ABU DHABI—The talks that collapsed in Islamabad on April 12 were the first direct US-Iran conversation since 2015. After twenty-one hours, US Vice President JD Vance announced that there was no deal, that Iran had not accepted Washington’s terms, and that the naval blockade would be enforced. What he did not mention—and what apparently received too little attention during the marathon talks—was the six countries whose airports, energy infrastructure, and civilian neighborhoods had been struck by Iranian missiles and drones over the preceding forty days. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states were not parties to the Islamabad talks, and they do not appear to have been formally consulted at the time. While the GCC has sought to draw attention to their shared vulnerabilities, including at an April 28 summit in Jeddah, they have been too often overlooked in this crisis.
What Iran did next underscored this point. Tehran responded to Washington with a fourteen-point proposal, which amounted to reopening the Strait of Hormuz, ending the fighting, and deferring the nuclear file. Iran was apparently aiming to secure the removal of US pressure—the blockade, the strikes—before committing to anything on enrichment.
But any deal that does not secure buy-in from the Gulf states risks undermining both their security and their relations with the United States if it falls apart. The asymmetry here is stark: Washington faces diplomatic embarrassment, while Gulf capitals face missiles.
The Gulf is not a single actor
One factor complicating efforts to secure buy-in from Gulf states is that there are divergences among them.
For example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has already made the judgment that it must cut a new path. On April 28, it announced it was exiting the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which was one of Abu Dhabi’s last institutional links to a Saudi-led framework based on Gulf unity. In recent weeks, the UAE has also sought a dollar swap line from the US Treasury, deployed Israeli Iron Dome batteries on its soil, closed its embassy in Tehran, labeled the Iranian strikes as terrorist attacks, and called for a comprehensive solution rather than a cease-fire. Collectively, these steps are more than mere reactions; they represent the framework of a government that believes the postwar Gulf needs a new organizing principle and has started to develop it.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has kept its channel to Tehran open throughout the war, called for talks to address “all issues” contributing to regional instability, and joined a quadrilateral mediation effort alongside Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan. Riyadh wants a seat at the table, not just a cease-fire. Its preferred outcome is a settlement comprehensive enough to curtail Iranian support for armed proxies and resolve the Strait of Hormuz question on a lasting basis—but not one that destabilizes Iran to the point of collapse. A broken or cornered Iran would export a different kind of instability, and that is incompatible with the regional environment that Vision 2030 requires.
Qatar’s calculus is different and more exposed. It hosts US Central Command’s largest forward headquarters in the region while maintaining functional relations with Tehran—a dual exposure that makes de-escalation a matter of operational necessity, not just diplomatic preference. Doha has explicitly warned against a “frozen conflict,” not because it wants Iran contained, but because unresolved tensions leave its energy infrastructure and its American tenant simultaneously at risk. A settlement that pulls Qatar into an anti-Iran alignment would cost it the mediating role that has become the signature of its foreign policy. One that fails entirely leaves it holding two relationships it cannot afford to lose.
Bahrain and Kuwait, which absorbed the heaviest Iranian strikes relative to their size, sit closer to the Emirati position. Both have called for accountability and stronger collective defense mechanisms, but neither has moved as decisively as Abu Dhabi to reorient its posture. Oman occupies the other end of the spectrum. It is the only Gulf state that has refrained from condemning Iranian strikes, has quietly maintained its back-channel function between Washington and Tehran, and has established economic ties with Iran that give it a structural interest in avoiding permanent rupture. For Muscat, any outcome is preferable to one that leaves Iran with nothing to lose.
In short, the Gulf states have not reached a common position on what the war means or what should come after it. Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash recently called the GCC’s collective response “the weakest historically, considering the nature of the attack and the threat it posed to everyone.” A bloc that cannot agree on the nature of the threat cannot agree on what a settlement should do, and Washington, by treating the GCC as a single actor, has ensured that whatever deal it strikes will be owned by no one.
The danger of a deal without Gulf input
The framework for an agreement reportedly being discussed by the United States and Iran does not appear to include provisions for Gulf security, reparations, or any compliance verification mechanism. Iran’s proposal demands US force withdrawals, compensation payments, and joint governance of the strait—none of which Washington will discuss. The publicly stated gap between the two sides is already wider than reported. The disagreement over enrichment—according to officials familiar with the talks, the United States is seeking a twenty-year enrichment freeze, while Iran has offered five years—cannot be closed by incentives. If Washington cannot bridge that gap on a central issue it went to war over, the probability that a subsequent negotiation resolves Gulf security, missiles, and proxies is close to zero.
The Strait of Hormuz is where Iranian and US positions fall apart. Tehran wants a toll booth. Washington wants an open sea. In the meantime, commercial transit remains blocked. Around two thousand ships are stranded on both sides of the strait; the International Maritime Organization estimates that 20,000 seafarers on these vessels have been there for over two months, running low on food and fuel. In the past week, the short-lived US operation Project Freedom moved a handful of US-flagged vessels through the strait, but an escort operation is not a shipping lane. The US Navy can sustain three to four transits per day at most; the strait normally handles dozens. If Iran’s claim to control access has not been addressed in any of the frameworks currently under discussion, the question is whether it can be addressed in the future, when the warships are elsewhere.
Deferring the nuclear file could still lead to an agreement. However, the danger is that it results in the wrong outcome: reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the blockade before Washington secures any commitment that it will achieve its other aims. The Gulf states are already factoring in this possibility, since they will bear the costs of any subsequent phase of the conflict.
A deal Gulf states can live with
The deepest flaw in the current framework is not what it omits. It is what it assumes: that a settlement can be constructed by leaving Gulf states on the sidelines. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iran nuclear deal, made a similar assumption. Iran’s neighbors had no standing within that agreement. When they saw Iranian behavior, their only recourse was to lobby Washington, which then had to balance their concerns against its own interest in maintaining the agreement. In 2015, the GCC states were observers of a threat. Now, they are active participants with detailed, real-time knowledge of Iranian military activities. Excluding them from the monitoring setup removes the most capable and motivated observers, weakening the system intended to catch violations. Such a deal is likely to fail from the inside.
Any Strait of Hormuz agreement must involve GCC participation and establish a framework in which states that are economically dependent on the waterway help monitor and enforce the deal’s terms. A maritime monitoring system based on this idea would empower the states whose tankers transit the strait, whose ports host its trade, and whose radar tracks its movements to take action on what they observe.
Iran will likely oppose this, since it would require accepting GCC involvement in a mechanism that currently treats Hormuz as a bilateral issue between Tehran and Washington. But that opposition is precisely why GCC participation must be a non-negotiable condition: Any arrangement Iran accepts today could be abandoned by a future government if Tehran alone calculates that the deal no longer serves its interests. Embedding the GCC as an active monitor and enforcer shifts that calculus. A future Iranian government would not simply be walking away from Washington, but from the regional states whose trade, infrastructure, and security architecture underpin the strait’s functioning. That is a far costlier exit, and a far more durable foundation for any governance framework.