Why America’s Closest Allies Are Quietly Worried About the Iran Strikes

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Bloomberg News, citing an internal assessment, reported that Qatar’s Patriot interceptor missiles had four days of supply left at current rates of use — a claim Qatar’s government officially denied as false and misleading. Still, that single disputed detail tells us more about the Gulf state response to the February 28, 2026 U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets than any official statement issued that week.

Rather than congratulating President Trump on the operation, the UAE and Qatar began making telephone calls to key figures in his administration. Those calls were meant to do something different: persuade the president to find an off-ramp from the military operation the United States had initiated. The message was not subtle. Both nations understood what was about to happen across the region. They were alarmed not by whether the strikes had occurred, but by whether they would stop.

The countries most tightly bound to the U.S. Military presence in the region are at the same time the most urgent voices calling for limiting American military operations. That apparent contradiction dissolves once you understand what these allies fear.

The Structural Trap Gulf States Are Caught In

Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, which houses roughly 10,000 American troops and serves as CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in the region; the command’s main headquarters sits at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Saudi Arabia hosts Prince Sultan Air Base. Kuwait hosts Ali Al Salem and Camp Arifjan. These are not minor arrangements, they are the physical bases from which the U.S. Military operates across the region, built because the Gulf states needed American deterrence against Iran.

Here’s the problem: the deterrence worked well enough that the Gulf states spent the years after 2023 quietly building ties with Iran as a backup plan. They were guarding against the chance that American commitment might someday weaken. Riyadh and Tehran restored diplomatic relations through Chinese mediation. Trade arrangements followed. The normalization was fragile, but it was real. It gave Gulf governments something they had not had in decades: a reason to believe that the Iran problem might be handled through diplomacy rather than military force.

Then the strikes happened. Suddenly the Gulf states found themselves physically inside a conflict zone, hosting the military infrastructure of one side in the fight, and watching the economic relationships they had spent three years building disappear.

Barbara Leaf, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the UAE from 2014 to 2018 and most recently as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs through January 2025, spent years in direct communication with Gulf leaders. She put the underlying dynamic plainly in interviews following the strikes. These countries, she noted, do not all look at the situation the same way. They do not have the same offensive capabilities as the United States. Their steady ask has been help containing Iran, not destroying it.

“What they have wanted consistently from the United States and from other key strategic partners is help in containing Iran, in pressing it back and constraining the threats that came from Iran,” Leaf said in a separate interview. Keeping Iran in check has a clear goal. Toppling its government does not.

Andrew Leber, a nonresident scholar at Carnegie’s Middle East Program and assistant professor of political science at Tulane University, described the impossible position clearly. Gulf states had been publicly distancing themselves from U.S. And Israeli military action in the weeks before the hostilities began, even while hosting American forces. They had prioritized diplomacy and dialogue with Tehran since the 2023 diplomatic reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran. That reconciliation shaped how Gulf governments approached the conflict.

When the escalation came anyway, they were caught. Withdrawing cooperation with the U.S. Operation was impossible, that cooperation is the basis of their own defense. But being seen as fully aligned with an operation aimed at destroying a state they had been building a relationship with was equally unacceptable. There was no clean option available.

So they made phone calls.

What the Phone Calls Revealed

The UAE and Qatar’s lobbying effort, reported by Bloomberg News in the days following the strikes, is the clearest view into what these governments believe when they are not issuing official statements. According to people familiar with the matter, both nations are working to quickly improve their air defense capabilities. They are simultaneously seeking to build a coalition to advance a swift diplomatic end to the conflict.

UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed and Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad called UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Both leaders were attempting to build international pressure for de-escalation.

The logic is roundabout but not complicated: Gulf states call European leaders, European leaders call Washington, Washington hears from multiple directions that the operation needs endpoints. It is the chain of calls designed to push Washington toward a ceasefire.

The urgency behind those calls becomes clear in the specific numbers. Qatar’s stocks of Patriot interceptor missiles would “last four days at the current rate of use,” according to an internal analysis seen by Bloomberg News. The country shut down liquefied natural gas (LNG, the fuel Europe depends on for heating and industry) production at the world’s largest export facility after Iranian drones targeted key installations.

That shutdown sent European gas prices surging approximately 47 to 54 percent, with multiple sources reporting figures of 47%, 50%, or 54%. A Qatari assessment warned that if shipping lanes remained severely disrupted by midweek, markets would see a more significant reaction for natural gas prices than Monday’s already sharp spike.

