strikeApr 16, 2026

The End of Managed Escalation in the Gulf

Summary

Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide. The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has exposed a reality many policymakers long preferred to avoid: The deterrence model that governed the Gulf for decades is no longer working as intended. For years, the region operated in the gray zone — covert strikes, proxy warfare, and carefully managed escalation. Iran built a strategy around missiles, regional partners, and nuclear latency. The United States underwrote Gulf security without direct war. Saudi Arabia and its neighbors relied on that umbrella while hedging against its limits, investing in missile defense and selective partnerships. There were rules, even if unwritten. That world is breaking down. The two-week ceasefire announced last week between the United States and Iran, brokered by Pakistan after 40 days of sustained bombardment, illustrates the point. What has emerged is not a durable settlement but a fragile pause, already strained by continued Israeli strikes on Lebanon, disputed terms over the Strait of Hormuz (and now a U.S. naval blockade), and Iranian accusations of violations. The ceasefire is less a return to order than a snapshot of its absence: ad hoc, conditional, and dependent on a mediator whose security relationship with both Washington and Tehran is itself constrained. What is emerging is not simply more escalation, but a different kind of conflict: direct, sustained confrontation without clear evidence that overwhelming force can deliver decisive political outcomes. The scale of the current campaign makes this plain. U.S. and Israeli operations have targeted Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile networks, and command systems at a tempo comparable to the opening phase of the 2003 Iraq War. By mid-March, U.S. and Israeli forces had conducted over 15,000 strikes across 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces with the U.S. military buildup described as the largest in the Middle East since 2003. Early reporting and official summaries confirm a broad campaign targeting Iranian leadership, nuclear sites, and missile forces across the country. Yet weeks into the conflict, Iran retains a meaningful portion of its missile arsenal and continues to strike across the region. U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that roughly a third of Iran’s missile arsenal has been confirmed destroyed, with another third likely damaged or buried in hardened underground sites. Separate analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that Iran’s missile launches fell sharply after the opening days of the war, while the Israeli military claimed that around 70 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers had been disabled by day 16. However, U.S. intelligence assessments disclosed by the Wall Street Journal suggest a different picture: Although more than half of Iran’s estimated 470 launchers had been destroyed, damaged, or trapped underground, many were likely repairable or recoverable. Iran’s missile stockpile had been roughly halved, but Tehran still retained thousands of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. This reveals the central problem: Destruction is not coercion. Military power can degrade capabilities without compelling political surrender — a dynamic long recognized in Thomas Schelling’s work on coercion as signaling and bargaining power, but now playing out in real time. The danger lies not just in escalation, but in escalation without a theory of victory. If military superiority inflicts damage without producing submission, and retaliation continues without restoring deterrence, then repeated strikes become a substitute for strategy rather than an instrument of it. That is not stability. It is managed failure. The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly a fifth of global oil transits — now sits inside an active conflict zone. Any sustained disruption, whether through mining, retaliatory strikes on tanker traffic, or the withdrawal of commercial insurance, will ripple far beyond energy markets. Gulf economies depend on exposed coastal infrastructure: Desalination, ports, and food supply chains all lie within range of Iranian systems that have yet to be fully eliminated. Yemen’s war demonstrated how quickly supply disruption translates into civilian harm at scale, even in the absence of a direct blockade. A partial or full closure of Hormuz, accompanied by possible Houthi strikes on Bab el Mandeb, would strain humanitarian agencies and systems already operating at near capacity and limit surge capacity to deal with another shock that could affect many states in the Global South. For Iran, the lesson is unlikely to be restraint. Its threshold nuclear posture — remaining just short of a weapon — did not deter attack. If anything, it combined provocation with vulnerability. Under these conditions, the logic of pursuing a more survivable deterrent will strengthen. That conclusion will not stop in Tehran. Saudi Arabia now faces a sharper dilemma. Despite close defense cooperation with the United States — including combined efforts to counter missile and drone threats through the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center — the war demonstrates both Washington’s willingness and ability to use force at scale and the limits of that power. Iran retains the capacity to retaliate, escalation cannot be tightly controlled, and Gulf territory remains exposed. This is what a non-absolute security guarantee looks like in practice. Recent diplomacy points to how regional actors are adapting. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s April 2026 visit to the Gulf — focused in part on defense-industrial cooperation and wartime innovation — led to agreements with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar on countering threats from missiles and drones. Zelensky described these as “historic” 10-year strategic partnerships worth billions, encompassing joint defense-industrial projects, coproduction facilities, and the deployment of over 200 Ukrainian counter-drone experts across the region. Qatar’s agreement is particularly telling: It includes coproduction arrangements and technological partnerships that go well beyond procurement, signaling that at least some Gulf capitals now view sovereign manufacturing capacity as a security priority in its own right. The logic is straightforward: Gulf states have been expending costly Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors against cheap Iranian drones, and Ukraine offers a proven, lower-cost alternative. Ukraine’s war has become a live demonstration of how states can generate deterrent effects through scalable, relatively low-cost technologies. For Gulf states, the takeaway is not alignment with Kyiv, but emulation. There is still no obvious external substitute for American power. Saudi security ties with Pakistan, while politically useful, do not translate into credible wartime guarantees — particularly under conditions of U.S.