BEIRUT — Last month, President Trump stood in the palatial ballroom of the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, and rebuked America’s misadventures in the Middle East.
As Saudi officials and U.S. business leaders looked on, Trump said that too many of his predecessors were “afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
“In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he added. “And the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
A mere five weeks later, Trump appears to be on the cusp of his own Middle Eastern adventure, one with uncomfortable parallels to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
That conflict — which killed at least 100,000 Iraqis and some 4,400 Americans, lasted almost nine years and destabilized the region for half a generation after. It became the prime example of the “forever wars” Trump railed against during his election campaign, and a lesson in the folly of intervening with no clear endgame.
For Trump’s Persian Gulf and Arab allies, the prospect of a repeat performance has left them scrabbling for a diplomatic off-ramp.
“There are no nations on the face of the Earth working harder than the Gulf countries today to calm the situation and stop this crazy war. They are absolutely against any military confrontation,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist and commentator, adding that leaders of the United Arab Emirates have been “burning the phones” round the clock.
“I’ve never seen their diplomacy more active and more engaged than it is today to bring an end to this.”
Most Arab governments have little love lost on Iran, which they view as an unruly neighbor fomenting unrest in their own backyards. Its nuclear program has long been a concern, but the bigger fear has often been Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, and their loyalties with a Shiite-majority Iran in a Sunni-dominated Arab world.
During the Biden administration, U.S. officials hoped to use that antipathy to forge an anti-Iran coalition that would see friendly nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE cooperating with Israel to isolate Tehran.
Instead, rapprochement with Iran has been the modus operandi in recent years, with Gulf countries normalizing and easing tensions with the Islamic Republic under the calculation that regional stability would bring regional prosperity.
All were quick to condemn Israel’s attacks last week. Saudi Arabia, which for years engaged in proxy matches with Iran and was often seen as its main competitor for regional influence, denounced what it called “blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran.”
The UAE said much the same. Despite being an enthusiastic member of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-brokered treaty that established relations between Israel and a raft of Arab nations, the UAE excoriated Israel for attacking Iran.
On Tuesday, the Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, called Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to express his solidarity; the same day, Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed emphasized a diplomatic approach was needed to “prevent the situation from spiraling into grave and far-reaching consequences.”
That focus on diplomacy, observers say, reflects pragmatism: If the U.S. were to enter the conflict, it’s likely Iran — or one of its allied militias — would lash out at American personnel, bases and other interests in the region, including in the UAE.
There are more than 40,000 U.S. soldiers and civilian contractors stationed in the Middle East, according to statements by Pentagon officials (though that number has fluctuated since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023).
The Council on Foreign Relations says the U.S. operates military facilities in 19 locations in countries such as Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the UAE. Eight of the facilities are considered permanent.
Pro-Iranian groups in Iraq and Syria have in the past regularly attacked U.S. bases. Last year, a drone launched by an Iranian-backed militia on a U.S. base in Jordan near the Syrian border killed three U.S. soldiers and injured 47 others.
Also, there is precedent for Iran’s allies attacking economic concerns, such as when the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen sent drones striking oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the UAE in 2022.
Iran may also decide to close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway that handles a fifth of the world’s energy flows. Meanwhile, Qatar shares ownership of the South Pars/North Dome field in Iran, the largest natural gas field in the world, which was hit last week in Israel’s strikes.
The UAE and other Gulf countries “absolutely do not want to be caught in the middle of a broader conflict nor do they want to be targeted by any party, as they have been in the past,” said Elham Fakhro, a Gulf researcher at Harvard’s Belfer Center. She added governments also fear fallout from a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities could contaminate natural resources they share with Iran.
Others, unsure how far the U.S. and Israel will go — whether they still stop at crippling Iran’s nuclear and missile programs or push for regime change — fear the impacts of the Iranian state disintegrating. Foremost in their minds are the aftereffects of America’s toppling of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, which unleashed sectarian rage, saw Iraq engulfed in blood-drenched bedlam and empowered terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
“It’s not in the interest of the Gulf states to see their large neighbor Iran collapse,” wrote former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Jaber Al Thani in a post on X, adding that the region saw the consequences of what happened in Iraq. He urged Gulf decision-makers to “immediately halt this madness initiated by Israel.”
“This war will also have profound repercussions for our region and perhaps the world,” he wrote. “Ultimately, the victor will not always be victorious and the vanquished will never be defeated.”
Behind that rhetoric is a growing conviction that Israel, rather than Iran, is the biggest threat to instability in the region, said Abdulla, the Emirati political scientist. Iran, after all, is diminished. In the past, it could rely on the so-called “Axis of Resistance” — a constellation of pro-Tehran militias and governments in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan — to frustrate adversaries’ plans. But the last 20 months of fighting have seen Israel cripple militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah while the U.S. has subdued Iraqi militias.
Israel, on the other hand, he said, continues to wreak havoc in Gaza and is planning to annex the West Bank. It has also occupied areas in Syria.
“Imperial Iran is probably no longer. OK, that’s an opportunity. But imperial Israel is not necessarily good for the stability of the region either,” Abdulla said.
U.S. intelligence officials say Iran is not pursuing a nuclear bomb — contradicting Trump, who has said the opposite — and intelligence assessment experts quoted by CNN this week said Tehran was at least three years away from building a bomb and delivering it in a strike.
(For all his complaints about American interventions in the Middle East — and claims that he had opposed the Iraq war two decades ago — when Trump was asked by radio personality Howard Stern in 2002 if he supported invading Iraq, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”)
If the U.S. were to attack Iran now, it would likely supercharge efforts to bulk up the militaries not just in Iran but elsewhere in the region.
This week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said regional threats necessitated a ramping up of his nation’s medium- and long-range missiles, saying they were needed for deterrence.
“Soon, we’ll reach a defense capacity that no one will dare challenge. … If you’re not strong politically, socially, economically and militarily, you lack deterrence, and you’re vulnerable,” Erdogan said. “We will elevate our level of deterrence so high that not only will they not attack us — they won’t even dare to think about it.”
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