The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia carried out multiple strikes against Iran after their countries were attacked by the regime in the early days of the war, showing the depth of the Gulf states’ involvement in the conflict and how much the region’s geopolitics have been transformed.
Before the war, strikes by the Gulf states on their large and heavily armed neighbor and rival for power in the Middle East would have been unthinkable. But new details have emerged that give a clearer picture of how directly they fought in the war, upending a careful balance the countries had sought to achieve.
The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia are now trying to re-establish deterrence against an Iranian regime that is less willing to compromise and holds new leverage over rivals with its chokehold on Strait of Hormuz and deep supplies of missiles and drones that are draining the Gulf’s stockpiles of munitions needed to intercept them.
The strikes by the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia came after Tehran attacked energy facilities and civilian infrastructure in both countries.
The U.A.E. engaged as early as the first week of the war and struck repeatedly using warplanes and Chinese-made drones in coordination with Israel and the U.S., people familiar with the matter said.
Saudi Arabia’s air force carried out multiple strikes on targets that included Iranian drone and missile-launch sites, one of the officials said. Saudi warplanes also hit targets in Iraq linked to Iranian-backed militias, some of the people said.
The Arab monarchies have long seen Iran as their top security threat, but they also have deep economic and social ties with the country. Their resort to military force—following thousands of drone and missile attacks by Iran—shows the difficulty of returning to the previous status quo.
“All of them were dragged into a situation they didn’t want and they had to make very difficult choices, and they really only have had bad options since the U.S. and Israel launched this war,” said Anna Jacobs, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “We’re starting to see different views on engagement with Iran even now.”
It wasn’t clear whether the Saudi or U.A.E. strikes did meaningful damage or had any lasting influence on Iran’s conduct in the war. Both the Pentagon and the Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
Though both countries carried out strikes, Saudi Arabia has since favored a more diplomatic approach with Iran, while the Emirates has doubled down on its relationship with the U.S. and Israel, urging a more aggressive response to the Iranian regime.
The energy-rich Arab states of the Gulf have long had difficult relations with Iran. Their neighbor advanced its ambitions of regional power through ties with Russia and China and support for a network of mostly Shiite militia groups that contributed to instability in the Middle East.
Gulf countries have deep defense ties with the U.S. and have trained alongside American forces for decades. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in hardware to upgrade their militaries and host U.S. bases.
“This war was a threshold-crossing event in so many different ways,” said Dana Stroul, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. “And I think it is a watershed moment in how Gulf air forces—specifically the Saudis and the Emiratis, which have the most capable air forces of the Gulf countries, moved from using them in defensive ways to offensive ways.”
After the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Gulf Arab states backed rebels in Syria, while Iran sent paramilitary forces that helped prop up the brutal regime of former President Bashar al-Assad. The two camps have long backed rival factions in Lebanon, where Iran supports Hezbollah, a militia and political party that is at war with Israel.
Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. also fought against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. A 2019 missile-and-drone attack on a Saudi oil facility that was attributed to Iran foreshadowed this year’s violence.
Confronted with the risks of such violence, Gulf powers began to repair relations with Iran in more recent years, with Saudi Arabia restoring diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2023.
In the months leading up to the war, most Gulf States, led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, urged the Trump administration not to launch the war, fearing the instability that would result.
When the American-Israeli bombing campaign began in late February, Iran retaliated by launching salvos of missiles and drones at U.S. bases and globally important oil and gas facilities—but also at airports, seaports, luxury hotels and high-rise buildings, aiming to create economic chaos across the Gulf. The attacks on national infrastructure were a red line for both the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia. Those strikes, along with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, threatened a generational economic setback for the Gulf states, which are among the world’s most important energy exporters.
The attacks upended years of careful balancing acts by countries like the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, where officials held daily crisis meetings to re-evaluate the country’s military posture.
“The most telling thing about these reported strikes is that both countries felt that U.S. protection wasn’t enough; that they needed to act independently to re-establish deterrence vis-à-vis Iran,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “We are far from the days of a U.S. security umbrella.”
The U.A.E. has taken the most hawkish approach to Iran, including attacking a refinery in retaliation for Iran’s strikes on national infrastructure in the country, people familiar with the matter said.
“I am very proud that the U.A.E. did not just sit idly and do nothing. It seems that the U.A.E. had enough confidence,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist who is familiar with government thinking. “We are not a sitting duck. We are not easy targets.”
The Emirates has long had a high appetite for risk and a willingness to use military power to advance its interests in the region. In recent years it has sent weapons to militias in Libya and Sudan and mercenaries to Yemen in a series of operations designed to outflank regional rivals.
But it isn’t clear yet whether it has the capacity to deter a much bigger, closer enemy like Iran. The aggressive stance risks making it a target in what has become a slow burning conflict with occasional flare-ups. Earlier in May, Iran attacked an important oil port in the emirate of Fujairah after the U.S. Navy launched an operation to break Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
“They are in a trap, because they cannot defend their own interests without having the U.S. threat hanging over Iran’s head,” said Yasmine Farouk, the project director for the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula at International Crisis Group.
Rather than uniting the Gulf countries against their common opponent, the war has deepened a schism between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates in which the two have taken diverging approaches to Iran.
Saudi Arabia has since adopted a more accommodating posture, pushing for diplomatic solutions to a conflict that has put its vast energy facilities at risk at a time when budgetary pressures are piling up at home. The U.A.E. also exited the Saudi-dominated oil cartel OPEC earlier in May.
“There’s no turning back,” said Matthew Hedges, an academic and author of a book on the U.A.E.’s political system. “You either double down with Trump, with the Israelis, with Western interests, and that’s what the Emiratis have done, whereas, increasingly over time the Saudis have done the opposite.”
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com, Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com and Shelby Holliday at shelby.holliday@wsj.com