Jadaliyya reports:

On Sunday night, the sky above Sitra turned orange. A suspected Iranian drone had struck BAPCO, Bahrain’s main oil processing facility, on an island southeast of Manama. The projectile set the refinery ablaze and sent fires into residential neighborhoods near the plant. Thirty-two Bahrainis were wounded, some critically. By morning, BAPCO had declared force majeure, forcing Bahrain to join Qatar and Kuwait in suspending oil shipments, and further pushing the price of crude oil toward record highs. At Bahrain International Airport, the only flights in operation were chartered services, carrying foreign nationals out, and stranded Bahrainis back in.

This is precisely the scenario the Gulf states have spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to avert. Collectively, the GCC states account for a fifth of all global arms imports. Five of eight permanent US military bases are stationed in the Gulf, where they host between 40,000 and 50,000 troops. Their presence is intended to secure a bargain that has helped drive the global economy: the free flow of oil, in exchange for US security assurances against a range of threats, including from Iran but also from regional rivals, internal instability, and the disorder that tends to follow US wars in the region.

The Gulf states have increasingly avoided relying on Washington’s deterrence alone. Instead, they developed a strategy built on three interlocking elements: cultivating deeper security guarantees from the United States; pursuing de-escalation with Iran; and, for some states, engaging Israel. The premise was that these three tracks, operating together, would allow the Gulf states to do what small and medium powers in volatile neighborhoods have always sought to do: remain protected without being consumed by the conflicts of others. Not every Gulf state pursued all three tracks equally, but the underlying logic was widely shared. Today, each of the three actors at the center of this strategy, Washington, Tehran, and Tel Aviv, have, in different ways, deepened the insecurity they were meant to manage. [Continue reading…]