Introduction

In front of a crowd at Tel Aviv University in May 2026, the US ambassador to Israel advised the governments of the Gulf Arab countries on which side of an ongoing war with Iran they ought to support. He went on to explain why one of them had already made a decision, claiming that Israel had sent Iron Dome batteries and personnel to operate them into the United Arab Emirates, which was the first time Israeli air defense crews had ever operated from the territory of another Arab state (Janes, 2026). The revelation wasn't totally shocking. Over the previous weeks, the deployment had been reported in various news by Axios, the Financial Times, and a number of Israeli media outlets. On the record, Ambassador Mike Huckabee's statement turned rumor into doctrine. Israeli equipment and personnel now played a role in Abu Dhabi's air defense. This is almost the clearest confirmation a structural realist could ask for: decades of resentment toward a possible protector begin to seem like a luxury that a state can no longer afford when it begins to absorb attacks intended for another state's war.

The underlying assertion, while appearing straightforward, is outdated. Threat is determined by proximity, capability, and perceived intent rather than identity, and states weigh it against threat rather than history or ideology (Walt, 1987). Early in 2026, for about six weeks, Iran tested this assertion and discovered the answer. Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli campaign that started on February 28, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and, according to the Trump administration, destroyed over 85% of Iran's defense-industrial base in 38 days (militaryspend.org, 2026; White House, 2026). However, Tehran retaliated not only on the American bases but also, deliberately, their strikes expanded to encompass all Gulf economies.

The Trust Gap

In March, Iranian missiles and drones struck a desalination plant and Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company in Bahrain (News on Air, 2026b). Kuwait's international airport lost a fuel tank and then a few weeks later, a terminal and its radar system were damaged by a drone strike (Reuters, 2026). Interception debris caused the Habshan gas processing facility in the United Arab Emirates to catch fire twice (Bloomberg, 2026). An estimated 700,000 barrels per day of throughput, or about a tenth of the kingdom's export capacity, were lost by Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline (Middle East Eye, 2026). A direct missile strike struck the Ras Laffan LNG terminal in Qatar (CNBC, 2026b), and missile interceptions overhead caused a fire to start at the world's largest petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia, Al Jubail (News on Air, 2026c). Less than two weeks into the campaign, sixteen people had died in the Gulf states, with over half of them being civilians, according to an AFP tally (Malay Mail, 2026). Iran's Revolutionary Guard clarified that none of this was coincidental: Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated that attacks on civilian infrastructure, including bridges, would not compel Tehran to submit (NPR, 2026).

Speaking to CNBC, Gulf officials claimed that the campaign had created a trust gap with Iran that would last beyond the actual conflict (CNBC, 2026a). If threat convergence follows automatically from exposure, this should have produced something close to a uniform Gulf lurch toward Israel and Washington. It produced, instead, only the UAE.

Threat Convergence Paradox

Over the course of the conflict, Abu Dhabi was hit by almost 400 ballistic missiles, 15 cruise missiles, and nearly 1,900 drones, according to its own count, the heaviest barrage in the Gulf (News on Air, 2026a). Additionally, it placed the most dramatic wager on the relationship that realists would anticipate. In addition to the deployment of Iron Dome, which Israeli officials subsequently confirmed was the result of a direct phone conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (JNS, 2026), the UAE allegedly carried out a covert strike against Iran's Lavan Island refinery, withdrew from OPEC after decades of membership, and senior officials, including presidential adviser Anwar Gargash, who openly characterized American and Israeli influence as the model for the Gulf's postwar order (Tehran Times, 2026; Times of Israel, 2026). When Huckabee framed the decision for everyone else, he did not bother with diplomatic softening. He told his audience in Tel Aviv that Gulf states had to choose. Very few of them responded in the same manner as the UAE.

Saudi Arabia, which was equally and possibly more severely affected economically, worked with Pakistan to mediate a de-escalation during the conflict rather than increasing its vulnerability to either belligerent (Middle East Eye, 2026). Despite not having a formal position in the government, Prince Turki al-Faisal continues to be the kingdom's most influential unofficial voice on foreign policy. In the months preceding the war, he had already argued in print that Israel, not Iran, was the regional "troublemaker" that Washington needed to control (The National, 2025). That opinion was not softened by the fighting. Instead of allowing Israel to "remain the only actor in our surroundings," he claimed that the war had been an Israeli plot to drag the kingdom into a conflict that was never its own, one that Riyadh decided to endure (Middle East Eye, 2026). That is not the language of a state coming together to confront a common danger. It is a state's language that disavows the idea that the threat is shared in the first place.

