Editor’s Note: Francesco Salesio Schiavi is a Middle East international relations specialist focused on security, defense, and governance in the Levant and the Gulf. He is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute of Switzerland (MEIS) and a contributor to many international outlets, including Al-Monitor and the NATO Defense College Foundation. For five years, he has been a researcher for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), and since 2017, he coordinated the Middle East section of the Italian magazine Pandora.

By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project

Israel’s September 9 strike in Doha — Israel’s first direct attack on a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — jolted the region’s security architecture. Coming amid sensitive diplomacy to achieve a ceasefire in the two-year-old Gaza war, the raid violated Qatari sovereignty despite the country’s status as host of the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base and a Major Non-NATO Ally, raising uncomfortable questions about the credibility of long-relied-upon security guarantees.

An emergency summit of Arab and Islamic leaders in Doha on September 14-15 registered broad regional alarm, and two subsequent sessions of the GCC Joint Defense Council produced pledges to tighten intelligence sharing, accelerate a joint early-warning network, and launch near-term air-defense drills.

For Gulf capitals, the Doha strike pushed Israel from a peripheral variable to a central factor in their threat calculus, alongside Iran and its partners. It also intensified hedging behavior, including fresh outreach to Turkey and Egypt, and the elevation of defense ties between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On September 18, defense ministers and senior officials from the six GCC states — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman — convened in Doha to announce a package of collective defense measures. For the first time in years, Gulf capitals coupled collective-security language with a concrete drill cycle and technical objectives.

The measures revolve around three tracks: enhancing intelligence exchanges through the GCC Unified Military Command, accelerating the development of a joint early warning system against drones and missiles by linking national sensors into a shared operational picture, and improving readiness by transmitting real-time air situation data to all member states. Updated defense strategies and command-center drills are expected within three months, followed by a live air defense exercise to sustain political momentum.

The language in the final communiqué echoed the GCC’s 2000 Joint Defense Agreement, Article II, which outlined principles of mutual support in the event of aggression. Officials underscored that “the security of the GCC states is indivisible,” while condemning Israel’s strike “in the strongest terms.” Politically, this wording signals a more explicit commitment to collective security and a visible show of solidarity with Qatar.

Yet the pledges also highlight familiar gaps. Past initiatives have often faltered in implementation, raising doubts over whether the current sense of urgency will translate into sustained cooperation or fade into symbolism. Historically, GCC efforts such as the Peninsula Shield Force — the bloc’s long-standing but largely symbolic joint military force — have underperformed; many cooperative security initiatives have been driven by summitry rather than institutional backbone. The communiqué, for example, left key operational questions unresolved: how to harmonize rules of engagement, deconflict airspace, and determine who commands — and finances — surge deployments of high-value assets in case another member is targeted.

The region has long invested heavily in high-end missile and air defense systems. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE operate American-made Patriot PAC-3 and THAAD batteries. Doha supplements these with Norwegian-built NASAMS 3, while Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are in the process of acquiring South Korea’s Cheongung II KM-SAM for medium-range coverage. Russian Pantsir-S1 systems provide point defense against drones, and the major U.S. bases in Qatar and Bahrain host advanced radars and command-and-control nodes that underpin much of the region’s air surveillance network.

This patchwork was stress-tested on June 23 when Iran launched a large-scale missile strike on Al Udeid at the end of its 12-day war with Israel that the U.S. had joined by bombing Iranian nuclear sites. Qatari PAC-3 MSE interceptors, supported by U.S. early warning, reportedly neutralized nearly all of Tehran’s ballistic missiles. Still, the episode revealed that interoperability remains a major challenge, as platforms from different suppliers rely on distinct protocols, and joint exercises to harmonize them have been limited. Sustainability is another key concern. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have shown how interceptor stockpiles can be depleted rapidly under sustained salvos.

When Israel struck Doha on September 9, these defenses failed to respond. According to U.S. CENTCOM officials, the Pentagon had received no advance warning of the operation, leaving Qatari and U.S. systems at Al Udeid unable to activate in time. Other reports indicate that the strike was launched from over the Red Sea by about 15 Israeli fighter jets firing 10 precision munitions at a single target. The aircraft never entered Gulf airspace; instead, they released air-launched ballistic missiles that flew at very high altitudes — likely outside the Earth’s atmosphere — and approached Qatar from the northwest, crossing Saudi territory. This stand-off trajectory placed them beyond the effective reach of existing missile defenses, optimized for lower-altitude threats. U.S. defense officials later acknowledged that while Washington can detect global missile launches, tracking midcourse trajectories at extreme altitudes remains a limited capability. The episode exposed radar coverage gaps and coordination shortfalls within the allied early warning network. To address these vulnerabilities, Gulf states have diversified suppliers, launched co-production initiatives, and pursued closer integration with U.S. assets. But achieving genuine self-sufficiency is still years away and will require levels of technical coordination, trust, and political commitment that the bloc has historically struggled to sustain.

