‘Severely damaged’: how the US-Israel war on Iran is decoupling Gulf security

2026.03.19 14:20 Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG hub is the world’s largest for liquified natural gas and has suffered extensive damage after being struck by Iranian missiles on Thursday. Photo: AFP For decades, the US security umbrella was the bedrock underpinning the Gulf states’ prosperity and stability. Today, Iranian missiles and drones have paralysed the Strait of Hormuz and hit civilian airports, ports, hotels and refineries across every Gulf country, despite thousands of American troops and advanced interceptors on the ground. The armed conflict has forced the region to confront a stark new reality. A Chinese scholar argued that the US-Israel war on Iran and ensuing Hormuz crisis had “severely damaged” the America-centred security foundation of the Gulf’s economic model, with its states bearing the price of over-reliance on a protector who failed to shield them. In a March 14 article on the China-US Focus website, Jin Liangxiang, a senior fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, described the American-Israeli strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliation as among “the most destructive events in the region’s modern history”. Jin said attacks on US bases and civilian infrastructure, along with the major disruption of Gulf shipping lanes, had produced a humanitarian catastrophe and systemic security shock for the GCC economies, eroding confidence in America’s security guarantee. The GCC, or Gulf Cooperation Council, is a regional alliance of six Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. “Not only has the US demonstrated an inability, or unwillingness, to protect its Gulf partners but GCC states now find themselves to be collateral damage in Washington’s confrontation with Iran,” Jin wrote. “In short, the security foundation on which the GCC’s economic model was built has been seriously undermined.” Jin warned that the Gulf region, which he described as one of the world’s three growth engines, could lose momentum,

原文链接: 南华早报