The weight of Qatar's reluctance is different and more focused. The first known Israeli military action on the territory of any GCC member state occurred on September 9, 2025, when Israel launched an airstrike against Hamas's negotiating delegation in Doha, seven months before a single Iranian missile entered Gulf airspace (Just Security, 2025). At the time, Qatar's government classified it as state terrorism, and it has not had any reason to change its mind. Saudi Arabia reiterated its long-standing demand for a "irreversible pathway" to Palestinian statehood, Qatar rejected Donald Trump's attempt in late May to include Doha in a simultaneous, multi-state expansion of the Abraham Accords alongside Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan, framed as the diplomatic capstone of the war's resolution, and the conference call reportedly sat in awkward silence (DePetris, 2026). Bahrain, which was already a signatory in 2020 and was sufficiently affected by Iranian strikes to draft a resolution in the UN Security Council calling for an end to the attacks, shifted away from the kind of bilateral military fusion that the UAE approved and toward coordinated maritime defense with its neighbors (UK House of Commons Library, 2026). The war resulted in two distinct member groups rather than a single convergent bloc within the Abraham Accords club.

A Unit-Level Correction

Here, neoclassical realism gains rather than loses credibility. When applied unqualified, a structural version of the balance-of-threat theory predicts nearly uniformity: expose six states to the same aggressor and anticipate six comparable adjustments. Instead, what was produced by Iran attacking the Gulf states supports the unit-level correction that neoclassical realism demands, according to which systemic pressure must first pass through intra-Gulf rivalry, elite threat perception, and domestic legitimacy costs before becoming foreign policy (Lobell et al., 2009). A smaller domestic Palestinian constituency to manage, a security relationship with Israel that had already been functioning covertly for years, and a leadership prepared to risk both its OPEC seat and its standing with Riyadh were among the unusually few costs associated with the UAE's calculation. The math in Riyadh went the other way. Convergence was hampered by a rivalry with Abu Dhabi that made visible distance from the UAE's decision nearly as valuable as the decision itself, a much larger Palestinian legitimacy question at home, and a former intelligence chief willing to state in print that Israel is the real destabilizer. For its part, before Iran ever fired a shot, Doha had an unresolved Israeli airstrike sitting inside its calculations.

This does not imply that the convergence thesis was incorrect. It indicates that it was lacking and that the war provided the missing variable. As the only Gulf state most vulnerable and least burdened by competing domestic costs, Iranian missiles did exactly what realist theory would predict. Riyadh's Palestinian commitment, Doha's unresolved grievance against Israel itself, and states whose elites carried independent, antecedent reasons to resist consolidating Iran and Israel into a single threat category were nearly the exact opposite of what they did.

Conclusion

What happens next will say more than the war already has. The ceasefire that took effect on April 8 has held only in contested form, broken within hours of its announcement and patched repeatedly since. The memorandum of understanding that Trump, Vice President Vance, and Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf signed on June 15 extends the truce another sixty days (TIME, 2026), and the Strait of Hormuz remains open in principle and nearly empty in practice, with insurers still unwilling to underwrite the route and more than 300 vessels still anchored outside it (militaryspend.org, 2026; UK House of Commons Library, 2026). If that arrangement hardens into an actual US-Iran settlement, the UAE’s wager, built on the premise that Iran remains the Gulf’s organizing threat, gets harder to justify, and Riyadh’s caution will look prescient. If it collapses back into open war, the UAE’s bet will look like foresight, and the rest of the Gulf’s hesitation will look exactly like the luxury good it always was. Either outcome settles the argument. What does not survive, in either case, is the idea that Iran’s bombardment produced one clean Gulf convergence toward Israel. It produced a test, and so far only one state has passed it the way the theory said it would.

Aaron T. Walter is a scholar of international relations and security studies with a PhD in International Relations. He lectures on U.S. foreign policy and international security systems with academic appointments in Europe at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania, and Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia. He has written monographs on Migration, Terrorist Organizations, and U.S. presidential elections, while chapters on topics such as the European Neighborhood Policy, Eastern Partnership and Cybersecurity have been published. From 2007 to 2014, he prepared Slovak Armed Forces personnel for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2018 he served as an ISGAP Fellow and Scholar-in-Residence at St. John’s College, Oxford. Originally from the United States, he resides in Vilnius, Lithuania.