For Qatar, this is not an abstract foreign policy concern. Its LNG exports constitute roughly 20 percent of the global market. The largest export facility was shut down. Four days of interceptor missiles. These are the real numbers driving the phone calls to European capitals.

Meanwhile, the conflict was landing on Gulf soil in ways that made the abstract real, fast. An Iranian drone struck near the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh on March 3. A Saudi oil refinery was forced to shut down after being targeted. Fires erupted near luxury hotels in Dubai. Kuwait’s international airport was fully closed as a precautionary measure, stranding thousands of passengers in an orderly but abrupt shutdown. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called his Emirati counterpart to express solidarity and readiness to provide support, the right thing to say in public. Privately, both leaders were confronting what American escalation meant for their countries.

The Energy Numbers Europe Cannot Ignore

European governments sit in a different position in this alliance split. None of them host American military bases in the Gulf. None are in the direct line of Iranian retaliation. What they are is exposed on energy in ways that directly affect industrial output and political stability at home.

The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most critical shipping lane for oil and gas. Reports suggest roughly a fifth of global oil consumption passes through it daily, along with a large share of global LNG trade.

For Europe specifically, the exposure is serious not because European ships dominate Hormuz traffic, but because the global market for oil and LNG is integrated. Any disruption creates a price spike that affects European buyers regardless of where their specific cargoes originate.

The Bruegel think tank, which covers international economics and trade policy with a European perspective, put the problem plainly: if LNG flows via the Strait of Hormuz are curtailed, the amount of gas available for immediate purchase on the open market drops sharply, and Europe would be forced to compete with Asian buyers for gas shipments available for immediate purchase at market prices. That pattern played out during the 2021-2023 energy crisis.

Prices spiked sharply and industrial production suffered — a memory recent enough to make policymakers in Berlin and Paris genuinely worried.

The numbers going into this conflict were already unfavorable. The European Union entered 2026 with storage levels well below prior years — roughly 39 percent of capacity by early February, compared to higher fills in both 2025 and 2024. That shrinking buffer means Europe has less room to absorb a sudden drop in supply than it did in either of the previous two years.

Source: Bruegel analysis of European energy market exposure. These bcm figures are drawn from that source; EU storage is typically reported in percentage-of-capacity terms, and readers should consult Bruegel directly to verify. Lower storage levels reduce Europe’s ability to absorb supply shocks from Hormuz disruption. Qatar supplied roughly 6 to 7 percent of Europe’s LNG imports in recent years, a share that has edged upward, but global market integration means any regional disruption affects European prices regardless of cargo origin.

The UK, France, and Germany issued a joint statement expressing they were appalled by the indiscriminate and disproportionate missile attacks launched by Iran (note: “disproportionate” is a specific term in international law, not just an expression of outrage) and would take steps to defend their interests and those of their allies. The language is strong.

Beneath it lies a more specific concern: how quickly the conflict ends before energy disruption becomes bad enough to cause factories slowing down or shutting. These governments are not opposing the strikes on principle. They are calculating how long they can bear the economic consequences before those consequences become politically impossible at home. (The pain is distributed unevenly across sectors and countries, as our analysis of who is winning and losing economically from this conflict examines in detail.)

Israel’s Narrower Math

Israel’s position in this coalition is more complicated than it looks from the outside, because what Israel is trying to accomplish is narrower and more specific than Washington’s stated aims.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly framed the goal as removing what he calls the existential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program — language that is his own, distinct from the Trump administration’s stated objective of eliminating imminent threats. That is a specific, reachable military objective with a clear endpoint: when the nuclear program has been weakened enough that Iran cannot produce a weapon fast enough that Israeli military planners consider the threat neutralized.

Washington’s stated objectives are much broader. The administration has laid out aims including destroying Iran’s missile and military capabilities and preventing nuclear weapons development. It has also cited blocking the long-range ballistic missile program and, in some public statements, toppling the regime.

Some of these are reachable through airpower. Regime change is much harder to achieve through airpower alone, though supporters of broader objectives argue the historical record is not entirely closed. Libya in 2011 is the contested example. A sustained air campaign combined with economic pressure and NATO support helped bring down the Gaddafi government without a large-scale Western ground invasion, though Western special forces did operate on the ground during the campaign.

Some analysts argue that Iran’s government, despite its deep institutions, faces internal political cracks. Those cracks, particularly among younger urban populations and within factions of the clerical establishment, could widen under sustained military and economic pressure. On this view, airpower need not directly topple a regime. It need only weaken the force that keeps a fragile government in place.

