The war on Iran is already upending the Middle East. Look to the Gulf states to see how | Nesrine Malik

7 hours ago 2

There is a tendency to think of the Gulf powers as static and unchanging. They are, after all, fortified by massive wealth and absolute monarchical rule, and secured with deep economic and military relationships with the US. The past week of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, and Iran’s retaliations, have brought into focus what these countries export (oil and gas) and what they import (tax avoiders and labour). But beyond thinking about energy-supply challenges to the global economy and engaging in the cheap and popular sport of smirking at influencers in war zones, we must remember that the current conflagration will have profound consequences for the entire region. This is not just about the US, Israel and Iran; it is about a complex, overlapping political order in the Middle East that is much more fragile than it looks.

Amid all the ways the region has been changing over the past few years, the low-key evolution of three Gulf countries in particular has been the most significant. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have been rapidly making changes, the effects of which have been felt from Libya to Palestine. The 7 October attacks, which arguably set off the chain of events that led to this moment, were partly inspired by Hamas’s desire to stop the normalisation process that Saudi Arabia was undertaking with Israel; this was following the UAE and others signing the 2020 Abraham accords with Israel. The three countries have been pursuing in different ways, often at odds with each other, ambitious global and regional agendas. And they are also much more unsteady than their decades-long familial rule suggests.

Saudi Arabia has been liberalising domestically, upending years of social and religious convention. Only a few years ago, the kingdom was threatened with “pariah” status by Joe Biden after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, while its bombing campaign in Yemen drew calls for arms boycotts. Since then, Mohammed bin Salman has turned the country into a place of outdoor raves, fashion shows and high-profile sporting events. The country that once derived its status from Sunni religious primacy – as the seat of the holiest site in Islam, Mecca – is trying to catch up with Qatar and the UAE, which have invested heavily in turning their countries into influential hubs of finance, consumption and entertainment.

The pivot that all three have made relies heavily on attracting international footfall. This, in turn, relies on the absence of war – Gulf powers have in effect tried to neuter geopolitics as much as possible to underwrite the stability required to make their countries centres of global traffic. Not provoking Iran, not antagonising Israel and keeping the US close as a security guarantor. In the space of little more than a week – with a fresh wave of Iranian missile and drone attacks hitting the UAE and Saudi Arabia on Sunday – this model has been disrupted.

Over the past decade, the UAE has been engaged in intense and bloody empire-building projects, funding proxy groups and wars in Yemen, Libya and Sudan as a way of securing strategic influence and gold assets. The path that it has taken has only in the past few months put it in conflict with its ally Saudi Arabia over the advance of UAE-backed forces in Yemen. In its process of normalisation with Israel, it has pursued a dogged path as the only significant Gulf power to sign the Abraham accords, and in doing so has signalled that it has no time for articles of faith like demands for Palestinian statehood. It is a transactional state that has energetically embraced the new world order of the supremacy of might and money, and has none of the religious or cultural baggage of Saudi Arabia.

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In the middle lies Qatar, a country walking the thinnest of lines. In 2017, the UAE and Saudi Arabia physically blockaded it and continued to do so for several years; since then, it has been balancing support for the Palestinian cause, through hosting Hamas officials and sending aid to Gaza, with having the largest US military base in the region and cooperating with Iran over the gasfields they share in the Persian Gulf. All these countries are at political inflection points, nursing sharp competitions between them. The closing of their airspaces, halting of liquefied natural gas production and potentially all oil production, the shattering of the peace, the fear and flames and booms and fallout of drones, missiles and interceptors, are not things that can be simply sat through until the campaign subsides. Even though there is no active military action on the part of these states, they are also at war.

Much of the cost can be absorbed by sovereign wealth. But what is harder to resolve is the state of insecurity that the Gulf now exists in. First, there is the question of duration. How many more days, weeks or even months, who knows, can the Gulf sustain the fallout of war when even its supply of drinking water – largely generated by energy-intensive desalination plants – could be at risk? Second, there is the matter of how much this war has made clear that these Gulf states have become, actively or passively, recruited to Israel and the US’s agenda to seek dominion over the Middle East. The longer this continues, the harder it becomes for their leaders to maintain the notion of sovereignty to project a sense of control and agency.

We are squarely in the zone of all sorts of unintended consequences. Economic shocks could intensify the UAE’s drive to fuel war in African countries to secure raw materials for itself. There is a risk of a dramatic falling out between Gulf powers over how far they can underwrite US-Israeli ambitions to their own cost. And there is the threat of spillover from an unravelling in Iran on their doorsteps. What is afoot is a colossal haemorrhaging of much of the political and economic capital that the Gulf has been accumulating.

Yes, there will be global economic consequences – but these countries are not just energy providers. You don’t have to sympathise with their political arrangements to understand the basic fact that these are places with human populations that cannot just be reduced to a caricature of lucky custodians of energy supply, bribing the greedy and the gullible to their lands. “Always,” Edward Said wrote, “there lurks the assumption that although the western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world’s resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.”

So much of the US’s and Israel’s approach to the Middle East has been based on this notion, that those who populate and govern it – even their allies – are not true human beings. Once the war ends, and Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu move on to their next calamity, what will emerge is a redrawn map of the region, with new resentments, competitions and security ramifications that the people who live there will have to deal with for generations to come.