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For decades, the Gulf occupied a fairly clear place in the international system. The United States was the dominant security power. Western economies played a central role in trade, investment, and finance. Relations with Asia grew steadily, but largely through oil and commerce.
That arrangement had already begun to change well before the Iran war of 2026. The war did not initiate the transformation; rather, it exposed, with unusual clarity, how far the shift had already advanced — and where its limits remained.
Once the conflict escalated into a serious military confrontation, the United States moved rapidly back to the center of the Gulf security landscape. Its military reach, intelligence capabilities, early-warning networks, naval presence, and air power demonstrated something that years of debate about a declining American role had sometimes obscured: no other outside power can currently offer the Gulf the same range of security capabilities.
Yet the war did not restore the old regional order.
The Gulf economy had already changed too much for that. China is deeply tied to the region through energy, trade, and industry. India’s role is expanding across markets, investment, and maritime connectivity. Europe remains an important source of investment, technology, and defense partnerships. None of these relationships disappeared because Washington again became indispensable in a military crisis.
The Gulf now lives with two strategic realities at the same time. Its security remains heavily tied to the United States, while its economic future is connected to a much broader group of partners.
That divergence may be one of the most important changes in the Gulf’s international position.
There are still areas in which the United States is exceptionally difficult to replace. Yet Gulf states can no longer organize their economic future around an exclusive relationship with the West. Energy demand has shifted markedly toward Asia. Trade routes and supply chains have become more diversified. Investment now flows from more directions. Gulf economies themselves have also become larger, more outward-looking and more capable of operating beyond the foreign-policy frameworks of an earlier era.
The result is a striking imbalance: the Gulf became economically multipolar before it acquired anything resembling a multipolar security order.
For Gulf states, the challenge is therefore not to decide whether Washington or Beijing should come first. That framing belongs to an older debate and simplifies the choices the region actually faces.
The more difficult task is to preserve a close security partnership with the United States while deepening economic and technological ties with China, India, Europe, and the wider Asian economy — without allowing any single relationship to narrow the possibilities available in another.
American-Centered Security, a More Multipolar Economy
The scale of the Gulf’s economic shift is already visible in the numbers.
Trade between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) exceeded $288 billion in 2024. India’s trade with the GCC reached $178.56 billion in the 2024–25 financial year. Merchandise trade between the European Union (EU) and the GCC stood at €165.6 billion in 2025.
The point is not that the West has somehow lost the Gulf economically. It has not. Rather, there is no longer a single center around which the Gulf economy revolves.
Energy makes the shift toward Asia even clearer. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 89 percent of the crude oil and condensate that passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the first half of 2025 was bound for Asian markets. China, India, Japan, and South Korea were among the main destinations.
For Gulf states, ties with Asia are no longer simply one component of a diversified foreign policy. They are built into the structure of their economies.
The security picture, however, is markedly different. When the crisis escalated into a military confrontation, Washington’s importance became much harder to dispute. The region therefore finds itself in an unusual position: its security architecture still looks largely westward, while an increasing share of its economic interests points east.
The Iran war showed how difficult that arrangement can become when the regional order comes under pressure.
What the War Revealed
The disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz offered another important lesson.
The Gulf’s importance to the global economy is often treated as a source of strategic weight. It certainly is. But importance does not provide immunity. At times, it creates vulnerability.
Before the war, more than 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products passed through the strait. When flows fell sharply during the conflict, the consequences reached far beyond the immediate region.
The episode underscored how closely Gulf security is tied to global economic security. It also revealed the other side of that relationship. Ports, oil installations, maritime routes, and logistics hubs become strategically valuable targets precisely because so much depends on them.
A powerful security partner can mitigate these risks, but it cannot make them disappear.
The United States can provide deterrence, intelligence, military power, and sophisticated defense systems. What it cannot do on its own is guarantee that every port, airport, energy facility, electricity grid, or commercial shipping lane will continue functioning normally during a major conflict.
That changes the security question for the Gulf.
For years, debate centered on who would guarantee regional security and whether American commitment could still be relied upon. Those questions remain important, but they are no longer sufficient.
Gulf states must also consider how much disruption they can absorb themselves. How quickly can damaged infrastructure recover? What happens if a major maritime route becomes unusable? Which alternative routes, facilities, and systems are already in place before a crisis begins, rather than being improvised once it is under way?
In that sense, resilience is increasingly becoming an integral part of deterrence rather than a separate security concern.
Technology Makes the Balance Harder
There was a time when Gulf states could keep their major foreign relationships in fairly distinct compartments.
The United States could provide security. China could buy oil and expand trade. European countries could supply investment, technology, and defense equipment. India and other Asian economies could deepen their roles as commercial partners. These relationships overlapped, but they did not necessarily collide.
That is becoming much harder to maintain.
