ARABIAN PENINSULA SECURITY BEYOND THE IRAN WAR / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Arabian Peninsula Security Beyond the Iran War

What was once a latent threat – Iranian strikes on Gulf Arab states – is now an operational reality with enduring consequences.

By: Kamran Bokhari

The strategic environment that prevailed on the Arabian Peninsula prior to the outbreak of the war in Iran on Feb. 28 has been fundamentally and likely irreversibly altered. 

A long-standing and grave threat – a direct Iranian attack on Gulf Arab states – has become reality. 

However the conflict unfolds, Gulf Arab states now confront a long-term security challenge from Iran, which has demonstrated both the intent and the capability to attack them. 

The central task for regional countries and the United States moving forward will be to prevent the normalization of this new and more volatile regional baseline.

 

Before the 1979 revolution, monarchical Iran’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states was best characterized as a U.S.-anchored, monarchical system of managed rivalry. 

The states cooperated to preserve a conservative regional order aligned with Washington, while simultaneously competing for influence, status and leadership within the Gulf subsystem. 

Importantly, this competition had not yet taken on an ideological or existential character, as all sides were broadly integrated into a shared Cold War security architecture. 

The primary external threat to Iran in this period was the Soviet Union and its perceived southward pressure, which encouraged a degree of tacit alignment among regional monarchies under U.S. strategic protection.

With the establishment of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of the revolution, Iran rapidly transformed from a status quo monarchic power into an explicitly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel revolutionary state with a revisionist regional agenda. 

The new regime articulated a mission to export its Islamist ideology across the Arab world, deliberately transcending the prevailing geosectarian divide and challenging the legitimacy of neighboring regimes. 

Over the next roughly 18 months, Iraq under Baathist rule – despite its own Shiite-majority population – came to see the Islamic Republic as an existential ideological and security threat, culminating in Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Iran in 1980. 

During the ensuing eight-year war, the Gulf Arab monarchies provided financial and political backing to Baghdad. 

They also formed the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981, institutionalizing their collective security response and making explicit their perception of the Islamic Republic as a systemic and ideological challenge to regional order.

During the 1980s, the Islamist regime in Tehran remained constrained by the demands of the war with Iraq. 

It was unable to pursue its broader regional ambitions, aside from coordinating with the Assad regime in Syria to cultivate Hezbollah, its premier proxy, in Lebanon. 

However, Iraq’s decision to invade and annex Kuwait in 1990, triggering a U.S.-led military response, left the Baathist state severely weakened, encumbered by sanctions and diminished in its role as a counterweight to Iran. 

The 2003 U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam ultimately removed this buffer altogether. 

Iraq soon fell under Iran’s sphere of influence, giving Tehran a direct pathway to project power into the Arab world.

Iran’s development of a credible missile capability with potential reach into Arab neighboring states has been recognized since the 1990s. 

The Islamic Republic first fielded ballistic missile systems in the mid-1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, laying the foundation for a sustained indigenous missile program. 

By the 2010s, this capability had expanded to include cruise missiles, significantly increasing range, accuracy and targeting flexibility. 

The strategic significance of these developments was further amplified after 2002, when Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, raising concerns about the potential convergence of missile delivery systems and a latent nuclear weapons capability.

In the event of U.S. or Israeli airstrikes aimed at degrading or destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, it was expected that Tehran would retaliate by targeting Israel directly as the principal adversary in its strategic narrative. 

Far more important was the threat, dating back to the 1990s, of strikes against energy-rich Gulf Arab states over their role as hosts for U.S. military installations and forward-deployed assets, which from Tehran’s perspective would make them complicit in any Western military campaign against it. 

By the 2000s, as Iran’s missile arsenal expanded, these threats had become more credible.

However, until Hamas’ devastating attack (backed by Iran) on Israel in October 2023, these risks were largely hypothetical. 

Given its relative strategic loneliness in the region and beyond, Tehran has had strong incentives not to initiate large-scale conflicts that could trigger overwhelming retaliation. 

Instead, it pursued an asymmetric strategy centered on cultivating and supporting radical Islamist proxy networks across the region, using them to extend its influence, pressure adversaries and maintain a persistent threat envelope around Israel and Arab states. 

Likewise, although Israel, with U.S. support, actively confronted these proxy groups, they refrained from attacking Iran or its nuclear infrastructure directly, with successive U.S. administrations preferring sanctions and diplomacy to manage the nuclear issue.

Since the Oct. 7 attack, deterrence has fallen by the wayside, and all sides have begun to make good on their old threats. 

The resulting escalation has underscored the vulnerability of critical chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, even as the weakening of Iran under unprecedented military and economic pressure could create space for renewed diplomatic efforts on both maritime security and its nuclear program. 

This same pressure could also be leveraged to compel Tehran to scale back its long-standing support for armed proxy networks across the region. 

The question of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal will remain, however, since even negotiated limits on range and payload can do little to mitigate the inherent threat posed to neighboring Gulf states.

The experience of direct conflict – and, crucially, the demonstrated ability to strike valuable targets across the Gulf – has likely reinforced Tehran’s confidence that it can both endure high-intensity confrontations and retaliate effectively. 

Consequently, Iran’s faith in its deterrent posture is likely strengthened, but it also may come away with lower perceived risks of escalation, making future crises more volatile. 

Absent a fundamental ideological and behavioral transformation of the regime – by definition a complex and protracted process – this outlook is unlikely to shift in the near term. 

In the interim, a U.S. strategy increasingly defined by burden-sharing and burden-shifting will require regional actors such as Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, in coordination with Washington, to construct and manage a more resilient security architecture capable of containing escalation risks in the Gulf and safeguarding adjacent theaters, including the Red Sea, where Houthi activity continues to threaten maritime stability.