How the Iran war will change the Middle East

If there is one thing U.S.-led regime change wars in the Middle East have in common, it is that they all produce a wide range of unintended consequences. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to widespread chaos and put Iraq under the heavy influence of Iran and Tehran-backed Shia militia groups. The U.S-led military intervention in Libya ended up dividing the country and destabilizing neighboring Mali and Chad, as weapons and fighters spilled over into those countries. And the U.S. arming of former President Bashar al-Assad’s opposition in Syria fueled a civil war that exacerbated sectarian tensions, fueled Sunni extremism, and led to refugee flows to Europe, which boosted support for right-wing populism. 

The 2026 war in Iran is no different. U.S. President Donald Trump set out to change the Iranian regime, decimate Iran’s nuclear program, degrade Iran’s armed forces, help Iranian protesters, and demonstrate American power and credibility on the world stage. He ended up making little progress on most of those goals but instead gave Iran unprecedented control over the Strait of Hormuz, severely undermined U.S. soft power and alliances around the world, and replaced a cautious, elderly, and unpopular Iranian supreme leader in his twilight years with a vengeful, hardline, and even more mistrustful military-dominated regime.

The Iran war will also likely have significant consequences within the region. By revealing the United States to be an unpredictable, unreliable partner—which rejected regional calls to avoid war and thereby inflicted major damage on the Gulf states—the war will lead U.S. regional partners to pursue more national self-reliance and diversify their international partnerships. The war impacted members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in very different ways and revealed limits to their mutual solidarity. It will also exacerbate growing divisions among them and impede long-standing efforts to develop a common regional security architecture. Finally, far from advancing Israel’s integration in the region—a long-standing goal of the Trump administration—the Iran war will further divide Israel both from the countries of the Gulf and from the United States itself. 

A region in flux

No Arab country wanted the war with Iran. Indeed, whereas only a decade ago many Arab leaders may have welcomed a war to change the regime in Tehran—which they saw as a rising power that was seeking regional domination—by the time the conflict started, most had made their peace with Tehran. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) restored diplomatic ties with Iran in 2022 (having downgraded them in 2016). In 2023, Saudi Arabia signed a formal normalization agreement brokered by China that reopened embassies and at least nominally got Iran to commit to stop arming the Houthis in Yemen. Around the same time, Iran announced visa-free travel with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar as part of the broader regional trend. Many of those countries were also expanding diplomatic engagement and economic ties with Assad, Iran’s proxy in Syria. 

It was not that the Arab countries no longer saw Iran as a threat. Instead, their appetite for confrontation diminished after 2019, when the Trump administration failed to robustly respond to suspected Iranian mining of UAE- and Saudi-flagged commercial oil tankers in the Gulf and an Iranian-backed drone attack on Saudi oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais. Both attacks were triggered by Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran. In addition, by 2026, Arab Gulf countries had concluded they had too much to lose in a conflict with Iran. The UAE and Saudi Arabia were both pursuing hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in data centers and seeking to develop their financial services sectors, which required stability to reassure investors and expatriates.

In fact, by early 2026, the Arab states’ situation vis-à-vis Iran was to a large degree in a “sweet spot”: Tehran’s military power, nuclear weapons program, and proxy network had all been severely set back by multiple rounds of conflict with the United States and Israel during 2024 and 2025. The weakened Iranian regime (the “devil they knew”) was still in place, and regime change—which could create instability or set unwelcome precedents—had been avoided. For all these reasons, Gulf Arab leaders made it unusually clear—in strong public statements, private messaging, outreach to Tehran, and the denial of U.S. access to their airspace or territory—that they opposed an attack on Iran. (Media reports that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman privately encouraged the attack suggest that Saudi Arabia could have been an exception among Gulf countries, or that the crown prince was willing to tell Trump what he wanted to hear.)

