The Gulf After the War That Never Quite Ended

A review of the Gulf Research Center’s Annual Strategic Survey, July 2026

By Burak Yalım

A Ceasefire Overtaken by Events

Every July, the Gulf Research Center (GRC) publishes a strategic survey meant to take stock of the preceding year. The 2026 edition, released from the center’s Jeddah headquarters, arrives at an unusually raw moment. It was finalized only weeks after the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding of June 17, 2026, paused the US-Israel-Iran war that had opened on February 28 of that year, and its seven chapters read less like a retrospective than a set of hedges against a peace that its own authors did not fully trust. That instinct has already been vindicated. On July 8, President Trump declared the Islamabad agreement “over,” and within days the International Crisis Group was describing, in its own words, how an agreement designed to end the war had become “another arena for coercive bargaining” (International Crisis Group, “Iran,” 7 July 2026). The Council on Foreign Relations recorded the same collapse in harder terms, after a brief reopening: “the truce collapsed on July 8,” Iran closed the strait again, and Washington revived its naval blockade while threatening a twenty percent transit toll (Cheatham and Roy, “The Strait of Hormuz: A U.S.-Iran Maritime Flash Point,” Council on Foreign Relations). A document written to describe a ceasefire was overtaken by the resumption of the war it described before most readers had finished it. That is not a flaw in the GRC survey. It is, inadvertently, its strongest argument.

Sager: Four Imbalances, No Fix in Sight

The volume opens with a foreword from GRC’s founder and chairman, Dr Abdulaziz Sager, who sets the tone bluntly: the Islamabad MoU provides “a pause for a 60-day period”, but “none of the structural issues of regional security has been resolved” (p. 4). Sager’s own chapter, “Beyond the Ceasefire: Rebalancing Gulf Security After the U.S.-Israel-Iran Conflict,” develops this into the survey’s organizing thesis. He catalogues four imbalances exposed by the war. Gulf dependence on external security guarantees whose priorities “may shift according to domestic politics, global strategic competition, or bilateral calculations with Iran and Israel” (p. 8); a widening gap between Gulf exposure to regional crises and Gulf influence over how they are resolved; an unstable mix of deterrence and diplomacy; and insufficient integration among the GCC states themselves in air defense, maritime surveillance, and cyber defense (pp. 8-9). His policy prescription, a standing GCC crisis-coordination mechanism paired with continued but more assertive engagement with Washington, is sound as far as it goes. Its weakness is one shared by much of the volume; it assumes a GCC capable of speaking with something close to one voice, an assumption the survey’s own fourth chapter goes on to dismantle.

Alani: Neutrality’s Limits

Dr. Mustafa Alani’s chapter on “The Implications of Trilateral Conflict” supplies the most granular military-political narrative in the book. Alani, GRC’s senior advisor on security and defense, traces the decision by GCC governments to declare strict neutrality in the days before the February war began, freezing “all combat operations at U.S. military bases and facilitation centers within GCC territories” and formally notifying both Washington and Tehran of their non-involvement (pp. 14). He is unsparing about the outcome: American and Israeli operations, he argues, achieved tactical successes against Iranian military infrastructure but “inadvertently strengthened Iran’s role in the region” by leaving Tehran able to convert battlefield losses into negotiating leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and its nuclear file (pp. 13, 16). Subsequent events bear this out with uncomfortable precision. In trying to stop Tehran from acquiring a weapon of mass destruction, one Iran analyst argued, Washington effectively handed it a weapon of mass disruption in the form of contested control over the strait, a reading that tracks closely with Alani’s own account of how a militarily degraded Iran retained coercive leverage. By mid-July, trade reporting from the U.S. Naval Institute showed the reinstated American blockade cutting strait transits by more than half within a week, with U.S. forces disabling tankers attempting to reach Iranian ports (U.S. Naval Institute News, “U.S. Disables Ship a Day Into Blockade,” 17 July 2026). Alani’s chapter was written to warn that the war might not produce the deterrent effect Washington and Tel Aviv intended. The maritime record since publication reads like an appendix he did not get to write.

Koch’s Optimism, and Al-Khathlan’s Rebuttal

Dr. Christian Koch’s chapter on GCC foreign policy recalibration is the volume’s most conventionally optimistic entry, and also, I think, its least convincing. Koch, who directs the GRC Foundation in Brussels, argues that the war will accelerate an existing shift toward Gulf “strategic autonomy”. A deeper hedging among Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and a cohort of middle powers including Türkiye, India, and Singapore (pp. 19-24). The framework is a reasonable description of where Gulf capitals want to be. Whether they can get there collectively is precisely what the survey’s next chapter calls into question.

