Gulf states are discovering the limits of US security guarantees and the costs of neglecting their regional relationships. Australia still has time to avoid that mistake.
“We got played,” a Dubai businessman told The Washington Post in comments later echoed in Semafor’s reporting on Gulf unease over the US–Iran deal. It is an unusually candid admission, the kind that surfaces when expectations built over decades collide with the realities of power.
The UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain now fear an agreement that appears to leave Iran’s military capabilities intact, while releasing funds that may strengthen its armed forces. Their frustration is genuine, but it is aimed at the wrong target. The problem is not simply this deal. It is the political and strategic model the Gulf monarchies chose to build — and what they declined to build in its place.
To understand the Gulf’s predicament, two facts have to be held together. First, the Gulf states became some of the wealthiest societies on earth. Second, that rise occurred while their largest neighbour, Iran, was systematically isolated and punished under a US-led regional order.
As modern political entities, most of the Gulf monarchies are young. Their emergence coincided with the petrodollar system, under which oil would be priced in US dollars in exchange for American protection. Gulf prosperity and Washington’s security umbrella were constructed within the same bargain.
Iran sits in stark contrast. It is an old civilisation with a long political memory and a constitutional tradition that predates most Gulf states. The idea that newly assembled petrostates, operating under US protection, were “containing” Iran was always more ideological comfort than historical description. The 2026 war did not create that contradiction; it exposed it.
None of this denies that the Gulf achieved impressive things. Dubai became a global financial hub; Abu Dhabi amassed immense sovereign wealth; and, Qatar leveraged gas reserves into out-sized diplomatic influence. But these successes unfolded inside an architecture defined by Iran’s exclusion and sustained by American force.
This is where the deeper failure lies. The Gulf states sought security from Iran rather than security in the Middle East. They outsourced the central strategic question of their region to Washington. American bases, fleets and pressure campaigns on Tehran became substitutes for the harder work of building a regional order that treated Iran as a permanent neighbour to be engaged rather than a problem to be managed indefinitely from abroad.
Paul Keating’s argument that Australia must find security “in our region, not from it” was not only about Australia. It was a wider warning about the limits of imported security when regional relationships are neglected. The Gulf is now living the consequences of ignoring that warning.
Qatar’s recent mediation efforts — marathon negotiations with Iranian officials to help broker a ceasefire — show that Gulf diplomatic capacity always existed. What was missing was not skill, but strategic intent. That capacity was rarely marshalled to construct a durable security framework that acknowledged Iran’s legitimate interests even while resisting its more destabilising policies.
Washington, unsurprisingly, has now cut an agreement on its own terms. Gulf investment in the relationship, however long and however deep, could not outweigh the priorities of the US administration. That is how great powers behave. The surprise is that Gulf rulers appear to have believed decades of reliance would ultimately produce a different outcome.
A moral and material ledger also sits behind today’s complaints. The Gulf states did not merely fail to resist Iran’s exclusion from the global economy; they prospered within it. Sanctions tightened oil markets in ways that benefited Gulf exporters. Iran’s financial isolation created openings Dubai was well placed to occupy. The Gulf did not have to design Iran’s exclusion to gain from it. Acceptance was enough.
That history matters. It is possible to fear Iranian power and simultaneously profit from the order that helped weaken it. The Gulf did both. Today’s insecurities are not the product of a single deal or a single war. They are the accumulated consequences of a model that substituted patronage for strategy.
An alternative was available, though far more difficult. The Gulf states had the money, geographic centrality and — in cases such as Qatar — diplomatic credibility to pursue a more balanced regional order that included Iran. This would not have required naivety about Iran’s nuclear ambiguities, proxy networks or the strategic leverage of Hormuz. It would have required recognising that many of Iran’s most aggressive behaviours were responses to life under siege, and that permanent exclusion was never likely to produce permanent stability.
Failing to attempt such an order left the Gulf exposed when conflict disrupted shipping and demonstrated how completely Gulf prosperity depends on a Strait of Hormuz that Iran can threaten to close. Interception systems and foreign bases proved to be poor substitutes for regional diplomacy. “We got played” is the sound of states discovering, late and at significant cost, that a security guarantee is not the same thing as security.
For Australians, this is not an exotic lesson from a distant region. AUKUS rests on a similar temptation: deeper dependence on US military capability as a substitute for regional embeddedness. It is a bet that Washington’s priorities will align with Australian security needs when it matters most. The Gulf states made that bet. They have now seen how the fine print reads when strategic circumstances change.
Australia, unlike the Gulf, still has genuine options. It is embedded in the Asia–Pacific, sharing a region with China, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Japan and the ASEAN states. It has economic ties, cultural connections and, if it chooses to develop them, the diplomatic possibilities that come with being an independent, credible regional actor. Instead, it is in danger of becoming another client state, purchasing an insurance policy from a patron that has just demonstrated to its Gulf clients how strictly its own interests govern its choices.
The Gulf’s reckoning is not a distant curiosity for Australian readers. It is a detailed preview of the destination reached when states seek security from their region rather than in it. The window to walk a different path is still open. It will not remain so indefinitely.
Steve Middendorf
Steve Middendorf was born in Minnesota in 1947 and educated in Catholic schools. He enlisted in the US Army in 1968 and worked on Nike Hercules guided missile systems in Germany during the Vietnam War era. University study in the early 1970s radicalised his view of US foreign policy. In 1993 Steve was offered a two‑year IT startup assignment in Australia and emigrated shortly thereafter. From this new vantage point, he began re‑examining America’s global role through the experiences of other migrants and wide reading in critical history, economics and international relations. Steve’s writing focuses on US power, the delusions of empire, and the distortions of Western media. He now lives on the NSW Central Coast and publishes regular commentary on Substack.