They have given up on Palestine to please the West. They have given up on their own sovereignty by re-establishing western colonialism in the heart of their countries. Little did the Gulf rulers, as anachronistic as they can be with the arranged loveless marriage between their traditions and the modern world, know that they were marrying everything they've always hated about the West.
But they did it because their incompetence makes them submit and require hand-holding as they continue to surf the choppy waves of their oceans of oil. For far too long they were cowered into believing they needed protection and, like in a traditional marriage, they were the wives of the Westerners who established military bases to protect their access to the oil and gas gushing from their Arab wives's fountains underneath the soil.
They probably do need some protection from Iran, but much more critically, they need protection from their own people who do not subscribe to their countries' submission to western neo-colonialism. Autocratic monarchies are an aberration in our time, but they have survived the challenges of the second half of the 20th century and the Arab springs of the 2000s. They survived by buying up their own people's loyalty with money, all the while selling their people to western mercantilism: Despite all the museums, the universities, the heavy-duty marketing and brainwashing for western-style consumption, the lavishly superficial architecture intended to demonstrate a "catch-up" on western democracies, the substane is not there.
Expats who return from the Gulf complain about increasing discrimination against westerners in matters of individual freedoms and cultural expressions. One family I know works and lives in one of the Emirates. Their children attend foreign-owned and -run schools, including christian religious schools. Yet, these schools are forced to imitate the American pledge of allegiance that American children are forced to recite every morning: Non-Emirati, non-Muslim children in non-Emirati must recite the Emirati national anthem heavily laced with references to Islam.
History tells us that such a far-from-equilibrium steady state of politics and culture does not last. It is unsustainable.
And now the bombing of Iran by the US has opened the region to all the vagaries that could unwind that equilibrium. Many of the Gulf monarchies (according to https://gulfmigration.grc.net/explaining-the-demographic-imbalance-in-the-gulf-states/) have populations where foreigners comprise anywhere from 40% (Oman, Saudi Arabia) to nearly 90% (UAE and Qatar). A simple retaliatory action by Iran against these foreign "assets" (be they civilians, military bases, oil ships, etc.) will cause that equilibrium to unravel. Particularly if the US fails - as it always does - to control the situtation on the ground. Foreign expats will flee, oil shipments will come to a halt, fancy museums and universities will shutter, falling revenues will impact those locals who depend on the foreigners for their livelihoods.... The range of catastrophic consequences is very broad because of the breadth of western implantation in the former UK colonies of the Gulf.
Lebanon went through a very similar scenario. During the first couple of decades (1940s-1960s) of "prosperity" after WWII, Lebanon was protected by the French and the Americans (JFK landed 10,000 US Marines in Beirut in 1958 to protect it against a Syrian-Egyptian takeover). Thousands of foreigners lived and worked in Lebanon. Dozens of universities, schools and cultural centers from France, the US, Italy, the UK, Germany and others led the country down a path of western acculturation.
Then Palestine happened. Long forgotten as silent refugees from Israel's barbaric war of independence in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were denied the right to return to Palestine rose up and began attacking symbols of Israel's protectors - western schools, universities, academics, diplomats, etc.. Half the country, namely the Lebanese Muslims allied themselves with the Palestinians against their own state and broke out into an armed uprising against the Lebanese state and government that they regarded as too cozy with the West.
And the rest is history. The foreigners left, their institutions disappeared, western businesses shut down and migrated to Cyprus and Greece... To this day, Lebanon continues to reel from the consequences of that reversal of fortune. The "interests-minded" West felt that now that it has Jewish Israel as its foothold in the Near East, it no longer had any use for the Christians of Lebanon who, for the previous couple of centuries, had been the pet pretext for intervention by the West.
I can imagine what is going on in the minds of the peoples of the Gulf. Anger at what is unfolding in Palestine, fear of Iranian retaliation, and apprehension at watching their western "protectors" (who will in the blink of an eye take flight) leave for greener pastures. If the Lebanese Christians who were somewhat closer culturally to the West were dumped like a dirty rag, I can imagine who much faster the West will abandon its Muslim "friends" in the Gulf as the first drone crosses the Persian-Arabian Gulf.
