Buckle Your Seatbelts: The U.S. National Security Strategy and the Coming Turbulence in the Gulf
By Patrick Theros
On December 4, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, presenting it as a corrective to decades of American overreach. The document rejects “forever wars,” U.S. global domination, and diffuse commitments untethered from clear American national interests.
In theory, this language ought to reassure Gulf states long accustomed to oscillation between U.S. over-involvement and abrupt disengagement. In practice, however, it has produced the opposite effect. What Washington frames as restraint registers in the Gulf as uncertainty, while its notion of discipline resembles episodic coercion without commitment.
The implications of this shift were immediately apparent to me. On the eve of opening a policy roundtable at the Doha Forum on the future of U.S.–Gulf relations, the White House posted the NSS. I spent the night reading it and abandoned my prepared remarks. Instead of analysis, I closed with a warning drawn from experience rather than theory: fasten your seat belts and prepare for turbulence. This was not rhetorical flourish. I found it impossible to reconcile the document’s internal contradictions with the requirements of deterrence, reassurance, and continuity that underpin Gulf security. Gulf policymakers in the room did not disagree. They nodded, some grimly, because the document confirmed trends they already feared rather than clarifying American intent.
Strategic Ambiguity and Gulf Insecurity
The NSS leaves little margin for ambiguity in Gulf security planning. For states facing proximate threats, extended deterrence is not merely rhetorical but existential. Either U.S. protection is credible, or it is not.
The NSS includes language designed to reinforce America’s longstanding obligations in the Middle East. It asserts that Washington will prevent any adversary from dominating the region while ensuring energy flows and maritime chokepoints remain secure. At the same time, it emphasizes avoiding prolonged wars and insists that regional actors assume greater burdens under U.S. leverage. This is not a productive tension. It is a contradiction. The United States claims it will not dominate the region while reserving veto power over any regional equilibrium it finds unsatisfactory.
For Gulf states, this posture signals conditional engagement contingent on the preferences of whoever occupies the Oval Office. It also revives a familiar expectation: increased arms purchases as a substitute for strategic reassurance. Historically, Gulf monarchies calibrated their security around predictable American over-presence, sometimes resented, often criticized, but ultimately reliable. What the NSS proposes instead is transactional, personality-driven, episodic intervention. For states whose survival depends on long-term guarantees rather than improvisation, this shift is deeply destabilizing.
The destabilizing effect of this approach is most evident in its disjointed application of balance-of-power logic. The NSS warns against Iranian or external domination while treating alliances as transactional and reserving unilateral freedom of action for Washington. Consultation is replaced by instruction. Gulf leaders are expected to accept American decisions rather than participate in shaping them, despite their proximity to risk and deep regional knowledge.
The NSS’s treatment of Iran exposes deeper weaknesses. It assumes that Tehran will remain irredeemably hostile and expansionist indefinitely. That outcome is possible, but it is not the only plausible future. A serious national security strategy would prepare for multiple contingencies. Within Iran’s elite, currents have periodically favored economic integration with Gulf states as a pathway to influence and stability. Major conflict in the Gulf would be economically catastrophic for all littoral states, not just Iran. Treating permanent hostility as inevitable forecloses imaginative diplomacy and leaves Washington unprepared for shifts that may occur independently of U.S. intent.
In short, the balance of power in the Gulf depends on credible deterrence, reassurance during crises, and predictability of response. The NSS undermines all three. It defines no red lines vis-à-vis Iran, offers no clarity on Gulf security guarantees beyond arms sales, and elevates personalized “peace deals” over durable deterrence architectures. For Gulf states, this signals a U.S. presence that is reactive rather than structural. For Iran, and for other revisionist actors, it signals opportunity.
There Is More to the Gulf Than Oil
The NSS also conceptualizes the Middle East in ways that overlook strategic realities. The region appears primarily as a source of hydrocarbons and maritime chokepoints the United States wishes to protect for its own economic survival. The GCC states emerge less as strategic partners than as investment pools and energy suppliers. The document gives little attention to internal fragility in Iraq and Yemen, regime legitimacy pressures, sectarian and identity politics, or the demographic and labor dynamics shaping Gulf societies.
