The Iran war has forced the US-Gulf alliance out of the shadows

(Eric Alter – Atlantic Council) They won’t say it in public. But in private conversations since the February 28 outbreak of war in the region, Gulf officials tell me that they have absorbed Iranian retaliation for hosting a US-Gulf security architecture they were never permitted to name. The current terms are no longer acceptable. They are not threatening to walk away. They’re doing something far more serious; they are pricing their options and actively recalibrating how much of the arrangement’s risk they are prepared to absorb without a structural change in their role in it. What is at stake in the on-again, off-again US-Iranian negotiations is not just a sustainable deal or a nuclear timetable. It is whether the informal strategic system the United States assembled with its Gulf partners and Israel over two decades was designed to survive a real war, or whether it was always a fair-weather arrangement dressed up as an alliance. – The Iran war has forced the US-Gulf alliance out of the shadows – Atlantic Council