When the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords with Israel in September 2020, the deal rested on two pillars that seemed, at the time, mutually reinforcing. The first was a shared perception of Iran as the primary threat to regional stability — a threat that Arab-Israeli security cooperation could contain more effectively than any of the parties could manage alone. The second was an implicit agreement to defer the Palestinian question indefinitely, allowing economic and diplomatic normalisation to proceed without the inconvenience of resolving the conflict that had prevented it for decades.
Eight days into a full-scale US-Israeli war on Iran, with Gulf cities absorbing missile strikes, oil installations under attack, hotels housing displaced civilians bombed, and regional leaders nursing a profound sense of betrayal toward Washington, both pillars have collapsed simultaneously. The Abraham Accords are not formally dead. But the strategic logic that built them is.
The Architecture and Its Assumptions
To understand what has broken, it is worth being precise about what the Accords actually were — and what they were not.
The agreements, brokered by the first Trump administration in 2020, formalised diplomatic and economic ties between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, with Saudi Arabia offering partial facilitation without signing. They emerged from a decade of quietly deepening cooperation, driven primarily by a shared Gulf-Israeli perception of Iran as an expanding regional power whose influence across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen constituted an existential threat to the Sunni Arab order. By institutionalising that cooperation, the Accords sought to consolidate a US-backed regional architecture that could contain Tehran without requiring the United States to do it alone.
The Palestinian dimension was handled through deliberate ambiguity. Israel agreed to suspend — not abandon — its plans to annex parts of the West Bank. The UAE accepted this as sufficient. Saudi Arabia, more cautious, repeatedly made clear that it would not normalise without “concrete steps toward the realisation of a Palestinian state.” That position, widely treated in Washington as a negotiating posture to be eventually overcome, would prove to be a strategic judgment of considerable foresight.
What the Accords emphatically did not do was consult the Gulf states on how, or when, or whether the Iranian threat would ultimately be addressed militarily. That question — the question of war — was left entirely to Washington and Tel Aviv.
The War Nobody in the Gulf Voted For
The decision to launch strikes on Iran on February 28 was, by all available evidence, made without serious consultation with America’s Gulf partners. Chatham House noted that Gulf governments had in fact been actively lobbying against a US military attack on Iran in the weeks before it happened — a remarkable inversion of the assumption, long held in Washington, that Arab Gulf states were quietly eager for American force to be applied to Tehran. The reality, Chatham House found, was that regional states had by 2026 concluded that they had “overestimated the Iranian threat, and underestimated the Israeli one.”
That judgment emerged from years of watching Israel’s conduct — in Gaza, in Lebanon, in its September 2025 strike on Doha targeting Hamas leaders — accumulate into a pattern that Gulf leaders found increasingly alarming. The Abraham Accords had been premised on Israel as a stabilising partner against a shared adversary. What Gulf capitals observed instead was an Israeli government pursuing maximalist military objectives with apparent indifference to the regional consequences for its nominal partners.
When the bombs fell on Tehran, Iran’s retaliation was immediate and deliberately targeted at the Gulf’s most vulnerable points: oil and gas infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, civilian areas including hotels and airports in Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, and US military command centres whose presence on Gulf soil had, overnight, transformed from a security guarantee into a liability. Six American soldiers were killed in Kuwait. The Gulf states found themselves absorbing the costs of a war launched by their patron in pursuit of objectives — regime change in Tehran — that they had explicitly warned against and had not authorised.
The Foreign Policy analysis that followed was striking in its directness: “Gulf leaders have good reason to believe that the United States and Israel launched a war, which directly impacts not just their interests but their survival, without serious consultation.” It concluded that for Gulf states, “US military bases have become a source of threat rather than security.”
Saudi Arabia’s Vindicated Caution
Of all the regional actors, Saudi Arabia’s position deserves particular attention — because Riyadh’s refusal to join the Abraham Accords without Palestinian progress now appears less like stubbornness and more like strategic clarity.
The Saudi condition — concrete steps toward a Palestinian state — was never simply about Palestinian solidarity, though that dimension carried genuine domestic political weight. It reflected a harder calculation: that normalisation purchased without resolving the Palestinian conflict would leave the Kingdom perpetually exposed to the charge of having abandoned the Arab world’s most enduring cause in exchange for American security guarantees that might not materialise when tested. October 7, 2023, and the devastation of Gaza that followed — over 75,000 Palestinians killed, the ICJ examining genocide proceedings — validated that exposure risk in the most brutal possible terms.
Riyadh also read the trajectory of Israeli policy more accurately than Washington did. Where the Abraham Accords framework assumed Israeli moderation as a dividend of normalisation, Saudi analysts watched Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declare that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” and observed a government whose coalition arithmetic made territorial restraint structurally impossible. The Gulf International Forum has noted that Israel’s strategic vision — voiced by Netanyahu himself — involves a post-war order in which a friendly Iranian successor regime joins the Abraham Accords, consolidating what the Forum calls an “anti-Sunni Hexagon Alliance.” Whether or not that vision is achievable, its implications for Gulf sovereignty are not reassuring.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Turkish President Erdoğan in Riyadh in early February 2026, as part of a broader effort to assemble a regional grouping — incorporating Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, and Pakistan — that would give the Kingdom strategic alternatives to exclusive dependence on Washington. The war has not derailed that project. It has accelerated its urgency.
The Irony Washington Built
There is a painful irony at the heart of this moment, and it is worth naming precisely.
The Abraham Accords were Washington’s answer to the question of how to build a durable Middle East order without resolving the Palestinian conflict. The premise was that economic integration, security cooperation, and the shared Iranian threat would gradually make the Palestinian question manageable — something to be administered rather than solved. It was, at its core, a bet that the region’s future could be decoupled from its most fundamental unresolved injustice.
The Iran war has revealed the cost of that bet. The Gulf states that signed or aligned with the Accords now find themselves caught between an Iranian adversary retaliating against their infrastructure and an Israeli partner whose regional conduct they view with deepening alarm. They are being asked to openly cooperate with Israel in a war their populations largely oppose, for objectives — regime change in Tehran — whose aftermath they fear as much as the conflict itself. Foreign Policy captures the dilemma starkly: “Washington has always dreamed of Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran without resolving the Palestinian issue. Here it is.”
It is not what anyone in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or Manama bargained for.
What Comes Next
The Abraham Accords will not be formally renounced. Diplomatic ties between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain remain formally intact. Kazakhstan formalised its entry into the framework as recently as early 2026. The economic architecture — trade agreements, investment flows, the UAE-Israel Comprehensive Economic Partnership — has institutional momentum that a single, even catastrophic, war cannot immediately unwind.
But the strategic foundation has shifted in ways that will outlast this conflict. Gulf states have learned that US security guarantees do not extend to protection from the consequences of American military decisions made without their input. They have learned that Israeli strategic priorities and Gulf state survival interests are not reliably aligned. And they have learned, at considerable cost, that a regional architecture built on deferring the Palestinian question cannot defer its consequences indefinitely.
Chatham House concluded that Gulf states will “continue the move to regional reconciliation but on Iran and Israel-Palestine, will look to reset the rules of engagement.” That reset — whatever form it takes — will not be shaped by Washington’s preferences alone. The bargain of 2020 promised the Gulf states security in exchange for normalisation. What they received was a war. That is not a foundation anyone rebuilds on without asking harder questions first.
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