It Could Happen Here - The Arab Gulf States in the Line of Fire

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Dana El Kurd speaks to Andrew Leber, assistant professor of political science and Middle East and North Africa politics, with an expertise in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states. Andrew outlines the different positions of the Gulf states in response to the ongoing war on Iran, the competing visions for the region posed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the role of Israel in their calculations.  Sources: Andrew Leber’s profile and articles - https://carnegieendowment.org/people/andrew-leber  How Palestine is linked to domestic grievances - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2022.2038567See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. All Zone Media. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I have with me, Andrew Lieber. Andrew Lieber is a non-resident scholar in the Carnegie Middle East program

and an assistant professor in Tulane University's Department of Political Science and their Middle East and North Africa Studies program. His research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics and international relations of the Middle East and North Africa region, with that particular focus on Saudi Arabia. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I wanted to have you on today because, well, the war on Iran, but also because I think there's been a lot of reporting and some that's not very well sourced in mainstream media,

like the New York Times, about the GCC state, GCC Gulf Cooperation Council, so the Arab Gulf states, about their motivations and the actions of the Gulf states during this war. I think that there's been a lot of obfuscation for a variety of reasons. So I wanted to bring you on, giving your expertise to kind of clarify fact from fiction on some of that. We're recording May 28th, so maybe people have seen this. Trump also recently threatened to bomb Aman, who were acting as mediators initially. So, yeah, I wanted to go through all the main GCC actors and get your analysis of their behavior during this war, what they want to happen when it's over. Sure, yeah, happy to do so. I think one.

thing that has been a little hard for people to follow maybe has been the tendency for U.S. and English language. Media outlets just talk about the Gulf states or the G states are what they want from this conflict. But even heading into this war, there were already key differences among these countries. There was a diplomatic and increasingly, potentially a military rift between Saudi Arabia and the neighboring United Arab Emirates. There have been past disputes between different Gulf countries as well. And even though initially, the Iran War seemed like it would paper over the cracks in these divisions. In many ways, it's also deepened the divides as different countries have interpreted the threats posed by Iran and by

Israel and potentially even the United States in different ways. So at present, we can maybe think of three broad camps within the GCC. So there's Saudi Arabia, the largest by landmass of these countries, and to a lesser extent, Kuwait, and also Qatar have taken the approach of trying to just get things back to quote unquote normal or like a new normal supporting mediation efforts by other countries like Pakistan and now, at least for Qatar, increasingly engaged in direct mediation to try to lock in some kind of agreement that restores lows of energy and other goods in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, the key body of water that allows things in and out of the Persian Gulf.

In one direction, you've had the United Arab Emirates, which has presented itself, as kind of much more hawkish in terms of its willingness to potentially use military force against Iran or to join the United States in a military effort to open the Strait of Hormuz. In the past few days, it's been quietly walking back some of those positions, but it has tried to draw a contrast between its more assertive stance towards Iranian actions in the region and Saudi Arabia. And then the other direction has discussed with the Sultan of Oman, which leaned much further in the other direction during the war, being the only country that criticized openly from the start, both the U.S. and Israeli-led attacks on Iran and Iran's reprisals on the other side of the Gulf.

Omani foreign minister Badrubu Saidi went on U.S. television prior to the war to make the case that this was the possible ongoing talks between the U.S. and Iran could bear fruit. That was unsuccessful as an intervention, but also Omani diplomats of various points have offered much more critical commentary of the United States, but they have likewise kind of walked that back, or at least not emphasize there as much in recent weeks, but clearly there is a narrative critical of their role that circulates in some parts of D.C., which percolated its way up into the president saying, well, if Vermont is not going to cooperate with certain things, then we'll just bond them until they do, which, you know, is not the nicest way to ask for the cooperation of other countries in a

sensitive geopolitical issue, but so it goes. Right. We're not the most effective these days, let's say. Yeah, so thank you for kind of laying that out. There are so many questions I have. I want to talk about kind of how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, you've already mentioned, differ on this issue, but also like how their differences speak to different visions for the region, especially vis-a-vis Israel. But also just like before we get to that, there's been a lot of reporting about how Saudi Arabia is like secretly really gung-ho about the war and is encouraging the Trump administration to be more aggressive. What weight do you put on those reports?

