entire region, and that didn’t work either. So, like North Korea, we have to go for the ultimate deterrence, nuclear weapons.”
The prospect of a humiliated Iran under Mojtaba Khamenei, who would succeed his assassinated father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is causing serious concern across the Gulf.
The Global Effects: What Asia Is Watching
The impact of the weakening U.S. security umbrella is not limited to this region. If that perception erodes in the Gulf — the energy heart of the global system — it will hardly remain intact in other regions where security also depends on the United States.
In Asia, where the regional security system relies on Washington’s military guarantees, the unfolding of this war is being watched closely. South Korea is particularly illustrative. Seoul faces three simultaneous pressures that directly affect its alliance with the United States. First, U.S. trade policy is eroding the competitiveness of key sectors of the South Korean economy. Second, the war in the Middle East threatens its energy security, given that a significant portion of the oil it consumes comes from the Gulf, along with raw materials essential to its powerful electronics industry. Third, the U.S. military’s global needs are reducing the military resources available on the Korean Peninsula. This accumulation of tensions will inevitably influence Seoul’s strategic calculations.
If the United States struggles to protect the Gulf against Iran — a regional adversary with resources far inferior to Washington’s — many Asian strategists are beginning to ask an inevitable question: What would happen in a far more demanding scenario, such as a direct confrontation with China?
Although the current war is still far from over, we can already identify one of its most profound effects: the collapse of the myth of absolute U.S. security. This belief, which not only sustained the strategic order in the Gulf but was also a central part of the international system that emerged after the Cold War, has been fundamentally challenged.
Originally published in Spanish on March 15 in La Izquierda Diario.
The post The War in Iran Is Shattering the Illusion of the U.S. Security Umbrella appeared first on Left Voice.
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