This narrow framing encourages short-term crisis management rather than long-term order. It also ignores the extent to which Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have spent the past decade pursuing diversification, hedging, and calibrated de-escalation to reduce dependence on any single external patron. The NSS neither reflects nor accommodates this evolution.
Credibility gaps further deepen Gulf skepticism. The NSS asserts that President Trump has secured peace in multiple major conflicts, including Israel–Iran, Pakistan–India, Armenia–Azerbaijan, and Gaza. Gulf leaders know better. No one in the region believes Israel–Iran hostility has been resolved, or that structural transformation has occurred between Pakistan and India. Assertions regarding Gaza ring hollow in societies where the war has generated profound public anger driven by perceptions of unconditional American support for Israeli actions.
What alarms Gulf capitals is not exaggeration per se, but strategic drift. Phase one of Gaza has dragged on far longer than anticipated, with no credible political horizon in sight. At the same time, Israel’s recognition of Somaliland has sharpened concerns that Israel, with American indulgence, is taking more concrete steps to extend its regional reach, this time into the Horn of Africa and the approaches to the Red Sea. For Gulf states whose security is intimately tied to maritime access and regional balance, these moves are not peripheral. They are cumulative and constitute a strategic threat.
The NSS’s silence on these dynamics suggests either profound misunderstanding or deliberate avoidance. Neither inspires confidence.
The NSS also treats American energy dominance as a strategic panacea. From the Gulf perspective, this framing carries irony. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar built energy leverage over decades in conjunction with American security guarantees. The NSS now substitutes U.S. production for Gulf centrality rather than treating the two as complementary. This concern is amplified by emerging U.S. engagement with Venezuela and announcements regarding U.S. control of Venezuelan oil exports. Bringing large volumes of Venezuelan oil back into global markets may serve short-term American objectives, but for the GCC it signals a willingness to accelerate the secular decline of oil prices in ways that directly undermine Gulf fiscal stability.
When Ideology Replaces Strategy
Layered atop these shortcomings are unmistakable ideological fingerprints. The NSS saturates its language with civilizational nationalism, cultural health, traditional families, and the rejection of “radical ideologies.” While some of this resonates domestically, it lands awkwardly in the Gulf. Gulf monarchies are socially conservative but strategically non-ideological. They seek partners focused on regime survival, economic transformation, technological autonomy, and calibrated de-escalation, not foreign policy filtered through American culture-war frames.
Personalization compounds this volatility. The NSS repeatedly elevates presidential instincts and deal-making. For Gulf leaders, this raises alarms. Personalized diplomacy lacks institutional memory, expires with leadership change, and generates asymmetric dependence. The Gulf remembers not only headline agreements but abrupt withdrawals, oscillating Iran policy, and sudden reversals.
This framing incentivizes GCC autonomy. Discussions with policymakers and academics make this clear. There is growing skepticism toward heavy investment in American AI platforms competing for global dominance. Many now argue that GCC funds should not invest in foreign AI development. Instead, they advocate indigenous systems, even at the cost of initial inferiority, on the logic that technological sovereignty is inseparable from political sovereignty. They expressed fear that reliance on foreign systems grants an unacceptable degree of leverage to the system provider. The NSS may not intend this outcome, but its logic drives it.
A Framework Without Guarantees
Taken together, the 2025 NSS maintains coherence of form but lacks strategic credibility. It asks Gulf states to accept greater risk under conditional protection, to substitute durable structure with personalized deal-making, and to trust restraint without reassurance. It downplays Gaza, misreads China’s role in the Gulf, and treats energy and security as transactional tools rather than pillars of long-term partnership.
Gulf policymakers draw the only conclusion available. They will not abandon the United States in favor of Chinese security guarantees, which no one expects Beijing to provide. Instead, they will hedge by investing in autonomy, diversifying partnerships, localizing strategic technology, and cautiously de-escalating where possible. They will also work to contain the political fallout of Gaza, an issue the NSS largely sidesteps but which absorbs Gulf populations and confronts their governments daily. President Trump’s initial 28-point plan to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict concluded with a two-state solution. Gulf leaders will do what they can to hold him to that commitment.
Seen in that light, the advice to fasten seat belts was not rhetorical. The Gulf no longer expects consistency from Washington, only episodes. In such an environment, strategic autonomy is not defiance. It is survival.