Another important factor was the growing rift between the two main Gulf powers, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Once closely aligned on a regional agenda focused on countering political Islam (in Qatar, Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Gaza), containing Iran, and combating Houthi rebels in Yemen, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had significantly diverged by 2026 and found themselves more in competition than agreement. The UAE resented Saudi Arabia’s efforts to attract capital and business away from the UAE (including through non-tariff barriers and visa policies); its warming relations with rivals in Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and Pakistan; and its alignment with suspected Islamist rivals in places like Libya and Sudan.

At the same time, Riyadh was furious about the UAE’s alleged arming of anti-Saudi separatist forces in Yemen (which Riyadh bombed in December 2025), the Emiratis’ deepening military and intelligence ties with Israel in the absence of progress on the Palestinian issue, and alleged violations of agreed OPEC oil production cuts to sustain prices. The growing personal rift between the two countries’ once-close leaders, the Saudi crown prince and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, has complicated efforts to forge a united Arab front on everything from energy policy to Israel, North and East Africa, relations with the United States, and how to deal with Iran. 

Consequences of the Iran war

The issues at stake in the conflict between the United States and Iran are far from settled, but some initial conclusions about how that conflict will likely affect the region can already be drawn:

1. Gulf countries will seek more autonomy from the United States.

The U.S. and Israeli decision to launch an attack on Iran in pursuit of regime change, against their better judgment, stunned Arab leaders. It led to the very consequences they feared but that the United States had dismissed: sustained Iranian attacks on regional energy and civilian infrastructure and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which devastated Gulf countries’ energy-export-dependent economies. Qatar’s 2025 security guarantee (in the form of an executive order), the “major non-NATO ally” status of Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain, and the basing agreements with multiple Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries all failed to shield any of them from Iran’s devastating attacks.

As a result, countries in the region will have little choice but to reduce their dependence on what they now see as an unpredictable and unreliable United States, which not only cannot fully protect them but may even jeopardize their security with reckless acts. The Gulf states will also worry that even if Trump is replaced by a less unpredictable Democratic president, the latter may not be as sympathetic to them as Trump has been.

This does not mean that the Arab Gulf states will cease relying on the United States—which has too much to offer in terms of investment, defense equipment, and political support—as their primary partner. Nor does it mean that they will seek some other main partner, such as China, which is reluctant to get too involved in the Middle East and could never replace the United States. However, it does mean that the Arab Gulf states are likely to increase defense spending and hedge against U.S. unreliability by diversifying that spending in the direction of other potential suppliers and partners, such as Europe, South Korea, and Australia. Limits on U.S. missile defense launchers and interceptors risk leaving the Gulf states exceedingly vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks. That vulnerability would be heightened in the event of a simultaneous contingency in the Indo-Pacific, when such assets would be in even shorter supply and could be diverted from the Middle East. Gulf leaders will be determined to avoid this outcome. The Arab Gulf states will also rapidly invest in alternative export routes via new pipeline networks to reduce reliance on both the Strait of Hormuz and the American military’s willingness and ability to keep it open. 

2. Divisions among Gulf countries have been exacerbated.

Far from uniting regional states against a common enemy, the Iran war will only exacerbate growing tensions among countries that have been affected in very different ways. The UAE was struck by over 3,000 missiles and drones, for example, more than all other GCC states put together. This can be explained partly by geography—Iran struck the most accessible targets—and partly by the scale of Emirati counterattacks on Iran, secret at the time but subsequently reported. But some Emiratis concluded it also had to do with the more accommodating stances Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman took on diplomacy with Iran or even possible side deals. As UAE top diplomat Anwar Gargash put it in an unusually blunt social media post on May 19, “The victim’s role has merged with that of the mediator … while the friend has turned into a mediator instead of being a steadfast ally and supporter.”  

If Saudi Arabia went into the conflict most open to potentially using force against Iran, the UAE emerged from it most determined to ensure Iran would pay a high price for its attacks and lose its capacity to threaten the Arab Gulf states again in the future. Partly as a result, Abu Dhabi seems committed to deepening its military and intelligence ties with Israel—which reportedly sent an Iron Dome battery to the UAE to defend it against Iranian missiles. In contrast, Riyadh is distancing itself from Israel, including through its diplomatic efforts alongside Pakistan, Oman, and Qatar to end the war (against Israel’s wishes). 