Shifting Threat Perceptions

For decades, Gulf threat perceptions have revolved around Iran, its network of regional partners, and transnational militant groups. Israel, by contrast, was often treated as a distant — if politically sensitive — actor, viewed through the lens of tacit alignment against Tehran or as a channel to Washington. However, as Arab Gulf countries have consolidated their political influence in the United States and Iran has weakened, the strategic necessity of even a tacit partnership with Israel has waned.

For the UAE, however, the calculus was distinct. The 2020 Abraham Accords were driven less by shared threat perceptions and more by a strategic bid to secure advanced U.S. defense technologies, deepen economic cooperation, and project an image of moderation and innovation on the global stage. While normalization initially promised geopolitical dividends, Israel’s expanding regional operations have since complicated Abu Dhabi’s balancing act between deterrence and diplomacy.

This shift has been further amplified by Israel’s increasingly aggressive and expansionist agenda, in which the strike on Qatar was seen as a turning point. As Majed al-Ansari, spokesperson for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry, put it: “Our region post-September 9 is not the same region as it was before.”

By violating the sovereignty of a U.S. ally hosting the region’s largest American base, Israel demonstrated both operational reach and a willingness to act unilaterally in the Gulf. Israeli military operations in Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and now the Gulf, are seen as part of a broader strategy to establish Israel as the regional hegemon. This not only undermines Gulf strategic autonomy but also tests GCC domestic legitimacy in the face of public anger over Israeli actions and threatens ambitious economic diversification strategies.

There are also growing doubts over U.S. reliability, long considered the cornerstone of Gulf defense. In a notable response, a U.S. Executive Order on September 29 offered Doha an explicit security guarantee superior to those extended to any other GCC member. Saudi Arabia is seeking similar assurances and de-facto Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is due to visit Washington on November 18.

A Crowded Landscape of Security Frameworks

The GCC’s renewed collective-defense pledges unfold against a backdrop of proliferating alternative and complementary security arrangements. After the Doha strike, Egypt revived  long-dormant plans for a NATO-style Arab alliance. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi used the September 14 Arab-Islamic summit to call for enhanced Arab military coordination, echoing Cairo’s 2015 proposal for a joint force with a Cairo-based headquarters, rotating command among Arab League members, and integrated land, air, and naval components, including specialized counterterrorism and peacekeeping units. Egyptian strategists see the current environment as a strategic opening to reassert Cairo’s role in Gulf security discussions and to counter fears of marginalization amid shifting Gulf–Israeli dynamics.

But for many Gulf capitals, Egypt’s proposal raises more questions than it answers. Some worry that a formal alliance could be interpreted by Israel as a direct military challenge, risking escalation rather than deterrence. Others note Egypt’s own constraints: Despite having the Arab world’s largest standing army, its forces have not engaged in high-intensity operations for decades, and Cairo lacks operational depth in Gulf defense structures. Overall, Egypt’s push for a joint Arab military force has so far stalled amid deep regional divisions and lack of consensus  — a dynamic further underscored by Cairo’s recent role as host of Israel–Hamas ceasefire talks in Sharm el-Sheikh rather than as the driver of a coordinated regional military response.

Perhaps most strikingly, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan announced a Joint Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement on September 17, eight days after the Doha strike. The pact commits both sides to mutual defense in the event of external aggression — a significant elevation of their decades-old security ties. The agreement blends Pakistani military expertise with Saudi financial and geographic resources, implicitly inserting Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent into the Gulf equation.

In parallel, Saudi Arabia has been in talks with the U.S. administration to conclude a comprehensive defense agreement, reportedly modeled on the US–Qatar pact. According to the Financial Times, Riyadh hopes to finalize the deal during the crown prince’s scheduled visit to Washington. However, the U.S. push for Saudi normalization with Israel could complicate progress toward a final agreement.

Taken together, these initiatives underscore a fluid, multipolar security environment.  Rather than relying on a single guarantor, GCC states are exploring multiple layers of protection. But whether they will bring more security or only more bureaucracy and confusion remains to be seen.