On September 9, 2025, Israel attacked Qatar in an act of international aggression that caused shockwaves in Doha, across the Gulf states, and around the world. Missile strikes on a building in a busy residential suburb at the height of the afternoon rush hour killed six people, including a Qatari citizen who was a member of the internal security forces. In addition to targeting Qatar as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, and the Hamas negotiating team who had gathered to discuss a proposal from President Donald Trump to end the war in Gaza, the attack reinforced growing perceptions that Israel is a threat to stability in the Middle East. The diplomatic fallout was swift, with Trump himself expressing anger—despite indications that the United States had some foreknowledge of Israel’s plans. The Gulf states’ responses nevertheless suggest that the impact on regional security will be incremental rather than immediate and disruptive.
Gulf Reactions and Reassessments
Regional and international leaders expressed solidarity with Qatar after the attack. On September 10, a high-level delegation led by President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan traveled from the United Arab Emirates to Doha, as did officials from other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. On September 15, an emergency summit of Arab and Islamic leaders took place in Doha at which Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani called for “concrete steps” to address Israeli actions. Summit attendees declared that the attack targeted not only Qatar but ‘all Arab and Muslim states,’ and the GCC noted that its Joint Defense Agreement states that an attack on one member state is considered a collective attack on all. Nevertheless, the summit fell short of expectations and did not deliver a tangible response.
Calculations and assumptions about regional security dynamics will undoubtedly need to be reassessed after a summer of volatility in the Middle East. During the 12-day June 2025 War between Israel and Iran, Qatar (and, by extension, the GCC) came under missile attack from Tehran; the US also carried out airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Such developments challenge the decades-long GCC practice of outsourcing key aspects of security and defense structures to the United States and largely benefiting from immunity to blowback from wider regional instability. Periodic initiatives to deepen cooperation made progress at times of external pressure but have struggled to overcome deep-rooted challenges and policy preferences among members. Will this recent instability prompt Gulf states to overcome their differences and become the co-architects of a new regional order?
Foundations of Gulf Security
The GCC has demonstrated an interest in collective defense and security throughout its history. The GCC’s first decade was dominated by the threat that the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War posed to regional stability. In 1982, just two years after its founding, the GCC created a 5,000-strong combined force, the Peninsula Shield, which held its first joint military exercise the following year. A 1986 request from Kuwait to deploy a contingent of the Peninsula Shield Force to secure its border with Iranian-occupied Iraqi territory was nevertheless denied, partly due to a lack of GCC consensus regarding the war and several members’ reluctance to become deeply involved. In 1990, the Peninsula Shield Force was powerless to prevent the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Although GCC forces fought in the Gulf War in 1991, they did so within a US- and Saudi-led military coalition, not as part of a coordinated GCC deployment. After Kuwait’s liberation from Iraq, Sultan Qaboos of Oman proposed creating a standing army of 100,000 troops, but in 1995 withdrew the proposal due to the ongoing lack of agreement. In 2011, the Peninsula Shield Force was eventually deployed to Bahrain, a GCC member—but in response to domestic unrest, not an external threat.
GCC defense arrangements are largely the result of decisions taken at the annual summits.
GCC defense arrangements are largely the result of decisions taken at the annual leaders’ summits each December. The 2000 summit saw the signing of the Joint Defense Agreement, Article II of which states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all of them. The 2000 summit also led to the creation of a Joint Defense Council. The 2009 summit created a rapid reaction force to quickly respond to security threats. In 2012, the summit focused on an upgraded Internal Security Pact, in response to uprisings in Bahrain and other Arab states. In 2013, the GCC announced plans to set up a Unified Military Command under the auspices of the Joint Defense Council and headquartered in Saudi Arabia, followed by a 2014 decision to establish regional naval and police forces, and a 2015 decision to establish a GCC Defense College in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
These earlier initiatives mean that there is already an infrastructure in place upon which the GCC can build if its members choose to pursue a collective or even an integrated approach to security and defense. The GCC Joint Defense Council and Unified Military Command can be the central component of such an approach, as GCC Secretary-General Jassem Albudaiwi said after Israel’s attack on Doha. On September 18, an extraordinary session of the Joint Defense Council and the Supreme Military Committee of the GCC agreed to enhance coordination, consultation, and intelligence sharing, and to accelerate work on a joint task force for a ballistic missile early warning system. Not every minister of defense was present, however—Saudi Arabia’s Khalid bin Salman Al Saud was absent, as was his Omani counterpart—and it is too early to determine how consequential the meeting will be.
Building on Past Legacies
Past experience suggests that longstanding policy preferences will be difficult to dislodge and that any new measures will at best coexist alongside the existing regional security structure and defense architecture, rather than replace or significantly alter. Historically, the six GCC states have found it difficult to reach consensus on ‘big-ticket’ items that impinge upon national interests or require the pooling of sovereignty, due to differing perspectives and threat perceptions across the Gulf. For this reason, approaches to issues such as relations with Iraq, Iran, or Yemen have varied widely—as they have with Israel—and progress on internal GCC matters, such as the single currency originally planned for 2010, has long stalled. The lack of a strong centralized body at the heart of the GCC and the resilience of individual member interests has previously undermined the pursuit of collective interests; this lack of centralization has been particularly evident in the sensitive realms of defense and security affairs.
