핵심요약

• 이란의 공격은 GCC 지역에 총 공격의 약 83%가 도달했습니다.
• UAE는 다른 국가보다 더 많은 공격을 흡수하며 높은 위험에 노출되었습니다.
• 양측은 60일간 호르무즈 해협의 상업적 항행을 재개하는 중간 프레임워크를 합의했습니다.
• 강대국 전쟁의 근접성이 지역 국가들에게는 표 없이 노출을 의미합니다.

도입

본 기사는 미국과 이란 간의 전쟁이 중동 골프 지역에 미친 직접적인 군사적 충격과 그로 인한 지정학적 위험을 분석합니다. 이는 단순히 지역 분쟁을 넘어, 세계 자본의 안전지대로 인식되던 국가들이 강대국 갈등에 노출될 때 발생하는 실질적인 위험 프리미엄을 이해하는 데 중요합니다. 골프 국가들의 경험은 국제 분쟁의 결과가 지역 경제와 에너지 흐름에 즉각적이고 비대칭적인 영향을 미친다는 점을 시사합니다.

본문 1: 군사적 보복과 지정학적 현실

이란이 미국에 대한 공격을 넘어 골프 국가들을 대상으로 보복한 행위는 지정학적 위험의 즉각적인 현실을 보여줍니다. 이란이 GCC 영토에 83%에 달하는 미사일과 드론 공격을 가한 것은 단순한 군사적 행위를 넘어, 해당 지역의 안보 구조와 에너지 공급망에 대한 직접적인 위협이었습니다. 특히 UAE가 다른 국가보다 많은 공격을 흡수했다는 사실은, 지역 내에서 공격의 분산과 흡수 능력의 불균형이 존재하며, 이는 골프 국가들이 강대국 간의 충돌에서 취약한 위치에 있음을 의미합니다. 이는 외교적 합의나 공식적인 선언 없이도, 강대국의 갈등이 지역의 물리적 경계를 침범하며 즉각적인 위험을 발생시킨다는 점을 입증합니다.

본문 2: 외교적 프레임워크의 성격과 에너지 시장의 변동성

군사적 충돌 속에서 도출된 외교적 결과물인 모드베른(Memorandum of Understanding)은 평화 조약이 아닌 14가지 조항으로 구성된 임시 프레임워크라는 점에서 주목할 만합니다. 이 프레임워크는 호르무즈 해협을 60일간 상업적 운송을 재개하는 내용을 포함하며, 이는 에너지 시장의 변동성에 직접적인 영향을 미칩니다. 해협의 재개는 유가와 해상 운송 비용에 즉각적인 영향을 미치며, 이는 골프 국가들의 경제적 취약성을 더욱 부각시킵니다. 즉, 분쟁의 종식 과정에서 도출된 합의는 공식적인 평화가 아닌 일시적인 통제와 상업적 이익을 위한 타협이라는 점에서, 장기적인 안보 문제 해결보다는 단기적인 경제적 안정에 초점이 맞춰져 있음을 해석할 수 있습니다. 이러한 불확실성은 투자자들이 지역의 장기적 안정성을 평가할 때 반드시 고려해야 할 핵심 변수입니다.

본문 3: 장기적 전망과 위험 관리

이러한 사건은 골프 국가들이 강대국의 지정학적 경쟁에서 '표'를 행사하기보다는 '노출'을 감수해야 하는 현실을 명확히 합니다. 장기적인 관점에서 볼 때, 지역 안정은 단기적인 군사적 휴전이나 임시 협정에 의존하기보다는, 강대국 간의 상호 의존성을 관리하고 다자간 협력을 강화하는 구조적 접근에 달려 있습니다. 골프 국가들은 에너지 자원의 공급 안정성과 해협의 자유로운 통행을 보장하는 다자간 메커니즘을 구축함으로써, 개별 국가의 안보 문제를 넘어선 지역 전체의 안정성을 확보해야 할 것입니다. 이는 단기적인 경제적 기회와 장기적인 지정학적 위험 사이의 복잡한 균형을 요구합니다.