Modern warfare depends increasingly on communications, satellites, surveillance, cyber capabilities, early warning, and the ability to process vast amounts of data quickly. At the same time, artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and cloud infrastructure have become central to Gulf economic transformation strategies.
The same technologies are now at the heart of strategic competition between Washington and Beijing.
US–China rivalry is no longer confined to tariffs, trade balances, or market access. It reaches deep into semiconductors, AI systems, telecommunications, computing infrastructure, and data.
For Gulf states, this matters because technological choices are not as easy to reverse as ordinary commercial ones. A company can change suppliers. Replacing an entire communications network, cloud system, or data architecture after years of investment is a different matter altogether.
The pressure to choose sides may therefore rarely arrive as a blunt political ultimatum. It is more likely to appear in technical language: conditions governing access to advanced chips, restrictions surrounding AI partnerships, cybersecurity standards, data requirements, or decisions about which platforms can operate alongside one another.
Such choices can shape strategic alignments for years without ever being described as geopolitical decisions.
This is where the Gulf’s room for maneuver may face its toughest test.
More Partners Are Not the Same as More Autonomy
Gulf states have spent years broadening their international relationships. The policy has served them well. It has created economic opportunities, reduced exposure to political shifts in individual capitals, and given regional states considerably more diplomatic flexibility.
But diversification has limits. A country can become less dependent on one power without becoming less dependent overall. Security may come from one partner, technology from another, markets from a third, and critical supply chains from a fourth. In that case, dependence has been rearranged rather than overcome.
Strategic autonomy cannot therefore be measured by counting partnerships. What matters is whether a state still has credible options when the interests of its partners begin to diverge. That requires capabilities that diplomatic diversification alone cannot provide.
More effective defense systems matter. So does maritime security. National industries matter. Digital infrastructure must be protected. Alternative routes for energy and trade need to exist before they are needed. Supply chains must be designed for resilience rather than efficiency alone.
Some of this is beyond the reach of individual states acting alone. Air and missile defense, maritime security, early warning, and the protection of major infrastructure are all areas where Gulf cooperation can produce far greater value than a collection of national systems operating separately.
The more capable the Gulf becomes of collectively managing the first stages of a crisis, the less often it will have to depend on an external actor to manage every crisis on its behalf.
The Limits of External Interest
Discussion of the future of the Gulf often returns to the same question: if the United States steps back, who will fill the vacuum?
There is something outdated about the assumption behind that question. It treats Gulf states as though they are simply waiting for one external power to replace another. They are not.
The Gulf today controls assets that the world’s major powers all value: energy, capital, ports, global airlines, logistics networks, and large pools of cross-border investment.
China needs Gulf energy and access to the region’s markets and trade routes. India needs the region for energy, commerce, and westward connectivity. Europe has interests in investment, energy, defense, and economic corridors. Washington continues to see the Gulf as an important part of the regional balance of power.
That gives Gulf states considerably more leverage than they had in the past. But there is an important distinction between having leverage and having security guarantees.
The number of countries with a direct interest in Gulf stability has grown. The number willing to bear the military and political costs of defending that stability has not grown at the same pace.
China has an enormous economic stake in the region, but that has not made it a substitute for the United States as a security power. India’s interests continue to deepen, yet New Delhi has shown little desire to become heavily involved in the Gulf’s military conflicts. Europe can make useful contributions, including in defense and maritime security, but it is not positioned to assume Washington’s role.
Searching for a replacement for the United States is therefore unlikely to provide a workable strategy. The more practical objective is different: preserve the American security relationship, broaden other partnerships where Gulf interests require it, and reduce the degree to which the region remains vulnerable to any single outside actor.
Beyond American Monopoly Is Not Beyond America
The Iran war underlined a reality that had sometimes been obscured by talk of American retrenchment. The United States remains the Gulf’s most consequential external security power.
At the same time, America no longer occupies the same position across every other dimension of Gulf international relations.
China is too important economically to be treated as peripheral. India is moving steadily closer to the center of Gulf economic calculations. Europe remains relevant across investment, defense, and technology. The Gulf states themselves have also changed. They possess more capital, greater diplomatic reach, and more options than they did two decades ago.
That is the real shift. The Gulf is not moving into a post-American era. It is moving beyond an era in which America could sit at the center of almost every important external relationship. There is a difference.
Nor should a wider range of partnerships be mistaken for strategic autonomy. If security depends on one power, technology on another, and markets on a third — while the region has few alternatives of its own — multipolarity can simply create a more complicated map of dependence.
The real test of autonomy comes when interests collide. Can Gulf states continue to make choices that serve their own priorities when Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, or European capitals want different things? Can they absorb a serious economic or military shock without surrendering that freedom of choice?
Those questions matter more than the number of strategic partnerships that can be listed on paper.
A more multipolar international order gives the Gulf greater room to act. Whether that space becomes genuine strategic autonomy will depend less on what external powers offer the region than on what Gulf states are able to build for themselves.