Yeah, I mean, those have been around since the start of the conflict. I'll preface this by giving a major caveat, which is that every week that goes by, we learn more about what we didn't know earlier in the war. Like, you know, we know now that both the UA and Saudi Arabia have carried out airstrikes on Iran at certain points that they didn't publicize that. But I'm broadly skeptical of accounts that Saudi Arabia and specifically Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, advocated for this war, pushed for the war. Saudi Arabia and Iran have not always had very great relations, but they nominally reestablished diplomatic ties in 2023. And generally,

I think Saudi Arabia's view is they want to keep the geopolitical peace in the surrounding neighborhood because otherwise Saudi Arabia can't get the kind of foreign investment or the kind of economic partnerships it needs to generate economic growth and employ its citizens. population, a major political concern. And I think even the United Arab Emirates prior to this war was not pushing for it actively. I think these countries also don't want to tell, with the possible exception of Vermont, don't want to tell President Trump no directly. So my understanding of things is that everything prior to the war was phrased in a kind of conditional, we would recommend you don't do this, but just make sure if you just think this is a good idea that you can militarily defeat Iran and a rather

quick and decisive fashion. Of course, that banked on the United States's current policymakers having an accurate view of their own capabilities, which seemed to be not a correct assumption. But I think that also during the war, you had kind of a panic in different directions, like a belief that, well, I guess if the United States has gone to war, clearly they can solve this militarily, right? So I think you had some leaders, especially the United Arab Emirates, pushing the United States to like finish the job, don't leave the conflict in a state where, it's very clear that the United States can militarily force Iran to do certain things, but you also haven't kind of secured meaningful concessions from Iran.

And that I think is, I guess one thing that the United States now, again, with the possible exception of Oman, is concerned about where they get left if there is any kind of deal. It's very clear that they do not have a seat at the table in terms of these negotiations. And there's certainly a lot of complaints online or in media outlets in the Gulf about that fact, but it doesn't change the reality that these are U.S.-Iran negotiations with maybe some consultation with Israel, maybe some communication with Saudi Arabia with the UA, but not a ton of consultation of them. And just to be clear, they've paid the brunt of the price here. And Iran has attacked civilian infrastructure and desalination plants and all those things. Yeah, no. I mean, Iran calculated,

I think, well, we could attack Israel, but most of the rockets and missiles be shot down. Israel's farther away. It's harder to hit them with a larger. payload, whereas you can hit a lot of infrastructure in the Gulf. It's been very clear that Iran targeted not only U.S. military bases, but also civilian infrastructure in an attempt to put a lot of economic pressure on these countries, especially the UAE, and even countries that had sought to mediate between the conflict or had been more openly, you know, critical of any U.S. military adventurism like Qatar, basically have their entire economy frozen right now because they can get very little of the liquid natural gas they produce in or out. Same thing with Kuwait, same thing with

Bahrain. One interesting, maybe unintended consequence of this, though, is that some of the Gulf states are doing better than others economically from this Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made up, you know, a significant portion of the ground lost from lost oil exports because they can export some oil over land. And Oman is exporting about as much oil as before, but at a much higher price, so economically are even doing perhaps better. But yeah, these are the countries that are primarily paid the price in direct terms. And then by extension, every country that, that relies on their energy supplies is also paying the price in terms of higher costs for cooking gas, diesel, fertilizer, and so on. Right.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. really this is an American-Israeli war, even if the United States kind of holds the final say. But, you know, recently on social media and in a number of repeated statements, President Trump himself and his administration have talked about the Abraham Accords and normalization of normalization of Israel, and normalization of Israel back in 2020. I think for President Trump, this is motive, talking about this now is motivated by a sense of, you know, there's a real loss of face and status by having talked up how he was going to have this decisive victory against Iran and then it being a disaster on every single front. So I think there's now going to be a hunt for like some other kind of quick win that he can show. But I think also the lead up to this war demonstrated that the Abraham Accords as a framework for U.S. policy towards the Middle East was pretty bankrupt in every direction. on the one hand, all of the carrots that the United States was supposed to offer to encourage countries to normalize ties with Israel and had effectively already been given out.