-Iranian confrontation and nuclear risk. Its role as a mediator underscores this gap between partnership and commitment. Saudi Arabia, in other words, cannot outsource deterrence indefinitely. If the old model is eroding, the alternatives are narrowing. Doubling down on the United States — tighter integration, expanded missile defense — offers diminishing returns when sustained U.S. operations cannot eliminate Iran’s capacity to strike back. Building stronger conventional capabilities — long-range strike, hardened infrastructure, and cost-imposition strategies — improves resilience but does not restore the old equilibrium. A third pathway could emerge via minilateral cooperation built around specific capabilities rather than formal alliances. The Arab Gulf states are already working closely with U.S., UK, Australian, and French counterparts. They are likely to continue to work with European and Asian partners — particularly those with advanced defense-industrial bases such as South Korea, Turkey, and select European states — on codevelopment, procurement, and operational integration. These arrangements are narrower, more flexible, and better suited to an environment defined by rapid technological change and persistent competition. In this context, geographically targeted coercion regains relevance. An imminent or demonstrated capability to threaten Kharg Island — the critical node of Iran’s oil export infrastructure — could reintroduce deterrence at the margins by directly holding at risk the regime’s primary revenue stream. This logic can be found in Iran’s seizure of Abu Musa, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs in 1971: Control over strategically located nodes can shift deterrence perceptions without resolving the broader conflict. Now, there is the possibility of the United States retaking Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb islands based on the same rationale. Diplomacy remains necessary, but the prevailing model is flawed. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action addressed enrichment timelines but left Iran’s regional posture, missile program, and support for armed non-state actors largely intact. Returning to that model in the middle of an active military campaign would signal that escalation brings diplomatic reward — precisely the wrong incentive. A new deal should be holistic, incremental, and must aim to re-establish a degree of trust or at least predictability. No alternative security provider can replace the United States, and diversification reduces vulnerability only at the margins. This leaves the most sensitive outcome: the gradual erosion of the taboo around nuclear hedging. Israel remains the region’s only nuclear-armed state, an undeclared but widely understood reality that reinforces an already asymmetric deterrence landscape. For Gulf states, this sharpens a structural imbalance: While Israel benefits from both an implicit nuclear deterrent and close alignment with the United States, Arab Gulf partners operate without a comparable nuclear umbrella. Under conditions of persistent conflict and uncertain external guarantees, this asymmetry matters. If adversaries can threaten escalation at higher thresholds, while regional states remain exposed below that level, the incentive to develop an independent deterrent — whether through latency, hedging, or more explicit pathways — becomes harder to resist. What is taking shape is not a new balance, but a more fragile and more combustible order. Direct conflict is replacing proxy competition without producing decisive outcomes. Military superiority remains real but politically constrained. Adversaries can be punished, but not compelled. Under these conditions, deterrence becomes less about prevention and more about managing ongoing conflict. As analysis of Ukraine’s drone war shows, the spread of low cost, long-range strike capabilities is already reshaping Gulf defense planning, reinforcing a shift toward persistent attrition rather than decisive victory. Deterrence is no longer delivered by a single external guarantor. It is increasingly coproduced across networks of states, technologies, and industries. This is a structural shift, not a temporary adjustment. As these dynamics take hold, the incentives facing regional actors will change. If conventional force cannot guarantee security, and external guarantees cannot eliminate risk, nuclear weapons will become more attractive. The lesson of this war is not that deterrence has held. It is that deterrence, as traditionally understood in the Gulf, is beginning to fail. And as it fails, the risks will not remain confined to strategy. A region moving toward nuclear hedging is also one in which civilian populations face escalating danger with diminishing capacity to absorb shocks. The greatest risk now is that policymakers continue to act as if the old rules still apply — as if escalation can be controlled, and competition contained. That assumption is becoming one of the most dangerous variables in the system. Robert Mason, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in the United Arab Emirates. His research concerns the international relations of the Middle East with an emphasis on the foreign and security policies of the Gulf states. His latest work is Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: Foreign Policy and Strategic Alliances in an Uncertain World (Manchester University Press, 2023). Rikard Jalkebro, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in the United Arab Emirates. His research sits at the intersection of peace and conflict studies, humanitarian action, and international relations, with a particular focus on peacebuilding, humanitarian diplomacy, and the politics of contemporary crises. Image: U.S. Army Security Assistance Command via DVIDS

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Daisy Johnston; Robert Mason; Rikard JalkebroBy Daisy Johnston; Robert Mason; Rikard Jalkebro
Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide. The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has exposed a reality many policymakers long preferred to avoid: The deterrence model that governed the Gulf for decades…

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Location: Iran

SECTIONS Crude oil prices rise ; Iran Reuters