Just like warmongering Europe, the Gulf petro-monarchies are paying the price for delegating their defense and security to Washington, their enemy disguised as a savior.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
A shield that protects the other
There are truths that history always manages to wrest from diplomacy. This is one of them: the military alliance between the United States and the Gulf petro-monarchies was never an alliance. It was an arrangement. A transaction disguised as a strategic partnership. A predatory lease signed by sovereigns eager to believe themselves protected.
One wonders how states sitting on the largest hydrocarbon reserves on the planet, managers of sovereign wealth funds among the most powerful in the world, abdicated their security sovereignty into the hands of a power whose fundamental interests structurally diverged from their own?
In April 2024, when Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel after the latter had launched drones at its consulate in Damascus, Syria – an operation dubbed “True Promise”, followed by the 12-day war of June 2025, then the open confrontation on February 28, 2026 – the American response was swift, total, and without hesitation. Patriot missile systems, destroyers of the Fifth Fleet, and F-35 and F-15 fighter jets were mobilized within hours. But not for Baghdad. Not for Riyadh. Not for Abu Dhabi. For Tel Aviv. This image speaks for itself. It says everything that forty years of diplomatic communiqués had carefully concealed. Washington made its choice. The response has never wavered since 1973.
One hundred billion for nothing
The figures are staggering – and nauseating. Since 1990, the Gulf petro-monarchies have absorbed more than $500 billion worth of American arms. Saudi Arabia alone signed a mega-deal with the Trump administration in May 2017, worth $110 billion – the largest arms sale in American history, which was later increased to $350 billion over ten years. The United Arab Emirates followed suit with orders for F-35s, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and THAAD systems for tens of billions more. Qatar hosts Al- Udeid, the largest American air base in the Middle East – more than 10,000 troops, hundreds of aircraft, and the headquarters of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Bahrain has hosted the Fifth Fleet since 1995. Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia: all territories generously made available to American power.
In May 2025, the Riyadh summit produced staggering trade and investment agreements approaching $2 trillion. Gulf sovereign wealth funds injected nearly $70 billion into US assets that same year. Bilateral trade between the two shores exceeded $120 billion in 2024. The recycling of petrodollars into Treasury bonds has been ongoing since the Kissinger-Fahd agreements of 1974, artificially maintaining Washington’s borrowing rates low, financing its colossal debt, and consolidating the dollar’s global hegemony.
The Gulf paid. Paid again. And paid again. In return? A promise of security. Conditional. Subordinate. Negotiable. From the moment Israeli interests diverged from Arab interests, Washington didn’t hesitate for a millisecond. It chose Tel Aviv. It has always chosen it. It will always choose it.
Israel: the sole priority
In American strategic doctrine, Israel is not just another ally. It is an unsinkable aircraft carrier – an advanced military platform, a regional command post, a permanent operational extension of American power on the doorstep of Eurasia. This reality has been set in stone since October 1973, when Nixon ordered Operation Nickel Grass to save Israel from imminent military defeat at the hands of Egypt and Syria – at the very moment when Arab countries imposed their oil embargo, devastating Western economies.
In January 1991, during the Gulf War, Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Tel Aviv. The United States immediately deployed Patriot missile batteries in Israel – simultaneously begging the Israelis not to retaliate in order to preserve the Arab coalition. Israel’s security took precedence over everything, even the cohesion of an alliance meant to liberate Kuwait. In March 2003, the invasion of Iraq – demanded by neoconservatives close to Likud, and theorized as early as 1996 in the Clean Break document written for Netanyahu – destroyed the regional balance, delivering Baghdad into the hands of Iranian influence and igniting a Middle East inhabited, subjected to, and financed by the Gulf states.
The American objective, never publicly stated but obsessively pursued from Brzezinski to the Biden doctrine, is crystal clear to anyone willing to read between the lines: to control the Eurasian backbone, to keep Russia under pressure from its southern flank, to contain Iran as a strategic linchpin, to monitor the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, which carry 40% of global maritime trade, and to strangle China from its western flank. American bases in the Gulf are not there to protect the Saudis. They are there to project American power eastward and northward. To encircle. To contain. To dominate.