So for Saudi Arabia, it was like, here are all our concessions that we were going to use in order to encourage you to normalize ties with Israel. We can just give those to you as long as you promised to invest money in the United States. So that's already been allowed to happen. At the same time, the downside for these countries in normalizing ties with Israel is pretty high. there's nothing that Israeli leaders at present can do to guarantee that there won't be another catastrophic and genocidal war against the Palestinian population. That's something that, you know, a Saudi leadership that is dealing with, you know, potentially rising unemployment,

that other countries dealing with ethnic or sectarian divides within their borders, not something they really want to take on as well. And I think that the war has kind of created divergent perceptions of Israel as well. I think for, countries like Saudi Arabia and especially Oman, there's a view of Israel, even for a newer generation of leadership like Mohammed bin Salman, who were not particularly opposed to a greater role for Israel in the region, greater ties with Israel, or just now concerned about Israel as a chaotic and unreliable partner in the region that will throw the security interests of its allies to the wind, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, their interpretation of the

Abraham Accords is that it did nothing to protect the UAE. and Bahrain from attacks by Iran or from getting dragged into an Israeli-led or partly Israeli-led war. In the other direction, however, the UAE itself kind of views its ties with Israel is more important than ever. Their view is like, well, this is a region of unreliable actors. Israel has a capable military, even if they don't admit it openly. Israel's the only nuclear armed actor in the region. And Israel did send, what's it called the Iron Dome Defense Technology, to the UAE during the conflict. On the one hand, I think we're, just as we saw during the Biden administration, the Abraham Accords remains this kind of like cargo cult for American foreign policy makers,

this idea that we'll just say the Abraham Accords and it'll magically make countries kind of change their foreign policy orientation. But I think the Abraham Accords as a UAE, Israeli, security, economic, political alliance in the region is stronger than ever and will continue to be the case into the future. But that Saudi Arabia will not participate in, in the way that the Trump administration assumes. Yeah, I think that Saudi Arabia will continue their policy they've had ever since October 7th, or at least since roughly thereafter, of saying, like, well, we're not ruling out.

We just have some conditions in order to move on that. And then, you know, I don't think those are unreasonable conditions of making progress towards a Palestinian state, but they are not anything that Netanyahu or even probably any other political coalition that comes to power in Israel is willing to even think about so, you know, I don't really see it happening soon. I suppose the thing is Trump is so unpredictable that he could just, like, lash out and declare that he's going to do something to Saudi Arabia if they don't normalize. But then it's a real question of, like, well, how long is he going to sustain that?

And, like, what does he do if Saudi Arabia or Mohammed bin Laden himself, like, snaps back over this past winter. We saw, for example, as part of that diplomatic rift between the UA and Saudi Arabia, we saw Emirati-backed forces in Yemen, making. gains, a lot of commentary online about like, oh, Mohammed bin Salman, isn't willing to do anything about this. And then ultimately wind up the Saudi foreign ministry condemned the UAE's role in Yemen and Saudi forces bombed like an Emirati shipment coming into Yemen. So there's also the potential here as well. Like these are two political systems where power is highly personalized around specific

individuals. And so if President Trump decides to go down that route, there's the possibility for this to become a very personalized conflict. Right. And I think it's important for listeners to understand the connection, why the Palestinian issue holds such weight for Gulf leaders. You mentioned, for example, ethnic and sectarian divides in particular countries, I'm thinking Bahrain, or, you know, rising unemployment and dissent and discontent in places like Saudi Arabia. It's because either explicitly or implicitly, the Palestinian issue in some parts of the Gulf is connected to people's anti-regime sentiment. which, of course, the Iranian regime is very good at stoking and exploiting. And so it's not just that they're worried about regional instability outside their borders. It's also, like you said, there are domestic implications for all these regimes. Yeah, I think if we want to turn back the clock to like the first Trump administration, and even right up to October 7th, in places like Saudi Arabia,

