Gulf Arab states are weighing the military value of U.S. bases on their territory against the growing risk that hosting them invites entanglement and retaliation, Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written. The Iran war, he argued, will almost certainly accelerate a shift toward strategic hedging that was already underway.
Wehrey, a former U.S. intelligence officer who served in Baghdad, wrote in Time that countries unnerved by Washington's unpredictability are turning to China, Russia, and Europe for certain types of arms and partnerships, while deepening their reliance on the U.S. for others, "Hvylya" reports.
Whatever path individual nations choose, militarization accelerates and dialogue stalls. The conflict is creating precisely the sort of chaos that authoritarians use to tighten their grip, Wehrey warned.
Regimes in Bahrain, Qatar, and other Gulf states are already using the war emergency to justify crackdowns on freedom of expression, compressing what little political space remains. Prospects for meaningful political reform in the Middle East, already bleak before the conflict, are bleaker now.
Already bloated military budgets will in all likelihood skyrocket, Wehrey wrote, leaving poorer nations with even fewer resources for health care, education, and other services. The wealthier Gulf states - long the region's financial lifeline - are turning inward, with diminishing resources flowing to the countries that depend on them.
Also read: how Iran retaliated against U.S. regional bases after the initial strikes.