That chapter, by Prof. Saleh Al-Khathlan, is the sharpest and most self-critical piece in the collection, and the one a reviewer is obliged to foreground. Al-Khathlan notes that for the first time in the GCC’s history, all six member states came under direct Iranian attack in a single conflict, an event the Council’s founding logic, and its 2000 Joint Defense Agreement and 2009 Joint Defense Strategy, would predict should produce a unified response (pp. 27-28). It did not. Al-Khathlan identifies three distinct postures among GCC states after the attacks. A de-escalatory majority, a smaller bloc pushing for a harder line against Tehran that “quickly lost momentum,” and a third group practising deliberate strategic ambiguity (pp. 28-29). His conclusion is not that the GCC is failing but that the premise of automatic collective response is “increasingly untenable,” and that the realistic near-term goal is a “minimum consensus”, agreed rules of the road that stop members from cutting bilateral deals with Iran, particularly over Hormuz, that could be exploited to divide the bloc (pp. 27, 30). It is a more honest diagnosis than most GCC-adjacent institutions publish under their own letterhead, and it converges with independent research. A separate postwar assessment from the Middle East Council on Global Affairs reaches nearly the same conclusion by a different route, arguing that Iran “calibrated its strikes to fragment the GCC states’ response, where six states fought six separate battles while the Council’s collective defense institutions went unused,” and that closing this gap requires a shared strategic doctrine and crisis-period authority for the GCC Secretariat, not more solidarity statements (Middle East Council on Global Affairs, “Lessons Learned by GCC States in the 2026 US-Israel-Iran War“). Two independently authored postwar assessments, one from inside the Gulf policy establishment and one from outside it, arriving at the same structural diagnosis deserve more attention beyond the Gulf specialist community than it is likely to get.

Sfakianakis: The End of the Rentier Bet

The volume’s most substantial intellectual contribution, however, comes from Dr John Sfakianakis’s chapter on the region’s economic order. Sfakianakis, GRC’s chief economic and program director, makes an argument that runs against the grain of most Hormuz-crisis commentary. The war demonstrated not the fragility of the global energy system but its resilience. Despite what should have been “one of the largest disruptions to global oil flows in history,” prices “retreat[ed] far more quickly than most governments, investors, and analysts had expected” (p. 33), a function of American shale exports acting as a supplier of last resort, coordinated strategic-reserve releases, and a sharp, policy-driven drop in Chinese import demand (pp. 36). His conclusion is uncomfortable for the rentier model that has financed Gulf development since the 1970s, another sustained oil-price supercycle “is increasingly unlikely,” and the region’s future will be judged less by how much capital it deploys than by whether that capital converts into “productivity”, internationally competitive firms, patents, research intensity, not simply skylines and giga-projects (pp. 37, 41). Independent reporting on Saudi Arabia’s own 2026 budget process supports him unusually well. NEOM’s absence from the kingdom’s 2026 pre-budget statement, the Public Investment Fund’s write-downs on giga-project holdings, and Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan’s public willingness to cancel underperforming projects “without blinking” (Gulf International Forum, “Rebalancing Ambition: Saudi Arabia’s Megaproject Pivot”) all point toward exactly the shift from mobilization to prioritization that Sfakianakis describes as already underway (p. 37).

Two Technical Postscripts

The two closing technical chapters, Dr. Naji Abi-Aad on energy-security lessons and Rear Admiral (Retd) Abdullah Jaber AlZaidi on maritime security, are narrower in scope but useful as evidence in support of the survey’s broader argument. Abi-Aad’s recommendation that GCC oil and gas producers build export infrastructure bypassing Hormuz entirely (pp. 44-45) reads as pure common sense once one has absorbed Sfakianakis’s chapter; AlZaidi’s account of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s shift toward “sea denial” rather than sea control (pp. 50-51), a strategy built on mines, drones, and manufactured uncertainty rather than blue-water dominance, explains with unusual clarity how a militarily inferior Iran nonetheless retained coercive leverage over global shipping insurance markets throughout the crisis.

Toward a Genuinely Plural Architecture

Beyond what the report itself concludes, I would go a step further than any of its seven authors is willing to go. A Gulf security architecture built almost entirely around one external guarantor was exposed as brittle in February 2026, whatever its virtues since the 1990s, and Koch’s chapter gestures toward diversification without quite specifying what it should look like in practice. The honest answer is not to replace Washington but to build genuine capability alongside it, in the specific domains where other actors happen to be better than the United States at the moment, not simply cheaper or more available. Türkiye has spent a decade proving out armed drones and layered air-defence integration under live fire, from Karabakh to northern Syria. Ukraine has, however involuntarily, become the world’s foremost laboratory in electronic warfare, naval drone denial, and exactly the kind of asymmetric maritime disruption that Iran itself deployed against shipping in Hormuz; that expertise is transferable, and Kyiv has every commercial incentive to sell it. France offers naval presence, an arms-export process untethered from U.S. congressional review, and an independent diplomatic seat that neither Washington nor Beijing can substitute for. None of this needs to come at Washington’s expense. It is simply what “strategic autonomy” has to mean in practice if it is to mean anything at all.

The second point is more delicate, and none of the report’s authors states it plainly. Every chapter treats Iran chiefly as a threat to be deterred, contained, or negotiated with from strength, understandably enough after the year the Gulf has just had. But a security order built only on deterrence, without also building the ordinary machinery of interdependence, resumed trade, energy and water cooperation, transparent maritime protocols, and above all recognition of the large Iranian population resident and rooted across the GCC, particularly in Dubai, will keep resetting to zero after every ceasefire, as it already has once this summer. Iran is not going anywhere. Treating its regional weight as something to be permanently shrunk by pressure, rather than managed through the same blend of deterrence and entanglement the Gulf states already apply to every other major power in this survey, is its own kind of wishful thinking, and a more expensive one with each round.

Read against the maritime and fiscal news that has overtaken it since publication, the GRC survey remains one of the more valuable documents to emerge from the Gulf this year: a policy community watching its own assumptions fail in close to real time, and saying so in print before the ink was dry. What it stops short of saying is that the fix is not a better version of the old architecture, but a genuinely plural one.