I think there was a belief that you could just suppress people's solidarity with Palestine or that this was like a dead issue for most Saudi citizens. But what kind of October 7th showed or changed was that that sentiment had really never gone away as much as it had seemed. And also that there's now an entirely new generation that has seen the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza over the past few years that is now well aware of everything has been done. And this is not something you can hide from people or pretend that it will go away. And it's even harder to do so if people aren't seeing kind of rapid economic

gains in their own lives. So it becomes yet another thing that, yeah, if you wanted to fault Saudi leaders for kind of weakness and international stage, if you wanted to fault them for not demonstrating political courage, that could be a cudgel to use against them. So inside Saudi Arabia, the one consistent thing over the past five, six, seven years is the complete suppression of talking about the Palestinian issue because political authorities are so worried, that if people start talking about one political issue, maybe they start linking into other concerns. At the same time, there has been a shift among kind of regime-aligned commentators from, you know, if this were back in 2019, 2020, you would hear them say, well, Saudi Arabia is now our country that

acts in its own national interest. That means we don't have to listen to the Palestinian leadership. That's their own concern. Now you hear kind of same tune, like different variation where it's like, because Saudi Arabia is acting in its own national interest, we can decide that we, we can decide that we want to act in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership, not just do whatever the West tells us to do. But then this leads into, I think, kind of the polarization among some of the Gulf countries, because it's the exact opposite dynamic for the UAE, where the UAE goes the route of presenting itself as closer than ever to the United States, very aware that they can use Saudi skepticism towards Israel as something to attack Saudi Arabia in U.S. commentary and U.S. media markets.

And then even if the country seem to be able to patch these differences up from time to time, it's going to keep driving them apart as well. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

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I'll be exploring the 14th season of Family Secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know,

but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original.

It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast. tell me something messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone, the more their real self comes out, they're going to be gross. What's the grossest thing about a man?

Burping. Shut it down. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity Kikis, check outlaws with T.S. Madison. Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader. And Vader was turned by Rupal?

Yeah, well, somebody's heard. I know some old, old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem, and start your day with intention with waking up with Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the outspoken network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open your free IHeart Radio app, search pride and listen now. But did Black music, food, and culture teach us about who we were becoming?

2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture, where we were. still consumed things in community. From Beyonce and Rihanna. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce. I don't think we'll ever see another Rihanna. To soul food, memory, identity, and the stories we carry through black culture. What does it mean to be black? And eat in America.

So we were this group of people who knew how to work the land, who knew how to live with the land. We make it do what it do. Therapy for Black Girls is bringing together the conversation shaping Black life right now. You will never make me feel bad for being a Black. for being a black American girl ever. Therapy for Black Girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but during the first Trump administration, the propaganda

around Palestinians emerging from the UAE was extremely vehement, let's say. Like, there was so much rhetoric coming out of UAE, like government officials and associations. influencers and things like that, that was attempting to kind of change the image of the Palestinian to an Arab audience. And even though you're right that they are clinging more than ever to the Abraham Accords, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that like they can't do that as much anymore. I'm not seeing as much of that kind of rhetoric and kind of anti-Palestinian racism that I used to see. Yeah. And it used to be that, you know, you could walk this like, I don't want to call it a fine line, but you could play this game. I'm more familiar with this in the Saudi

