A US Defeat in the Gulf Hands Hormuz to Iran, and Arabs Pay

The United States built its Gulf bases to keep oil flowing through Hormuz and to deter Iran. The US Navy has kept a presence in Bahrain since 1948, and the Fifth Fleet has been headquartered there since it was re-established in 1995. Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base hosts the forward headquarters of US Central Command and is the largest American base in the region. Kuwait hosts the Army’s Camp Arifjan and Ali Al Salem Air Base, the UAE hosts aircraft at Al Dhafra, and US forces returned to Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base in 2019 after an absence of 16 years.

The bargain was simple. The Gulf monarchies offered land, money and access, and America offered protection. Roughly 40,000 American troops were spread across the region before the war, and for decades their presence alone was meant to make an Iranian attack on a Gulf state unthinkable.

The 2026 war broke that bargain. Iran attacked the bases themselves, and the host countries absorbed the blows.

Iran’s first missile and drone salvo on 28 February 2026 damaged the Fifth Fleet headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain, including barracks, warehouses and communications towers. Iranian fire also reached Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, where American aircraft were parked in the open. Independent damage assessments count at least 20 US bases hit across the region, with repair estimates between $5 billion and $9.4 billion, and the Pentagon has not decided what it will rebuild.

Gulf rulers drew their own conclusion. They invited American bases to protect them from Iran, and the bases are the reason Iranian missiles fell on their territory. Saudi Arabia will not reopen bases on its soil that served the Americans and were struck. Bahrain may decide not to rebuild what was destroyed. Washington will find few volunteers to pay for new ones.

Tehran is already asking for exactly this. On 31 October Iran’s foreign minister said Iran’s conditions include lifting the sanctions imposed after the Islamabad memorandum and reducing American forces in the region. Iran’s first demand of its neighbours is that the Americans go.

If America leaves, Iran writes its own name on the Strait of Hormuz. About a fifth of the world’s oil consumption passed through the strait before the war, and almost all of it comes from the Arab side of the Gulf.

Tehran has already built the machinery to charge for it. Iran’s parliament approved a Hormuz transit-fee law on 30 March 2026 allowing charges of up to $2 million per voyage, framed as payment for security and environmental services. In May Iran set up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority that claims no vessel may pass without its permit. The fees were suspended during the 60-day negotiation period agreed in June, not abandoned. The Gulf Cooperation Council’s secretary general called the fee collection an aggression and a violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees free transit through international straits.

The convention is enforced in practice by the US Navy, and by nobody else in these waters. Without it, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq would be paying a toll to a government that fired missiles at them this year. Our explainer on how wide the Strait of Hormuz is shows how little room the shipping lanes leave.

The Gulf states know all this. They want the war to stop so they can build pipelines that carry their oil and gas away from Hormuz: west across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, onward through Egypt’s SUMED pipeline to the Mediterranean, and north through Syria.

Part of that network already exists. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline can move about 7 million barrels a day to Yanbu on the Red Sea, although the port can load only about 4.5 million. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line delivers crude to the Gulf of Oman, outside the strait, and a second line is under construction. Egypt’s SUMED pipeline carries about 2.5 million barrels a day from Ain Sukhna on the Gulf of Suez to Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean.

But who says Iran will let those pipelines work? The same power that closed Hormuz can strike a pipeline. In September 2026 drones launched from Iraq damaged the East-West pipeline, and Saudi Arabia shut the whole line on 11 September. It was pumping 5.8 million barrels a day again by early October, but the lesson was clear. An Iran that holds Hormuz can threaten the bypass routes too, and charge the Gulf for leaving them alone.

Iran’s reach does not stop at ships and pipelines. Tehran can stir unrest in countries with large Shia populations, and Bahrain, home of the Fifth Fleet, is the most exposed. Shia Muslims are a majority of Bahrain’s citizens. In March 2011, when protests shook the kingdom, Saudi and Emirati forces crossed the causeway under the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Peninsula Shield to keep order.

With American power in the background, Iran had to weigh the cost of meddling in Manama. Without it, nobody would stop an Iranian-backed uprising there.

This is no peaceful neighbour waiting for the Americans to leave. Iran’s regime behaves as a criminal state. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which runs its wars, is a force of extremists that Washington designated a terrorist organisation in 2019. Iran’s own people cannot stand the Guards. The Gulf will not tolerate them either.

Yemen shows what Iran’s network does when it senses an opening. On 2 November, according to military sources, Houthi fighters advanced to within 80 km of Aden, the seat of Yemen’s internationally recognised government, with its main port and airport. It is the closest they have come since the first months of the war in 2015, a shorter distance than Cairo to Tanta.

The Houthis spent October tightening a siege on Taiz, whose main road to Aden they cut in early October. Government forces inside the city have not surrendered. Then the Houthis turned south toward Aden. The southern forces that once defended the city lost their backer when the UAE completed its withdrawal from Yemen on 2 January 2026, so Aden has no strong force guarding it.

If the Houthis take Aden, it will be a disaster for Yemen’s government and a humiliation for the coalition. Saudi Arabia has absorbed attacks on its own cities to win this war. It has to deliver now. A Saudi Arabia under fire at home while its Yemeni allies lose ground would be a catastrophe.