The Iran War Is Splitting the Gulf. UAE Is Pivoting Toward Israel. Qatar, Oman, and Iraq Are Walking Away. Saudi Arabia Is Doing Both.

The most concrete fact in the realignment is also the most visible from satellite imagery: Israel deployed Iron Dome interceptor batteries with Israeli operating personnel to the UAE during the war. The batteries shot down Iranian drones and ballistic missiles in Emirati airspace at an intercept rate the Jerusalem Post puts at over 95 percent. There is no historical precedent for this in the Gulf. An Israeli defense system operated by Israeli personnel firing interceptors over an Arab capital is the kind of arrangement that, two years ago, would have produced a diplomatic rupture. It produced operational gratitude instead.

Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and the country's standing reference voice on Gulf-state policy, told the Jerusalem Post the partnership has now moved well beyond the symbolism of the 2020 Abraham Accords:

“It's not just security. It's tourism, science, investment, trade. There is no Arab country closer.”

Yoel Guzansky · Senior Fellow, INSS · Jerusalem Post, May 21, 2026

Guzansky also gave Herb Keinon the structural read on the relationship's next phase — an Israel-UAE joint defense fund under discussion to acquire and co-develop weapons systems. The reasoning is blunt:

“Israel will need UAE money. We have the technology, but we lack the resources.”

Yoel Guzansky · INSS · Jerusalem Post, May 21, 2026

Riyadh chose a different bet. On September 17, 2025, at Al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) with mutual-defense obligations explicitly oriented toward Iran-source threats. Within months, roughly 8,000 Pakistani troops, fighter aircraft, and Chinese-built HQ-9 air defense systems had deployed to the kingdom. In January 2026, Bloomberg and Pakistan's Minister for Defence Production confirmed an active tri-party draft to bring Turkey into the pact — what MEMRI and several regional outlets framed as the contours of a Sunni “Islamic NATO.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in its May 12 analysis, summarized the Saudi posture with the title that became the editorial shorthand for it across right-of-center policy circles: Saudi Arabia's Strange War: Appease Iran, Rebuff Israel. The substantive complaint is that MBS, since the June 12-Day War weakened Iran, hardened rather than softened Saudi anti-Israel rhetoric — the opposite of what the Trump administration's Abraham Accords 2.0 framework was built to elicit.

Qatar took a different role again: not partner, not rival — mediator. On May 18, Trump publicly credited the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE with persuading him to call off a Tuesday May 19 U.S. strike on Iran. That public credit was unusual; what was more telling was the diplomatic vehicle. The peace proposal Trump cited had been drafted by Qatar and Pakistan — both states with structural reasons to keep the Iranian regime intact: Qatar shares the world's largest natural-gas field with Iran (the South Pars/North Dome reservoir), and Pakistan shares a 900-kilometer land border with it.

Oman, the historical Gulf-region back-channel for U.S.-Iran talks, took a sharper line. Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi urged the United States to “not get sucked in further,” and the Omani Foreign Ministry condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran as illegal aggression — a public position no other GCC state took. Iraq is the structural loser of any prolonged conflict regardless of position: 90 percent of Iraq's state budget runs through oil and gas exports, and 90 percent of its imported food, goods, and medicine transits the Strait of Hormuz. Baghdad's leverage is closest to zero.

What is keeping the realignment's costs from spiraling is U.S. military hardware. On April 13, 2026, at 10 a.m. ET, U.S. Central Command implemented a naval blockade of Iran under the direct order of President Trump and the field command of Admiral Brad Cooper (CENTCOM Commander). On May 4, CENTCOM launched Project Freedom — a sustained operation to escort commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz with two carrier strike groups, an amphibious readiness group, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, more than 100 land- and sea-based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms, and roughly 15,000 service members.

The Trump administration's stated diplomatic objective in the region has been an Abraham Accords 2.0— a Saudi-Israel normalization layered onto the 2020 UAE/Bahrain/Morocco/Sudan framework, formalized through a U.S.-backed integrated regional security architecture. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff have made repeated trips to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Manama since February pursuing the framework. As of the publication of the Keinon piece, no Saudi-Israel normalization has been signed. MBS refused to announce formal ties on his November 2025 Washington visit. Riyadh continues to condition recognition on what it calls “concrete steps toward a Palestinian state.”

“The region's most significant crisis since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait — exposing the hollowness of Arab solidarity.”

Tareq al-Otaiba · Former UAE National Security Council official · Jerusalem Post, May 21, 2026

The UAE's Foreign Ministry, asked about the secret Netanyahu visit, did not bend. The statement framed the relationship as fully public and transparent — which was almost certainly meant to deny back-channel arrangements while preserving the public ones:

“Relations between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel are public and not based on non-transparent or unofficial arrangements.”

UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs · Statement · May 14, 2026

On the other side of the chess board: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian preside over a weakened state. Israeli and U.S. strikes beginning late February degraded Iranian air defense and ballistic-missile production capacity. The IRGC's ability to project force into the Gulf through proxies has been reduced, though not eliminated. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, issued a public threat against the UAE on the wake of the Netanyahu-MBZ revelation, calling Emirati cooperation with Israel “unforgivable.” The veiled threat is itself a confirmation that the realignment matters to Tehran.

The American interest is unusually clean to state. A Gulf re-aligned with the UAE+Israel pole, anchored by CENTCOM, reduces pressure on U.S. energy supply, reduces the chance of an Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz closure, and constrains Chinese strategic gains in the region. A Gulf re-aligned with the Saudi+Pakistan+Turkey pole — or worse, a hedged Gulf playing Beijing off Washington — does the opposite. Carnegie's April analysis names three plausible post-war scenarios; the operational facts on the ground now point most strongly toward the first. The diplomatic facts — MBS's posture, Qatar's mediation track, Oman's public condemnation of the strikes — point toward the third.