case, but the rhetoric would go, of course, Saudi Arabia stands with the Saudi issue, but the Palestinian leadership, they would basically adopt the same tropes we were familiar with the United States. Like, the Palestinian leadership, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, or they would just do a correct translation of that. Yeah. But yeah, it's much harder. Like, you can't get away with that anymore, because the pushback online would be incredibly intense. And likewise, even from the UAE, we see continued coordination with Israel. But it's interesting. how the UAE denies or doesn't confirm certain things. So bombing Iran during the war, the UAE foreign ministry kind of does a wink, wink, wink, nudge, like, well, look at our

policies where we said we were to retaliate if we were attacked Jaya and conclusions. Whereas when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, like, visiting the UAE, they're like absolutely not, this is false news. It did not happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that points to the extent to which, especially Netanyahu has become extremely toxic and hard to separate from that. And that, you know, even though I don't think the UA is going to be hosting any, like, major Palestinian solidarity events anytime soon. At the same time, they're not, like, you know, this is not like a warm piece in terms of how they're approaching Israelis either.

I'm pretty sure the UA even condemned the recent law, like basically allowing executions of the death penalty. Yeah. It will specifically define to basically beat Palestinians on the West Bank, also condemn Israel's actions in Lebanon as well. So it's become harder to mount the kind of. media campaigns against Palestinians. I think, you know, partly because they backfire and then partly in recognition that, like, this was done for years and years. And then ultimately,

what distinguishes Saudi Arabia from the UAE is not that their citizen publics have different views about the Palestinians, but just that in the UAE, you can surveil, coerce, and bribe your citizen population so much better than in Saudi Arabia. It's like, sorry to be kind of crass about it, but, like, the Jews just isn't worth the squeeze in terms of the Saudi monarchy relative to at least being in this kind of middle path where they're maybe not pushing the United States too much for Palestinian statehood, but are like doing at least the bare minimum to keep, I guess, the idea of a two-state solution alive. Yeah, and to stay adhering to the Arab Peace Initiative in some capacity.

What's kind of the takeaway, do you think, for all of these countries in the aftermath of this war? do you foresee a change in their positions vis-a-vis the United States in particular? For years and years, analysts of the Gulf, I'm talking about, like, these states hedging. And I think in one direction, this war showed that, like, most of that amounted to just trying to get, like, more concessions from the United States. Like, you had a couple European countries show up. You had, like, Pakistan get involved a little bit. But there's strategies for the course of this war still revolved around trying to influence U.S. thinking, you know, frame how they were viewed in the United States. But I do think it is going to trigger changes down the line.

Like we saw Saudi Arabia normalized ties with Iran four years after the United States failed to intervene after Iranian-line groups attacked Saudi oil fields. I think something similar here, where we're going to see developments three or four years down the line that have been cooking in the background as a result of what has happened in 2026. I think we're starting to see some of that now. And it's not going to be like, oh, we're going to get a Chinese military base in the Gulf. it's going to be other things like we're seeing Saudi Arabia try to work with what it views as the other

regional middle powers it can trust and work with Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan. The UAE, meanwhile, is trying to double or triple down on its direct security ties with Israel. But I think the way these ghost states are going to react is going to figure out how can we shape the diplomas here on the region? How can we shape our own security in ways that don't rely on the United States, but aren't. like, how to put it, I think in Washington, D.C. because of the obsession with Chinese influence in the world, there's always this belief of like, oh, like, if not us, then it will be like the Chinese will be involved. And I think the reality is going to look very different. I don't think China wants to get involved in a security fashion of the Gulf, but there are other countries that have an interest

in like some degree of peaceful economic development or some degree of like maximalized security. And that's going to be the future of these state security relations. Well, thank you so much, Andrew. Really appreciate your expertise. I'll link your profile at Carnegie in the show notes, as well as given that we talked about kind of the Palestinian question in relation to some of these other issues domestically in the Gulf states. I'll also link to some of my own research on this topic. So thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.