For forty years, the Gulf monarchies have been generous guests of a foreign military apparatus that uses them as much as it pretends to defend them.
The realization, shattering and belated
It took salvos of missiles, an open war between Israel, the United States, and Iran in 2025-2026, direct American strikes against Iranian military installations, first during the 12-day lightning war in June 2025, and then since February 28, 2026, and the straining of the straits for some Gulf capitals to finally formulate the unthinkable: what if we had chosen the wrong protector from the beginning?
This question was posed directly by Dr. Bishara Bahbah – former mediator between the Trump administration and Hamas – in an interview with Al- Ghad TV in April 2026. His conclusion was scathing: there is no justification for the Gulf states to continue investing in an American military presence incapable of deterring Iran, yet perfectly operational in protecting Israel. Hussein Chokra, a research associate at the American University of Beirut, rigorously theorized this on Al Jazeera on May 3, 2026: the United States will systematically sacrifice Arab interests whenever they clash with those of Tel Aviv. These voices are not marginal. They are symptoms of a brutal intellectual awakening among Arab elites.
The mistakes are structural and accumulated over decades. In August 1990, Riyadh begged Washington to intervene against Saddam Hussein, opening its doors to an American military presence that would never leave. In 2003, the Gulf monarchies tacitly supported – or allowed – the invasion of Iraq, which fractured the regional order and propelled Iran to the status of hegemonic power in the Shiite crescent. In 2011, they supported interventions that ravaged Libya, Syria, and Yemen – conquests of chaos that continue to this day. At each turn, American dependence deepened. With each crisis, Arab sovereignty fractured further.
Instability, a deliberate product
The American military presence in the Gulf has not produced stability. It has produced exactly the opposite: four major wars since 1990, a nuclear-armed Iran despite thirty years of sanctions, a Yemen in ruins after ten years of conflict, a devastated Iraq, a fragmented Syria, and an economically collapsed Lebanon since 2019. If the record of an alliance is measured by the concrete results for its most vulnerable members, this one is damning.
But instability is not a failure of American policy. It is its calculated dividend. A stable, unified Middle East, sovereign over its energy resources and maritime routes, would be an emancipated Middle East – and therefore ungovernable from Washington. The constant turbulence justifies the presence of bases and fuels arms sales – more than $50 billion in 2023 alone, according to the Congressional Research Service – perpetuates security dependency, and neutralizes any desire for Arab unity.
The United Arab Emirates completed this logic of fragmentation by recently announcing its withdrawal from OPEC, undermining the main bargaining power of Arab producers vis-à-vis the United States and the West. Each monarchy cultivates its “special relationship” with Washington, discreetly marginalizing regional solidarity. Divided, they are worth infinitely more to Washington than united. And Washington, since Kissinger, has orchestrated this division with cold and unwavering mastery.
One wonders how states sitting on the largest hydrocarbon reserves on the planet, managers of sovereign wealth funds among the most powerful in the world – the Saudi PIF exceeds $900 billion in 2025, the Emirati ADIA flirts with $1 trillion – abdicated their security sovereignty into the hands of a power whose fundamental interests structurally diverged from their own?
The paradox is that these states financed their own containment by hosting bases whose real operational objectives were aimed at Eurasia, not their own protection. They acquired weapons over which they had no control: neither the software code, nor the munitions supply chains, nor the political conditions of use – as painfully demonstrated by the US embargo on precision bombs destined for Saudi Arabia, briefly imposed by the Biden administration in 2021 at the height of the war in Yemen. They recycled their petrodollars to finance the debt of the country that dominated them.
In short, in May 2026, while the Trump administration is negotiating directly with Iran in Oman over nuclear issues, the Gulf monarchies are neither consulted nor informed in real time. Agreements directly concerning them are concluded behind their backs. This scene – seemingly anecdotal – is in reality the perfect metaphor for forty years of a relationship called an alliance, which is nothing more than a willing vassalage.
The story of this alliance is like that of a tenant who has paid exorbitant rent for forty years only to discover, one morning in crisis, that the lease contained a clause he had never read – or refused to read: the security provided expressly excludes cases where your interests conflict with those of the landlord.
This clause has always existed. It is simply written in the invisible ink of American realpolitik.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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