Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Dina Esfandiary and Sultan Alamer
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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As the United States and Israel’s war on Iran enters its second week, the conflict has definitively spread to some of Iran’s neighbors, which up until now had been seen as islands of stability.
“Iran’s response, unlike its response in June, was hard and it was fast,” Dina Esfandiary, Middle East lead for Bloomberg Economics, tells Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “It then went on to focus on the Gulf Arab states and went quite hard at it, actually, which I think surprised many.”
Esfandiary explains that Iran’s decision to launch prolonged strikes against the Gulf states was driven by the regime’s limited options. “They can’t reach the United States. They can barely reach Israel,” she says. “The only way that they can impose a cost on as many people as possible is either targeting energy markets or targeting their immediate neighborhood.”
“It would be extremely difficult for these countries to go back to business as usual, given the damage that has been done.”
In Esfandiary’s view, the Iranian strikes have rolled back a significant diplomatic shift that had been underway in the region. “Many countries in the region really saw Israel increasingly as the bigger threat,” she says. “Iran was no longer the main threat the Gulf Arab states faced. Israel was, because Israel was like Iran only with better capabilities and with a blank check from America to do whatever it wants to do.”
Sultan Alamer, a senior fellow at the New Lines Institute’s Middle East Center, a nonresident scholar in the Carnegie Middle East Program and an associate at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University, tells Al Yafai that the diplomatic progress built over many years between the Gulf states and Iran now lies in ruins. “All the Gulf countries came along with the Iranian regime in terms of reconciling relations, building good arrangements on how to manage their conflicts and differences, and now all that’s fallen apart,” he says. “It would be extremely difficult for these countries to go back to business as usual, given the damage that has been done.”
Alamer identifies a collective action problem facing the Gulf states. None want to enter the conflict offensively, but he warns of the risk of American abandonment. “Let’s assume that they joined the war and then Trump decided that he achieved victory and pulled out, and then we will be stuck fighting the Iranians,” he says. “The cost for the United States to pull out and declare victory is different than the calculation for the Gulf states.”
Alamer sees the conflict as marking the end of Saudi Arabia’s recent era of regional diplomacy. Following the 2019 attack on its oil facilities, Saudi Arabia shifted to “a policy that is primarily focused on reconciliation, neutrality and zero conflict with their neighbors,” he says. “Now that zero-conflict policy is being tested, and I think that we are witnessing the end of this Saudi honeymoon with the region.”
Looking ahead, Alamer warns that the worst-case scenario for the Gulf would be a descent into civil war in Iran, which “would threaten everything that they care about in terms of protecting energy, protecting tourism, protecting economic development.”
Further reading: Saudi Arabia’s Break With Interventionism by Sultan Alamer