WASHINGTON—Over the past several weeks, I’ve joined discussions with senior leaders from Europe and the Arab Gulf on the future of their strategic relationship. These included the inaugural Europe Gulf Forum, held in Costa Navarino, Greece, in May, as well as June engagements with current and former officials in Washington, Brussels, and the United Kingdom.
The message is clear. The old, international rules-based order was never perfect, with great powers exempting themselves when convenient. But the instability emerging now as the old order recedes is much worse. The US is signaling ambivalence about enforcing the centuries-old principle of freedom of navigation—with President Donald Trump himself threatening to collect tolls from the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s negotiated sixty-day ceasefire with Iran leaves open difficult questions around whether there will be any limits on Iran’s nuclear program or its control of Hormuz.
Nations in Europe and the Gulf share major interests on these loose ends, given that they are both more in range of Iran’s missiles than the United States and their economies are most jeopardized by a compromised Hormuz. These “middle powers” have little choice but to hedge between global superpowers unless they unite.
To that end, Europe and the Gulf represent enough nations and capabilities to secure their common interests by leveraging the economy of their linked geography and knowledge from their respective wars. These Europe-Gulf strengths, incentivized and bound by multilateral self-interest, can champion the norms of sovereign engagement that smaller nations have relied on for stability and agency.
Geographic advantage
Europe and the Gulf sit on natural centers of economic gravity thanks to their combined geography.
The English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world. And between the Strait of Hormuz, Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Danish Straits, 44 percent of daily oil traded by sea passes between Gulf and European chokepoints. With 80 percent of international trade conducted by sea, this means that the stability and prosperity of the international order’s key supply chains depend on access to these waterways.
Europe and the Gulf are no less central by air. Dubai International Airport is the busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic, followed by London Heathrow Airport, as both serve as natural stopping points for the longest flights.
The two regions would be well served by continuing to build out sea and air infrastructure, and developing rail and pipeline links—strategic redundancies made more urgent by the Iran war. These investments can grow both regions’ economies and international influence.
Knowledge and power
At great cost, the Russian war on Ukraine is showing us the future of warfare. Ukraine produced zero drones when the war began. Now it produces ten million drones per year. For the first time this April, Ukraine launched more drones and missiles into Russia than Russia did into Ukraine, while achieving more territorial gains than its foe as well. So far this year, Ukraine has wounded or killed 35,000 Russian soldiers per month, with 95 percent of those casualties coming from drones and long-range missiles. Short of crossing the nuclear threshold of escalation, war is now about the data that empowers drones, long-range missiles, and the networks and satellite Command and Control (C2) detection that guide them.
After four years of war, Ukraine has developed the world’s largest modern battlefield dataset to train artificial intelligence (AI) models to recognize the patterns, shapes, and behavior of people and machines at war. Add this to the Gulf’s data defending against nearly ten thousand drones and missiles fired by Iran. Ukraine recognizes the need for Gulf resources to industrialize that data, striking long-term defense and drone cooperation agreements in April with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. These agreements follow the hundreds of billions of dollars invested into AI infrastructure by Gulf sovereign wealth funds.
The Gulf has the energy and infrastructure to take all this data and use it to train AI for practical battlefield applications. In addition to Ukraine’s proprietary data, Europe has a growing defense industrial base and a commitment from NATO nations to ramp up their defense spending. Together they can fuel a globally competitive Europe-Gulf defense industry.
Multilateral self-interest
Europe and the Gulf seem unlikely allies due to their cultural differences, but we cannot forget that Europe was drastically more fractured in the early twentieth century than current disagreements between Europe and the Gulf or, for that matter, between Gulf states. As fighting two world wars pushed France and Germany to integrate, the collapsing rules-based order is catalyzing Europe-Gulf coordination. Both regions see how a critical mass of multilateral interests can ultimately serve their individual security and voice.
While Europe and the Gulf do collide on differing values, the geopolitical stakes are simply too high for the European Union to prioritize imposing its values on other countries over international stability. These disagreements are most notably captured by EU policies like the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Qatar even threatened to cut EU energy supplies over CSDDD. The EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement connecting 700 million people, however, passed despite opponents like the European Green Party arguing it would “create uncertainty about the future implementation of CBAM,” proving the EU can move past such disputes.
Outside the EU, the UK just signed a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that includes visa liberalization even though one in six Britons view Muslims as a cultural threat. The centrality of Europe’s values on human rights and sustainability have not changed; international circumstances have. Russia’s aggression and American volatility are forcing Europe to decide between relaxing regulations to broaden their economic security, particularly on energy, or stand on principles at the expense of their power to project them.
Europe-Gulf relations are shifting from economic convenience to existential necessity in the interest of bypassing the shocks of war and creating a buffer against the instability of great powers.
A new center of gravity
It is not a coincidence that the first GCC diplomatic mission was established in 1993 in Brussels, the seat for the EU’s primary decision-making bodies. The EU’s first ever appointment of the EU-GCC envoy in 2023 reciprocates that legacy. Both Europe and the Gulf understand that multilateralism matters.
While the role of US security assistance remains indispensable for Europe and the Gulf, its leverage is weakening over time. Gulf countries now look to diversify their security as the guarantee of US deterrence has been shattered by the Iran war. For example, Saudi officials told me that they credit Chinese-brokered Iranian rapprochement and the country’s defense pact with Pakistan for suffering fewer Iranian strikes than the UAE despite its larger size. Pakistan is finalizing arrangements to include Turkey—a NATO member that captures 65 percent of the global drone market—in that pact.
And as the NATO Summit next week in Turkey will address, Europe has stepped up its defense spending. The US-Europe NATO split is now 60/40 and is moving toward 50/50. This is largely due to Europe’s largest economy, Germany, increasing its spending the fastest by boosting its defense budget to 3.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2027, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz citing Iran as a key motivator. As for Russia’s neighbors that never let their guard down after the Cold War, Finland and Sweden, the Ukraine war pushed them to join NATO. They bring independent C2 that Europe needs beyond the US nerve center and the US needs to monitor the Kola Peninsula—Russia’s largest concentration of nuclear weapons.