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Since it started attacking the region on Feb. 28, Iran has been widening the geography of its strikes across the Gulf, following a clear pattern as Tehran has steadily brought more Arab states into the conflict, raising the pressure on governments that have so far sought to stay out of it. <\/p>\n
The response from the Arab world, however, has been notably different, with clear legal, diplomatic and economic measures but no move toward a collective military response. For Iran, that distinction is becoming an important measure of how far it can push without turning regional pressure into a broader war. In security studies, this is known as horizontal escalation, widening the conflict to create pressure elsewhere rather than simply increasing the intensity of the original fight. <\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s retaliation following Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei\u2019s assassination and the opening US-Israeli strikes quickly escalated beyond the familiar Strait of Hormuz-UAE axis that had shaped earlier rounds of confrontation. In fact, the UAE took the heaviest share of the attacks, intercepting more Iranian missiles and drones than any other country in the conflict, including Israel. But Iran also struck countries that had previously remained outside its line of fire. Oman was hit for the first time, with strikes on Duqm port and an oil tanker, despite Muscat\u2019s long-standing role as a mediator between Washington and Tehran. In Qatar, the Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas facility came under attack despite Doha\u2019s historically close ties with Tehran and their shared gas field. Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were also drawn into the fighting, while NATO forces intercepted Iranian drones near Turkiye\u2019s Incirlik base. <\/p>\n
The significance lies in where the strikes landed and what countries Iran targeted. This includes a mediator, a close partner and states that had previously avoided direct exposure. As such, each Gulf state was forced to read the crisis through its own geography, threat perception and bilateral history with Tehran, which meant six governments approaching one campaign from six separate starting points. <\/p>\n
\nThe Gulf\u2019s senior voices are clearly placing the cost on Iran, rather than on the cohesion of the Gulf<\/p>\n
Zaid M. Belbagi<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As a result, existing multilateral defense architecture, including the Gulf Cooperation Council\u2019s Unified Military Command and Joint Defense Council, was not activated collectively even as the individual states came under fire. Tehran\u2019s wager, in other words, was that years of Gulf rapprochement and strategic patience with Iran reflected an underlying inability to act together and that testing every state simultaneously would expose that gap before any collective mechanism could close it. <\/p>\n
Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, made some very interesting remarks at the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi this week that offer a useful indication of how the region is reading the situation. He described Iran\u2019s campaign as a \u201cwar of choice\u201d that had cost Tehran decades of accumulated trust. As such, the Gulf\u2019s senior voices are clearly placing the cost on Iran, rather than on the cohesion of the Gulf. If Tehran set out to expose divisions among its neighbors, the early verdict suggests the opposite. The strikes have left Iran facing the consequences of its own escalation. <\/p>\n
In March, 12 Arab and Islamic states met in Riyadh and issued a joint statement invoking self-defense rights under Article 51 of the UN Charter and calling on Iran to respect nations\u2019 sovereignty, halt support for regional militias and avoid threatening the Strait of Hormuz and Bab Al-Mandab Strait. And the Arab League Council followed with a formal condemnation affirming the right of affected states to defend themselves individually or collectively. <\/p>\n
Eventually, the GCC secretary-general took the unprecedented step of briefing the UN Security Council directly, securing Resolution 2817\u2019s condemnation of the attacks. None of this was improvised and it built a paper trail that increased Iran\u2019s exposure to the whole international system. <\/p>\n
\nRead separately, these look like divergent strategies. Read together, they diverge in instrument rather than in objective<\/p>\n
Zaid M. Belbagi<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Individually, states calibrated their own instruments to the same end. The UAE moved to an indefinite trade embargo on Iran in August, while deepening security cooperation with Washington and Israel. Saudi Arabia held a more measured line of de-escalation and engagement. <\/p>\n
Read separately, these look like divergent strategies. Read together, they diverge in instrument rather than in objective. Both tracks converge on the same message to Tehran: one in which further horizontal escalation will carry permanent structural cost, in trade, in deepened US-Israel security integration and in internationalized legal exposure. That structure is, in practical terms, harder for Tehran to plan around than a single unified response would have been because there is no discrete threshold to test and no single strike that resets the calculation. <\/p>\n
But the war is far from over and the June 17 Islamabad Memorandum, which was intended to bring the fighting to an end, contains no guarantee that Iran will refrain from targeting Gulf civilian infrastructure again. It does not acknowledge Gulf casualties, nor does it give the Gulf states a seat in the framework for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. In practice, the conflict has also continued beyond the agreement and into a naval phase, with tanker confrontations between Iran and the US taking place this week. <\/p>\n
That makes the next test more important than the one the region has already passed. The question is whether the pressure created by this round of attacks can now be turned into something more durable: shared doctrine, deeper intelligence-sharing and greater redundancy in export routes. Non-Strait of Hormuz pipeline capacity remains structurally insufficient to replace the volumes that would be lost in a full closure, leaving the Gulf exposed to the same vulnerability in any future confrontation. The choice, ultimately, is between building a more coordinated regional response now or facing the next round with six states once again fighting the problem largely on their own. <\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s calculation was that widening the conflict would move faster than the Gulf could respond as a bloc. So far, that calculation has not held. The Gulf states have absorbed the attacks individually but their response has increasingly converged through diplomacy, law and economic pressure around a common message, which is that escalation carries costs that do not disappear when the fighting stops. <\/p>\n
That is not the picture of a fractured Gulf that Tehran may have hoped to find. It is a region beginning to coordinate on its own terms, not by matching Iran strike for strike but by deciding where and how to exert pressure in return. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n