The counterargument, backed by the weight of historical evidence, is that Iran’s institutional strength differs meaningfully from Libya’s. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps functions as a parallel state with deep economic interests. It has loyalty structures that have survived decades of sanctions and a proven ability to hold power together under outside pressure rather than break apart under it.

Historical success rates for air-campaign-driven regime change against states with comparable institutional strength are poor. Without a ground invasion that Trump has said he does not intend, the historical and structural evidence suggests airpower alone is unlikely to achieve regime change in Iran. The administration’s defenders would note, though, that weakening military capability and speeding up internal political pressure may not require that outcome to count as strategic success.

Netanyahu told Fox News on March 2 that the operation may take “some time” but “it’s not going to take years. It’s not an endless war.” That is not a casual remark. A head of government managing expectations about duration is sending a signal to his own public, and indirectly to Washington, that Israeli strategy favors speed and precision over a drawn-out conflict.

If the American operation goes beyond the timeframe Israeli planners consider ideal, Israel may start pulling back its support. Israel has the most to gain from degrading Iran’s nuclear program. It also has the most to lose from an open-ended conflict that makes Iran more determined to fight back. Such a conflict could also potentially draw in Hezbollah from Lebanon.

Netanyahu managing expectations about duration in public suggests that privately, Israeli planners are worried about the mission expanding beyond its original goals. That worry is not being stated directly. But it is being stated.

The Embassy Closures as a Signal

On March 3, the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia closed its doors. A day earlier, the embassy in Kuwait had issued an identical order. The U.S. Mission in Riyadh warned of an “imminent threat” of missile and UAV attacks over Dhahran, a key Saudi oil hub. Americans living in the country were advised to shelter in place.

Embassy closures act as an early sign of how much the country hosting U.S. Forces trusts the situation. When the State Department reduces diplomatic presence, it signals to the host government that Washington believes the threat environment has changed significantly.

It also quietly acknowledges that the host nation’s territory has become a battlefield. That acknowledgment carries weight.

Riyadh has its own history of deciding how much access to give U.S. Forces depending on how risky the operation looks. During the first Gulf War in 1991, it allowed the U.S. To use its territory for the operation. During the second Gulf War in 2003, it restricted offensive U.S. military operations while simultaneously permitting significant logistical activity, including use of the Combat Air Operations Center — a public posture shaped partly by domestic opposition. That tension between stated limits and actual access shaped what American forces could accomplish from Saudi bases. The pattern is consistent: they say yes to defensive operations and no to offensive ones with unclear goals.

The closures are not an open restriction of military access. But they are a signal. Riyadh and Kuwait City telling Washington: we understand the stakes, and they are high enough that we are taking precautionary steps. The question is whether Washington is reading that signal the same way the Gulf states are sending it.

The Off-Ramp That Almost Existed

Here is the detail that makes the whole situation more complicated, and more troubling, than the official narrative suggests.

On February 27, hours before the strikes began, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi described substantial progress in U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, expressing strong optimism but stopping short of announcing a formal agreement. The Geneva talks ended without any signed accord, with discussions moving to a technical phase. Iran had indicated preliminary willingness, described by Oman as part of ongoing negotiations rather than a finalized deal, to never stockpile enriched uranium and to accept full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Albusaidi stated that “if the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations.” He estimated three months would be needed to finalize an accord. He also said the breakthrough on nuclear stockpiling “has never been achieved any time before.”

Oman’s role as a quiet, unofficial go-between for U.S.-Iran talks is long-standing and well-established. The administration described negotiations as having reached an impasse rather than explicitly accusing Iran of bad faith; third-party mediators described the talks as making progress at the time of the strikes, and some analysts directed the bad-faith characterization at the U.S. side. The Omani mediator’s assessment was different.

The administration’s skepticism, however, deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms rather than dismissed. Officials and analysts who supported going ahead with the strikes could point to a specific and well-documented pattern: Iran has repeatedly made commitments to IAEA verification that it later walked back or got around.

During the 2013-2015 interim period leading to the JCPOA, transparency provisions were in several respects strengthened in the final text, which included enhanced verification measures that matched or exceeded interim commitments, though Iran subsequently restricted IAEA inspector access in documented cases after formal agreements were in place. The Arms Control Association has documented multiple cases in which Iran restricted IAEA inspector access even after formal agreements were in place.