The Gulf states also found themselves impacted in diverse ways by the Strait of Hormuz’s closure. Notably, because Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to the Red Sea enabled it to continue to export a larger proportion of its oil production than the UAE, Riyadh’s oil revenues actually increased (by some $9 billion) due to the elevated price, as did Oman’s (by nearly $6 billion), whose oil exports do not need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. UAE oil revenues, on the other hand, declined by over $1.5 billion, even with the elevated price, and Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain were even harder hit. The war’s divergent impacts contributed to the UAE’s April 28 decision to leave OPEC. That decision had been in the works for years, but the strait’s closure provided Abu Dhabi with the need and opportunity to finally move forward.  After the strait is open (and once its enhanced pipeline capacity comes online), the UAE will likely focus on maximizing revenues and concern itself less with keeping prices at levels Saudi Arabia needs to balance its budget, which will only exacerbate tensions between the two countries.    

3. Israel has been further divided from the United States and most of the Arab world.

The Iran war will also have a major impact on relations among Israel, the United States, and Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East.  Even before the Iran war, U.S. attitudes toward Israel were turning highly negative, driven by the consequences of the war in Gaza and the extreme-right orientation of Israel’s government. But Israel’s role in instigating what most Americans consider to be an unnecessary and costly war in Iran has dramatically accelerated that trend among both Democrats and Republicans, including many loyalists in Trump’s “MAGA” base.

Some 60% of all Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to Pew polling, and 74% of younger Americans polled by NBC News in April sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. Once controversial calls to withhold U.S. military support to Israel are now commonplace; in April, 36 Democratic senators voted to block a key arms sale to Israel—12 more than in a similar vote before the Iran war. The possibility that the United States will soon end its security assistance to Israel altogether—particularly if Democrats take back the presidency in 2029 and Israeli policies do not change—is now very real.

Israel’s role in the war in Iran will also halt for the foreseeable future any likelihood of further normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab states. Whereas, as noted above, the UAE may not only maintain but expand its ties with Israel as an ideological partner in its struggle against Islamists in Qatar, Turkey, Gaza, East Africa, and elsewhere, other GCC states (including Saudi Arabia and Qatar) will likely distance themselves further from Israel and rule out the establishment of formal ties.

In May 2026, during a call with Arab leaders and in subsequent social media posts, Trump suggested that joining the Abraham Accords—the normalization agreements signed between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain in 2020—should be “mandatory” for a number of Arab and Muslim countries as part of his proposed deal to end the war in Iran. But the prospect of any of these countries—particularly Saudi Arabia—joining anytime soon is almost nonexistent. Israel’s unwillingness to commit to a Palestinian state was already a major obstacle to Saudi participation in the accords.  Now, with public anger at Israel even higher, a growing rift with the UAE, the diminishment of the threat from Iran, and the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to expand defense and nuclear energy cooperation with Saudi Arabia anyway, no one should expect Riyadh to respond favorably to Trump’s entreaties. 

Policy recommendations

Trump’s reckless decision to launch an unnecessary war against Iran has had devastating consequences, not just in terms of immediate human, financial, and strategic costs, but on crucial relationships with and within the region that will never be the same again.

In the short term, there is little the United States can do to mitigate the damage. Its options are largely limited to ending the war with as few nuclear and financial concessions as possible. It will then need to rebuild trust and confidence with its regional partners and restore credible deterrence and engagement with Tehran. Even after all the damage caused by the war, the United States will remain the partner of choice for most of the region, and even if Trump has squandered much of the goodwill he initially had, subsequent administrations will still have the opportunity to pursue a more constructive approach. That will require continued military, economic, and diplomatic engagement with the region, but also a recognition that hubris and unilateralism always produce unintended—and usually negative—consequences that not even the United States can control.