Gulf citizens face critical shortages as attacks target water and power systems

Millions of people across the Gulf region have spent the past five months living beside a threat that no diplomatic agreement has managed to contain. Iranian attacks have targeted the civilian infrastructure that underpins daily life: power stations that keep hospitals and homes running, desalination plants that supply roughly nine in ten glasses of drinking water, and airports that connect the region to the world. The ceasefire that arrived within weeks of the first strikes did not survive the spring. A memorandum followed in the summer and collapsed within a month. Each pause was announced with mounting confidence and ended the same way: drones over critical facilities, another chokepoint closed, the bombing resumed days after suspension.

The pattern has exposed a deeper reality that Gulf governments are now beginning to act upon. For fifty years, these states have relied on security guarantees from outside powers, arrangements that promised protection but did not prevent them from being drawn into a war they neither started nor were consulted about. The Iranian campaign was never purely military. It was an attempt to make Gulf capitals bear the costs of conflict until they capitulated on Tehran’s terms, while inflicting maximum pain on the global economy and the civilians who depend on functioning infrastructure.

What actually held during the February 28 strikes was not political architecture but something more tangible: air and missile defences built over a decade of investment and integrated with US systems. They intercepted the overwhelming majority of what Iran fired. Yet this technical success revealed a political failure. The security umbrella that decades of cultivation had promised did not prevent the attack. It merely limited the damage. That distinction matters enormously for how the region now thinks about protecting itself.

Analysts in Washington and Tel Aviv have read Gulf governments’ refusal to escalate as passivity, a sign of weakness. Restraint backed by functioning defences, however, is not the same as restraint born of vulnerability. It is precisely why the Gulf remains one of the few parties every side will still take a call from, and why a channel to Tehran remains open even after the bombing resumed. The region’s measured response reflects not helplessness but a deliberate choice to avoid wider conflict while building something more durable.

The emerging security framework rests on four layers, each essential to the others. The first is US and European enabling capacity: the equipment, missile defence systems, intelligence, logistics and command-and-control infrastructure that no Gulf planner pretends can be replaced. But the relationship must change. Vague expectations of protection are not enough. Joint planning, interoperability and responsibilities written down in advance are. The Gulf will not diversify away from the US. It will diversify with it.

Europe complements rather than replaces this pillar. Its navies already operate in these waters, and the war has strengthened the case for deeper cooperation in maritime defence, training and infrastructure protection. NATO offers standards, doctrine and experience in making different militaries work together at speed, though the Gulf should not join the alliance itself.

At the core sits the Gulf Cooperation Council and its national forces: integrated air and missile defence, shared early warning, maritime awareness, intelligence fusion and cybersecurity. National forces alone proved insufficient when Iranian attacks closed the Strait of Hormuz. That gap must be closed. The same urgency applies to hardening the energy, water and transport arteries on which Gulf societies and much of the world economy depend.

Around that core operates the R4, established by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. It links Gulf and Levantine security to the Palestinian cause and gives a Gulf-centred framework the strategic mass the GCC cannot generate alone. By late July, this broader regional response was taking operational form. On July 28, Saudi and US aircraft struck militia sites across eastern Iraq in response to more than 30 Iranian drone attacks over 72 hours.

Two days later, after Riyadh convened representatives from 43 countries and the European Union, Saudi Arabia announced a 14-state maritime defence coalition for the Bab al-Mandeb, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It included the R4 in its entirety, alongside Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. The coalition is a statement of intent rather than a force at sea, but it begins to translate consultative weight into regional action. Within this framework, Qatar and Oman open otherwise inaccessible channels, Saudi Arabia convenes, and Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan provide military capacity and geostrategic depth.

Qatar’s smaller arrangements offer another model. Its joint Typhoon squadron with the United Kingdom and combined command with Turkey show how mixed forces can be built without waiting for treaties. Similar arrangements could support maritime surveillance, counter-drone defence and logistics in months rather than decades.

Industry is equally critical. The Gulf holds capital and political will; Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan hold production lines and engineering depth. Moving beyond procurement to joint production is the test. Barzan Holdings and the UAE’s EDGE Group agreed to establish a joint venture covering missiles, unmanned systems and satellites. Strategic autonomy does not mean building every weapon at home. It means no foreign political decision can switch off the region’s essential defences.

The Gulf’s relationships with Russia and China must also be brought within this security framework. US officials accused Moscow of passing Tehran the locations of US warships and aircraft. The Financial Times reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had acquired a Chinese commercial imaging satellite, and Washington sanctioned three China-based firms for providing satellite imagery that enabled Iranian strikes. Moscow and Beijing denied the allegations. The principle is straightforward: an external power whose technology helps others strike Gulf states or Gulf shipping cannot expect the rest of the relationship to remain undisturbed.

For now, the ecosystem must deter while keeping military channels open and protecting civilians and commercial shipping. Later, it should remain open to both Iran and Israel, on conditions: respect for sovereignty, an end to interference and proxies, and, in Israel’s case, genuine movement towards a two-state solution. Permanent isolation is not the objective. No arrangement will be believed while the Palestinian question is treated as an afterthought.

What these months have shown is narrower than self-sufficiency and considerably more useful. Gulf states have real defensive capacity, and it works when national systems are fused with US, British and other partner capabilities rather than replaced by them. They have also carried messages between enemies while under fire, and one has convened a 14-country coalition around a plan to keep a critical waterway open. For 50 years, these states consumed security on terms set by others. The open question now is whether the framework taking shape can protect civilian life and commerce durably enough to make that era genuinely past.