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Trump’s Gulf Arab allies race to avoid all-out war in Iran
Becky Anderson and Mostafa Salem, CNN
Fri, June 20, 2025
Fearing the repercussions of a total regime collapse in Iran, Gulf Arab states have intensified their outreach to the Trump administration and Tehran over the past week.
The United Arab Emirates, a US ally that has long been opposed to an unsupervised Iran nuclear program, has been in contact with officials in Tehran and Washington to avoid further escalation, according to a top official, amid fears that instability in Iran could affect the region.
“We’re following the situation very closely… our diplomacy is working hard like many other countries,” Anwar Gargash, adviser to the UAE president, said on Friday. “Concerns have to be resolved diplomatically… there are many issues in the region (and) if we choose to tackle everything with a hammer, nothing will be left unbroken.”
Israel began an unprecedented attack on Iran last week, killing its top military brass as well as several nuclear scientists and destroyed part of its nuclear program. Iran has responded with a barrage of missile strikes on Israeli cities.
Gargash, who delivered a letter from US President Donald Trump to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March calling for nuclear talks, said any military escalation to the conflict will be “detrimental” for the whole region.
“This is setting us back. The language of conflict is overpowering the new language of de-escalation and economic prosperity for the region,” Gargash said.
Across the Gulf, growing anxiety about the conflict is driving efforts to prevent further escalation.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with Trump and called for a de-escalation hours after Israel struck Iran on June 13. The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, also spoke to the president and called for the crisis to be resolved “through diplomatic means.”
“We have been making all the possible communication between all the parties regionally and abroad. These talks between us have been about finding a way out of the rabbit hole when it comes to this escalation,” the Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari said Tuesday.
Last month, Trump was feted with grand welcomes and trillion-dollar deals when he visited three Gulf Arab nations for the first presidential visit of his second term. At the time, Trump praised the “birth of a modern Middle East” and signaled his intent to sign a deal with Iran to prevent it from building a nuclear bomb.
US President Donald Trump is greeted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as he arrives at King Khalid International Airport on May 13, 2025, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. - Win McNamee/Getty Images
But after Israel struck and killed Iran’s military leadership and nuclear scientists, Trump shifted his rhetoric, teasing a possible US military intervention on Iran.
The president’s threats have his Arab allies worried and fearing Iranian reprisal attacks against the US on their soil, where the US has a significant military presence. Major exporters of energy, the Gulf states also fear that Iran may shut the Strait of Hormuz on its southern shore, through which a third of seaborne oil passes.
Nightmare scenario
Gulf Arab states, long critical of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its support for proxy militias across the Middle East, have in recent years softened their stance toward Tehran, pivoting toward diplomacy and rapprochement to avoid conflict.
Experts warn that a US attack on Iran could draw it into a quagmire even more challenging than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – a drawn-out confrontation that could last the duration of Trump’s presidency and exact a heavy toll on American lives and resources at Israel’s behest.
“Iran is large and could be fractured and divided along ethnic lines, (and it) has a considerable stockpile of missiles, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)… that essentially could fall out of central state control,” Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain, told CNN.
“I don’t think anyone wants to see Iran slide to chaos, I think there is a broader desire and preference to deal with one bad actor rather than multiple bad actors,” he said.
Firas Maksad, managing director for the Middle East at Eurasia Group, told CNN that Gulf Arab states are in a comfortable position seeing Iran weakened, but would much rather prefer diplomacy to avoid instability in the region.
“If there is in fact a diplomatic breakthrough… where Iran’s nuclear ambitions towards a nuclear weapon at least are capped, Iran is much weakened and stability returns, that’s a very positive outcome for (Gulf states),” he said.
“I would have to say, though, that the concern is that (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu drags the region and drags President Trump into further escalation by perhaps taking out Iran’s ability to export oil,” he added. “That might then take us in a much more negative direction in terms of blowback against Gulf (oil) facilities.”
Trump’s announcement on Thursday of a two-week diplomatic window now offers his Gulf Arab allies breathing space to push for de-escalation, following a week of unprecedented regional clashes that left the Middle East rattled and on edge.
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