The timing was doubtless coincidental, but Implementation Day of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) took place a day before the 25th anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm. Precisely a quarter-century after President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker, III assembled a 32-member multinational coalition to liberate Kuwait and remove the Iraqi threat to the Gulf, the Gulf States now feel betrayed and abandoned by the international community over Iran.
While there is no consensus among the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states on how to approach the reintegration of Iran into the international community, the divergence in view from the U.S. position will have implications for the next presidential administration as it settles into office almost exactly a year from now. Many in the Gulf now openly wonder whether U.S. support can still be relied upon, given the speed with which the U.S. government has engaged Iran in negotiation and diplomacy since 2013. This incomprehension may lead to further instability in the Middle East as the Gulf States continue to take increasingly unilateral action in Yemen and other regional conflict zones.
The regional order in the Gulf has long been shaped by a triangular competition for influence. Alternating periods of conflict, cooperation and uneasy coexistence between the three major regional powers of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have determined the fragile and shifting balance of regional power since the 1920s. Strategic realignments occurred periodically in response to underlying changes in regime perceptions of domestic and regional interests, and in reaction to specific events, such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. For the five smaller Gulf States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), their vulnerability as small states in a volatile region meant they relied heavily upon great power protection — initially from Britain and latterly from the U.S. — as an external guarantor of regional security.
For many in the international community, Saddam Hussein’s sweep into Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990 epitomized the existential threat posed to the smaller Gulf States by their larger neighbors. But for Gulf rulers, this was symptomatic of a longer-term pattern of vulnerability. A previous Iraqi military ruler had, in fact, massed troops on the border with Kuwait six days after Kuwait became an independent state in June 1961, necessitating the rushed return of British forces to the country. Successive Iranian rulers, including the Shah, maintained a territorial claim to Bahrain, which was not sated by the resounding result of a plebiscite organized by the United Nations in 1970 that categorically found in favor of Bahrain becoming a sovereign Arab state. And Qatar, intriguingly, long felt threatened by the rise of a strong, centralized Saudi state, from tensions over boundaries in the 1930s to a series of border skirmishes as late as 1992 and 1993.
Over the quarter-century since the liberation of Kuwait, all six GCC states have deepened their strategic and military cooperation with the U.S. This was achieved through the signing of separate defense cooperation agreements with Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE that built upon an existing access to facilities agreement with Oman (dating to 1980), as well as a wide range of military agreements that have underpinned Saudi Arabian security since the 1940s. The GCC states also evolved into major logistical and command-and-control hubs for the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain in 1995 and later became the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Qatar in 2002. Bahrain and Kuwait additionally were awarded Major Non-NATO Ally Status by the George W. Bush administration in 2002 and 2004, respectively.
During the 1990s and 2000s, moreover, substantial stocks of military equipment were prepositioned at airbases in the UAE and Kuwait, which became the administrative and logistical lifeline for multinational operations in Afghanistan after 2001 and in Iraq after 2003. As the staging post for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Kuwait turned over an estimated one-third of its territory to U.S. and coalition use. The UAE, in addition, has become one of the U.S. military’s staunchest and most dependable allies, taking part in every coalition action involving U.S. troops since Desert Storm (barring only the 2003 Iraq war) and developing a very high reputation among U.S. defense planners. The UAE and Australia were the only non-NATO allies permitted to fly close air support missions in Afghanistan, and the UAE has been the only Arab coalition member to be given overall command of air strikes involving U.S. aircraft against Islamic State targets in Syria.
All of these factors heighten the incomprehension among Gulf ruling elites at the perceived direction of U.S. policies in the Middle East in recent years. While the so-called “pivot to Asia” was always more of a catchphrase than a reality, many GCC officials, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE, have felt deeply dismayed — to the point of betrayal — by the Obama administration’s pivot, in their view, to Iran. Outspoken senior Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in characteristically blunt fashion in November 2013, when he stated that, “The U.S. has to have a foreign policy, well-defined well-structured. You don’t have it right now, unfortunately. It’s just completely chaos, confusion.”
Policymakers in the Gulf were especially aggrieved that the U.S. not only conducted secret bilateral talks with Iran without informing them but that they also were then excluded from the subsequent full-scale nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran. At the time of the initial breakthrough in negotiations in 2013, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., told an audience at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “How we feel is that we weren’t part of the discussions at all, in some cases we were — I would go so far as to say we were lied to, things were hidden from us.”
A fundamentally different opinion of Iran separates policymakers in the Gulf and their counterparts in the Obama administration. For many in the Gulf, the primary threats from Iran lay not in the controversial nuclear program but in Tehran’s political, financial and logistical support for militant non-state actors such as Hezbollah and, more recently, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and in Iran’s “meddling” in regional conflict zones such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen. GCC officials also note with alarm that neither their nearly-year-long war in Yemen nor the sharp escalation in Saudi-Iranian tension since the turn of the year dissuaded or slowed the progress toward Implementation Day. Simply put, Gulf officials wonder increasingly whether they still have the U.S.’s backing, and many cannot wait until the arrival of a new presidential administration, which will inherit both the task of continuing to monitor and implement a JCPOA it did not negotiate, and of rebuilding trust and confidence with longstanding political and security partners in the Gulf.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute. His research examines political, economic and security trends in the Middle East and, in particular, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states’ changing position within the global order.
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