Political differences between GCC states have further impeded its ability to create a genuine security community capable of defending members against external threats. The smaller GCC states have persistently been concerned by the imbalance of power with Saudi Arabia, the regional giant, and express a strong preference to conduct security and defense relationships on a bilateral basis, especially with the United States. The 2017-2020 blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE, together with Egypt, crystallized the challenges of coming together even if tensions have greatly eased.
Regional Security Beyond the GCC
In 2020, two Gulf states—the UAE and Bahrain—normalized relations with Israel when they signed the Abraham Accords. It is striking that neither the destruction of Gaza since October 2023 nor the 2025 Israeli attack on Doha prompted Abu Dhabi or Manama to disengage from the accords, despite occasional warnings that they might. The UAE and Bahrain also engaged with Israel in the Negev Forum, founded after the Abraham Accords to discuss regional cooperation and now apparently suspended. The UAE has also engaged with Israel in the I2U2, which also involves the United States and India. None of the other GCC states have opted to normalize with Israel, despite pressure from the United States and strenuous attempts by both the Biden and second Trump administrations to broker a Saudi-Israeli agreement—which looks a more distant prospect than ever after the September 9 attack on Qatar.
Three GCC states have been granted major non-NATO ally status by the United States: Bahrain in 2002 and Kuwait in 2004 during the Bush administration, and then Qatar in 2022 during the Biden presidency. While this official status does not include mutual defense or security commitments to the designated country, it nevertheless brings military and financial benefits such as a shortened Congressional review period for weapons transfers. The other GCC states have deepened their own security and defense ties with the United States in different ways, including the Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement (C-SIPA) signed with Bahrain during a September 2023 visit by Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa to the White House, and the granting of Major Defense Partner status for the UAE in September 2024 when President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met President Biden. The result is a patchwork of agreements that remains squarely based on bilateral relations with the United States.
Four GCC states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE—are part of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) established by NATO in 2004 to deepen security cooperation with regional partners. However, neither Saudi Arabia nor Oman have joined the initiative, and its record has been uneven, although in 2017 NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg opened a NATO-ICI Regional Center in Kuwait which has become a hub for dialogue but has struggled to develop a regionwide or collective approach in the Saudi and Omani absence. Here, too, individual GCC states have strengthened bilateral rather than multilateral relations with NATO: the four ICI member states’ notably opened separate diplomatic missions to NATO in Brussels throughout the 2010s.
Previous efforts to think and act collectively in security and defense matters do not augur well.
Previous efforts to think and act collectively in security and defense matters do not augur well. In 2015, only two Gulf leaders attended a US-GCC Strategic Partnership launched at a summit in Camp David by President Barack Obama—a clear indication of regional frustration at being cut out of the US-led negotiations with Iran that had led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The Camp David summit nevertheless formed five working groups to enhance cooperation in counterterrorism, missile defense, military preparedness and training, critical defense capabilities, and cyber security. The working groups and the strategic partnership were superseded by the first Trump administration’s efforts to form the so-called Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA) with GCC states plus Egypt and Jordan. MESA failed to gain traction for reasons including the Qatar blockade, a failure of parties to agree on the scope and scale of the issues to be covered, and Egypt’s withdrawal in 2019.
In March 2024, the GCC for the first time launched a Vision for Regional Security, a relatively brief and somewhat bland document that drew criticism for being performative rather than substantive and playing to the lowest common denominator to ensure regionwide consent. Eighteen months later, with GCC states no longer shielded from the overspill of regional conflict, there is now an opportunity for the GCC to take practical measures to deepen the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ of security and defense cooperation should Israeli and Iranian attacks on Qatar prove to have significantly altered geopolitical calculations in Gulf capitals. Closer cooperation and pooling of resources could bring relatively quick results in technological innovation, intelligence sharing, air and missile defense, logistics and supply chains, and defense industrial management. Yet even this list would require states to reorient their separate defense localization programs and priorities.
To be sure, early responses to the September 9 attack suggest that GCC states will continue along well-trodden paths. On September 18, Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Pakistan that upgraded existing bilateral agreements, while President Trump issued an Executive Order on September 29 that essentially did the same for US-Qatar security ties. Trump’s order included an explicit American security guarantee for Doha that exceeds any commitment previously given to any GCC state and may drive others in the Gulf to seek something similar. Such commitments may temporarily stem the damage to the credibility of US security guarantees from the failure to prevent the Israeli attack on Doha, although the rationale for moving Israel into CENTCOM in 2021 may prove harder to defend. If the shock of summer 2025 does spur real collective action, the impact is more likely to unfold at the technocratic rather than political level. The consequences of Iranian and Israeli attacks on Qatar will therefore become apparent over the coming years, not the next few months.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Kuwait MoD
