The damage on Gulf countries is not limited to the breach of security, sovereignty, and long-standing reputation as safe business hubs but also concerns the oil infrastructure, environment, aviation industry and vital installations such as desalination plants.
Acknowledging it is no military match for the United States and Israel, Iran has adopted the strategy of inflicting damage on neighbours who host US military bases – though the Gulf countries had openly vowed not to allow the US to use their territory to launch attacks on Iran, and exerted serious efforts to find a political solution before the war broke out.
Yet Iran has not spared a single Gulf country from daily attacks, including those that have been friendly to Tehran, exerting serious effort to prevent the war, such as Oman and Qatar. It has caused damage to civilian infrastructure including airports and hotels. Along with blocking the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas goes, causing worldwide economic disruption, Iran believes that these are most effective tools to force US President Donald Trump to bring this war to an end.
Iran has also been blunt in terms of threats: If the US and Israel attack Iranian oil installations or infrastructure, Iran will strike similar installations in the Gulf countries, as we seen happening in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. It also issued similar threats of retaliation against water desalination stations, and even the banking sector in the Gulf countries in the case of such targets being hit in Iran.
However, the US president, who has been consulting only with his partner in this war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, does not seem to be interested in bringing the war to an end any time soon, even after the failure of his initial assumption that the Iranian regime would quickly be defeated following the shocking opening attack of 28 February, which “decapitated” Iran by killing its supreme leader as well as top military leaders.
Instead, he is now asking the world to join in his war under the banner of re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, claiming that the US did not need the oil that travelled through it, and that he was actually benefiting other countries, including adversaries such as China.
No wonder this demand by Trump has been met with a near mute reaction from most of the countries to which he appealed for help. The simple answer was that no country, whether a US ally or not, was consulted in advance on the decision to go to war. Thus, other countries see no reason to be involved in cleaning up the US and Israel’s mess, particularly considering the serious threat to their own ships and troops.
At one point after former US president George W Bush unilaterally decide to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003, he soon recognised the well-known idiom, “if you break it, you own it.” The situation with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is no different, and it is rather bizarre that Trump expects otherwise.
Even more worrying, however, is that if Trump’s pressure and threats result in the deployment of such international naval force, this will certainly take some time, weeks and not days. The world economy cannot sustain the current, skyrocketing fuel prices, or wait until such proposed naval force becomes functional.
The Gulf countries are also entitled to worry about the day after the war. Nearly all analysts agree that the definition of victory for Iran’s regime is to stay in power, even if the country suffered heavy damages to its military arsenal, infrastructure, and civilians. Thus, if this war ends with the same regime in power, it will probably take years to rebuild trust between Iran and its neighbours. Even a weakened Iranian regime that feels isolated and accuses its neighbours of taking part in a military campaign against it is likely to remain a source of instability for the region.
Meanwhile, if the US and Israel achieve their target of toppling the regime after a long military campaign, there is no clear plan as to who would replace the current regime. Knowing the structure and ethnic diversity of Iran’s population of 93 million people, the sudden fall of the current regime would be a prescription for chaos and civil war, threatening the entire region’s security for many years to come. That is not an outcome either the Gulf countries or the rest of the world want to deal with.
Instead of causing more upheaval in world security and the world economy, the only rational option is to look for a way to de-escalate and bring this war to an immediate end. According to Pentagon officials, the US has spent no less than $11 billion in the first two weeks of the war, and $5.6 billion in the first two days. That is not counting the heavy costs paid by Gulf nations, whether to intercept non-stop Iranian missiles and drones or in terms of the damages inflicted on their oil and civilian installations.
This is an absurd situation, considering that a deal could certainly have been reached to prevent this war if not for continued pressure by Netanyahu on the US president, whom he managed to convince this war was going to be an easy ride that would enable them to bring about a new regional order dominated by Israel. The US president had also obviously grown accustomed to easy and quick victories, similar to what took place in Venezuela in January.
Developments in the US-Israeli war on Iran over the past two weeks have proved that a repetition of the Venezuela scenario was an illusion, and launching a war in a volatile region that sits on top of the world’s largest reserve of oil and gas cannot be an easy ride or the kind of video game that the US president and his secretary of war have been using to promote the war to a sceptical American public.
The world cannot stand by, fearing threats of revenge by an unpredictable US president. Indeed, the conduct of the Iranian regime over the past five decades, as well as its unjustified attacks against Arab Gulf countries since the US-Israeli war broke out have left it with a few friends. Yet there is too much at stake for the security of the Arab Gulf as well as the entire Middle East and the world to let this war drag on any longer, causing massive destruction and more nightmare scenarios.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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