The Golden Triangle, how three Gulf states stopped waiting for protection and started buying influence

I. From rupture to hedging

The starting point is the rupture. On 5 June 2017 Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed ties with Qatar and imposed a land, sea and air blockade, issuing thirteen demands that ranged from closing Al Jazeera to shutting Turkey's military base; Doha rejected them as an assault on its sovereignty.^[1][2] The crisis ran for three and a half years and ended at the Al-Ula summit on 5 January 2021, where the parties signed a solidarity declaration and Riyadh reopened its borders.^[3] The lesson the protagonists drew was not that unity had been restored. It was that even a US security umbrella did not prevent intra-Gulf coercion, and that each state needed its own leverage.

That leverage now takes three forms, and the brief treats them in turn: the American alliance, recalibrated; the Iran relationship, de-escalated; and the African and maritime footprint, expanded.

II. The American alliance, recalibrated rather than abandoned

The United States remains the indispensable security partner, but on terms the Gulf states increasingly shape. Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US installation in the Middle East and a forward headquarters of Central Command, into which Doha has poured more than eight billion dollars; in March 2022 President Biden designated Qatar a Major Non-NATO Ally.^[4][5] The UAE hosts the US 380th Air Expeditionary Wing at Al Dhafra, and Dubai's Jebel Ali is the US Navy's busiest foreign port of call.^[6][7] None of this has been renounced. What has changed is that the hosts now read the relationship as one input among several, not a guarantee, a posture sharpened by their reading of the US response to the 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities and by the broader sense that Washington's attention is migrating to the Indo-Pacific.

The Gulf no longer asks only whether America will defend it. It asks what else it must build in case the answer is "not enough."

III. The Iran relationship, de-escalated

The clearest expression of the new autonomy is the détente with Tehran, and the fact that it was brokered not in Washington but in Beijing. On 10 March 2023 Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed in the Chinese capital to restore diplomatic relations severed since 2016; Iran reopened its Riyadh embassy on 6 June 2023.^[8][9] The agreement did not resolve the underlying rivalry. It lowered the temperature, and it signalled that Gulf capitals would manage their own neighbourhood, with whichever great power could deliver. This is the single most important strategic adjustment of the period, because it removes the assumption, long built into Western planning, that the Gulf monarchies are permanently locked into confrontation with Iran.

IV. The footprint: Yemen, the Red Sea, the Horn

The third instrument is hard presence abroad, and it is where the three states most visibly diverge.

In Yemen, the UAE joined the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in March 2015, then drew down most of its forces by 2019–2020 while retaining influence through the Southern Transitional Council and a network of coastal and island positions.^[10][11] A UN-brokered truce held from 2 April 2022, formally lapsing that October but largely surviving in practice.^[12]

The Red Sea has become the new fault line. After the Gaza war erupted in October 2023, the Houthis attacked commercial shipping, prompting the US to launch Operation Prosperity Guardian on 18 December 2023.^[13][14] Tellingly, Saudi Arabia stayed out of the publicly listed coalition, a caution the Institute reads as deliberate, protecting Riyadh's parallel peace track with the Houthis and its détente with Tehran.^[15]

The Horn of Africa is where Gulf ambition is most physical. The UAE built a base at Assab in Eritrea in 2015, took a thirty-year concession on Berbera port in Somaliland in 2016 (a roughly 442-million-dollar project split with Somaliland and Ethiopia), and by 2024–2025 was rapidly developing Bosaso airbase in Puntland.^[16][17][18] Multiple investigations allege the UAE has used these positions to channel arms to Sudan's Rapid Support Forces; a UN Panel of Experts found "credible" reports of such shipments in January 2024, and Amnesty International identified Chinese-made weapons in Darfur it assessed were re-exported by the UAE, allegations Abu Dhabi categorically denies.^[19][20] The wider regional order shifted again with the Ethiopia–Somaliland memorandum of 1 January 2024, granting landlocked Ethiopia coastal access and drawing condemnation from Mogadishu, Cairo and Asmara.^[21]

V. The money behind the posture

The autonomy is bought. Saudi Arabia was the Middle East's largest military spender in 2024 and seventh globally, at an estimated 80.3 billion dollars, within a regional total of some 243 billion, up 15 per cent on 2023.^[22][23] Behind the defence budgets sit the diversification drives: Saudi Vision 2030, launched in April 2016 to cut oil dependence, and sovereign wealth funds whose assets, the PIF and ADIA near the trillion-dollar mark, Qatar's QIA above half a trillion, give these states a reach in finance, technology and infrastructure that no amount of weaponry alone confers.^[24][25] On normalisation with Israel, the three have split: the UAE signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020, while Saudi Arabia has held out, its crown prince insisting in 2024 that there will be no relations without a path to a Palestinian state, a position that hardened after October 2023.^[26][27]

VI. The Institute's assessment and recommendations

The Institute's central judgment is that Western policy still treats the Gulf as a set of clients to be reassured, when it should treat them as autonomous middle powers to be bargained with. Three implications follow, with operational recommendations for European and multilateral actors.

First, stop pricing in permanent Gulf–Iran hostility. The Beijing détente is shallow but real, and planning that assumes confrontation will misread Gulf behaviour in any future Iran crisis. European actors should engage Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as potential de-escalation channels to Tehran, not only as counterweights.

Second, make the Horn of Africa footprint a transparency priority, by mid-2027. The most destabilising dimension of Gulf statecraft is the externalisation of rivalries into Sudan and the Red Sea littoral. The credible allegations of UAE arms flows to the RSF, denied, but found "credible" by a UN panel, warrant a dedicated, adequately resourced UN monitoring mechanism and binding end-use scrutiny on transfers transiting Gulf-controlled ports. Ambiguity here is fuelling a war.

Third, engage the sovereign wealth funds as security actors, not just investors. PIF, ADIA and QIA shape ports, telecoms and critical infrastructure across Africa and Europe. Treating their deals as purely commercial misses their strategic content; treating them as threats forecloses cooperation. The defensible middle is a transparency-and-reciprocity framework that admits Gulf capital while screening assets of genuine security sensitivity.

The Gulf has stopped waiting to be protected. The task for everyone else is to deal with three confident, cash-rich, hedging states on the terms they have set, not the terms the West would prefer they still accepted.