There is a real legal and operational difference between a foreign minister’s announcement of a conceptual breakthrough and a ratified, binding agreement with defined verification mechanisms and consequences for non-compliance. Albusaidi’s statement described a framework that would need three more months to finalize. On the administration’s reading of Iranian behavior, those three months could allow enrichment activity to continue and the window for effective military action to close.

Analysts at think tanks including the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have broadly characterized Iran as using negotiating periods to advance its nuclear program — a strategy sometimes called “talk and enrich” — and that documented pattern gave planners grounds to doubt the Omani announcement. On this view, it represented a delay rather than a lasting off-ramp. The administration was not ignoring diplomacy. It was making a careful judgment that a foreign minister’s announcement, without a signed and verifiable agreement, did not amount to the kind of binding commitment that would justify standing down an operation already in motion.

That case for skepticism is not trivial. But it also does not fully settle the question of whether the diplomatic option deserved more weight. Even accepting the administration’s concerns about Iranian compliance history, the Omani announcement represented a publicly stated Iranian commitment to the specific condition, no uranium stockpiling, full IAEA verification, that formed the nuclear core of the justification for military action.

Moving ahead without testing whether that commitment could be made formal left allies and observers without the evidence needed to judge whether the diplomatic path had truly been exhausted. The same was true of moving ahead without publicly explaining why it could not be made formal.

If Iran had truly agreed to end uranium stockpiling with full IAEA verification, the nuclear argument for striking Iran had largely been addressed. The remaining justifications, Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for the armed groups Iran funds and directs across the region, are significant and valid. But they are also potentially solvable through diplomacy rather than prolonged war.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a more restricted rationale for the operation in public statements. He suggested that destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capability was the core objective. If that is genuinely the case, the operation has a definable endpoint: when missiles have been sufficiently degraded, not when the Iranian government has changed.

The problem is that Trump’s own public statements have been inconsistent about goals. As the strikes began, he urged Iranians to “take back your country,” implying regime change. By Monday, he made no mention of regime change and focused instead on preventing nuclear weapons development. The goals and timeline kept shifting.

A careful defender of the administration’s approach would argue that this apparent inconsistency is neither accidental nor confused. Maximalist public rhetoric, the argument goes, is a standard tool of coercive bargaining: by keeping adversaries uncertain about the outer limit of American ambitions, the administration increases Iranian incentives to negotiate and reduces Tehran’s confidence that it can simply wait out a limited operation. The logic has historical precedent.

Richard Nixon’s deliberate use of unpredictability, the so-called “madman theory”, was designed to make adversaries believe the costs of continued resistance were unbounded. During the Gulf War, the George H.W. Bush administration used broad public language about Iraqi disarmament and regional order while privately keeping a more limited set of operational objectives. The war ended well short of the maximalist rhetoric.

On this reading, Trump’s “take back your country” language was aimed at Iranian domestic audiences and at Tehran’s leadership thinking. Rubio’s more limited public rationale, focused on ballistic missile capability — while noting he also stated the operation was necessary regardless of Israeli timing — represented the actual military objective. Deliberate ambiguity, not confusion, would be the administration’s defense.

The problem with that interpretation, in this case, is that the signs of genuine confusion are more specific than the coercive-signaling theory can comfortably explain. Deliberate ambiguity typically involves a consistent private message paired with variable public rhetoric. Here, the public statements shifted not just in emphasis but in the stated endpoint of the operation. Timelines moved from days to weeks to open-ended within the same news cycle.

Allied governments, whose cooperation the administration needs, reported being unable to get clarity on objectives through private diplomatic channels, not just public ones.

That is a different problem from strategic ambiguity. Strategic ambiguity is aimed at adversaries. When it also leaves allies unable to plan, it suggests the ambiguity is not fully under control. For allies trying to figure out how long they can bear the political and economic costs, that distinction matters enormously. Shifting objectives that confuse partners as well as adversaries are not reassuring. They suggest the endpoint might move not by design but by accident.

How Alliance Strain Could Become Operationally Real

The Gulf Cooperation Council, the regional bloc of Gulf states, held an emergency meeting on March 1 to discuss the attacks. The council issued a statement expressing full solidarity among member states and their unified stance in confronting these attacks (official statement language that signals agreement in principle). Agreeing in the heat of the moment, though, is different from unity held over weeks or months of open-ended conflict.

The GCC states agree that Iran should not attack them. On the question of what American military response is proportionate or sustainable, the consensus breaks down considerably.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, described the situation plainly. Gulf states are caught between a desperate Iranian leadership willing to impose significant costs and a U.S. President whose thinking weighs allied concerns differently than Gulf states would prefer. Ulrichsen’s own characterization was sharper. He described the administration as “heedless” of those concerns.

That framing implies willful disregard rather than a careful strategic judgment that allied discomfort is an acceptable cost of achieving defined objectives. Whether the administration’s posture reflects indifference or a deliberate choice to put operational goals ahead of alliance management is itself one of the central contested questions of the conflict.

Whether the alliance structure can hold under that strain is the central operational question. It may break down in practice, with Gulf states beginning to restrict basing access, intelligence sharing, or overflight rights (the right to fly military aircraft through their airspace) as the conflict continues.

Historical precedent is not comforting here. Turkey refused to allow U.S. Ground forces to pass through its territory during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite hosting Incirlik Air Base and having deep strategic ties to Washington. The consequences for U.S. military planning were significant. The inability to attack Iraq from the north limited operational options, though the U.S. had contingency plans and the war proceeded rapidly without a northern front.

Pakistan restricted CIA drone operations from its territory after the 2011 Abbottabad raid. Riyadh restricted operations from its bases during the second Gulf War. The pattern is consistent: host nations accept American military operations until the political or economic costs go beyond what their governments can justify at home. That threshold has been reached before, and it can be reached again.

None of these outcomes is certain in the current conflict. But they are possible, and they are what drives the Gulf states’ urgent lobbying for an off-ramp. A quick end, once initial objectives are achieved, probably preserves the underlying alliance structure. A prolonged one may crack it in ways that are hard to reverse.

The congressional authorization questions add another layer of uncertainty that allies are watching closely. Bipartisan lawmakers have pushed for votes to reassert congressional authority over war-making, and whether the president needed Congress to authorize the strikes is still a live legal debate. For U.S. Allies, the legal debate over who has the authority to start a war matters less for its legal details than for what it signals about whether the U.S. Government is united enough to see this through.

If Congress is divided, public support may fade faster than the administration expects. That uncertainty makes allies more reluctant to commit their own resources. It reduces confidence in America’s willingness to stick with the operation long-term. History suggests that concern is not unfounded: as we’ve examined in our look at how public opinion on Iraq began eroding as early as 2003-2004, with support falling below 50% for the first time in May 2004, and yet the war ran until 2011, public opposition at home and the war on the ground can move in opposite directions for years before they converge.

Trump has stated the operation could last “four weeks, or less,” but acknowledged it could go longer if objectives require it. That ambiguity is exactly what drives allied alarm. If the endpoint is clear and near, allies can bear the political costs. If it is uncertain and distant, the costs become harder to justify to their own populations. The phone calls to European capitals become more urgent, and the interceptor missile stockpiles keep counting down.

The combination of factors described above points toward a set of specific decision points at which alliance strain becomes operationally real rather than merely diplomatic. Qatar’s Patriot interceptor stocks, estimated at four days of supply at current rates of use according to an internal assessment cited by Bloomberg News — a claim Qatar’s government officially denied — represent the most pressing near-term threshold. If resupply does not arrive before stocks run out, Qatar faces a difficult choice. It must either reduce interception rates or accept greater exposure of the Al Udeid infrastructure that supports the entire operation.

EU gas storage levels entering 2026 were reported as significantly below those of two years prior — the European Commission typically tracks this in percentage terms, and the precise bcm figures cited in some reports cannot be independently verified from authoritative sources — leaving European governments with less economic cushion to absorb a prolonged Hormuz disruption. A sustained disruption could force industrial contraction and a domestic political crisis.

The basing-access precedents are also instructive. Saudi restriction of offensive operations in 2003 and Turkish denial of ground transit that same year suggest that host-nation tolerance is not a fixed variable. It weakens as operational duration and domestic political costs increase.

Readers watching for early signs of alliance fracture should watch three signals in particular. First: whether Qatar requests emergency interceptor resupply through U.S. or partner channels — Qatar holds Major Non-NATO Ally status and participates in NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative but cannot access NATO resupply mechanisms as a member state — which would signal that the four-day estimate is operationally real, not a negotiating figure. Second: whether any Gulf state begins tying overflight or basing rights to timeline commitments from Washington. Third: whether European energy ministers call emergency storage coordination meetings of the kind last seen during the 2022 gas crisis.

Any of those developments would show that the alliance strain described in this piece has moved from the diplomatic to the operational level. At that point, the costs of an undefined endpoint become real rather than theoretical.

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