결론

이번 사태는 강대국 간의 전쟁이 지역의 물리적 경계를 넘어 지역 경제와 에너지 흐름에 즉각적인 영향을 미치는 지정학적 현실을 극명하게 보여줍니다. 골프 국가들은 단기적인 외교적 합의를 통해 에너지 통로의 일시적 개방이라는 실질적 이익을 확보했지만, 근본적인 안보 문제는 여전히 해결되지 않았습니다. 향후 골프 지역의 안정성은 다자간 협력과 에너지 인프라의 상호 의존성을 관리하는 구조적 노력에 달려있다는 점을 주목해야 할 것입니다. 시장은 이러한 지정학적 변동성이 에너지 가격과 지역 경제에 미치는 영향을 지속적으로 모니터링해야 할 것입니다.

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The Gulf in the Aftermath of the U.S.- Iran War - horn review

In the early hours of February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States launched Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Epic Fury, opening a war whose first salvo killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with his defense minister, the armed forces chief of staff, and the IRGC commander. Within hours, Iran began retaliating not only against Israel but across the Arab Gulf, treating American basing and Emirati-Israeli alignment as legitimate targets in a war the Gulf states had neither declared nor been meaningfully consulted on. By the time a ceasefire took hold, Iran had fired the overwhelming majority of its missiles and drones not at Israel but at its Gulf neighbors, roughly 83 percent of total strikes landed on GCC territory, with the UAE absorbing more attacks than any other country in the conflict, Israel included. The states that had spent two decades building reputations as safe havens for global capital discovered, in the space of weeks, that proximity to a great-power war confers exposure without conferring a vote.

What followed defied both the swift regime collapse that Israeli planners had promised Washington and the all-consuming regional conflagration that some in Tehran’s leadership had threatened. Iran’s government did not fall; Khamenei’s son Mojtaba was installed as successor within days, and an embattled but functioning state apparatus continued fighting for months. The war ground through a failed April round of talks in Islamabad, a US naval blockade of Iranian ports imposed in mid-April, and a slow, halting diplomatic track that finally produced the Memorandum of Understanding, signed remotely by Presidents Trump and President Pezeshkian on June 17. The memorandum is not a peace treaty. It is a fourteen-point interim framework: an end to hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping (toll-free, for sixty days only), a partial unwinding of the naval blockade, and a sixty-day negotiating window to address the issues the document conspicuously does not resolve,Iran’s nuclear stockpile, its ballistic missile program, and the future of its regional proxy network. For the Gulf states, who were not party to the negotiations and whose only formal channel into the process ran through Pakistani, Qatari, Saudi, Turkish, and Egyptian facilitation roles rather than a seat at the table, the settlement confirmed what four months of bombardment had already taught them: they bore the most concentrated regional cost of the war and exercised the least influence over how it ended.

I. ECONOMIC COST: A WAR THAT CAME TO THEM

The regional energy toll was severe and unevenly distributed. Iranian strikes damaged roughly eighty energy facilities across the GCC, with reconstruction costs estimated above fifty-eight billion dollars by mid-2026 and direct infrastructure losses already exceeding twenty-five billion dollars by early April, according to Welligence’s energy sector analysis. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex absorbed a strike that eliminated an estimated seventeen percent of national LNG export capacity, roughly three percent of global supply, with QatarEnergy declaring force majeure on exports and warning the damage would persist for years. Bahrain’s Sitra refinery sustained damage with no clear restoration timeline. The UAE’s Habshan gas processing plant, struck twice by interception debris, is not expected to return to full operation before 2027.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran imposed on March 4 and which the US Navy then compounded with a counter-blockade on Iranian ports beginning April 13, produced what the International Energy Agency characterized as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Combined Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Saudi, and Emirati oil production fell by roughly 6.7 million barrels per day within the war’s first two weeks, and by at least 10 million barrels per day by mid-March, even as Saudi Arabia and the UAE partially offset losses by diverting flows through overland pipelines built decades earlier as insurance against precisely this scenario, the Saudi East-West pipeline to Yanbu and the Emirati Habshan-Fujairah line. Those states without comparable alternative routes fared far worse: Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar’s LNG exports were effectively halted. The closure also triggered what regional economists termed a grocery supply emergency, since the GCC imports roughly seventy percent of its food and over eighty percent of its caloric intake through Hormuz; by mid-March, seventy percent of regional food imports were disrupted, consumer prices for staples spiked between forty and one hundred twenty percent, and retailers resorted to emergency air freight. The blockade’s threat to desalinated water, which supplies over ninety percent of drinking water in Qatar and Bahrain and the majority in Kuwait, Oman, and the UAE pushed the crisis, briefly, toward a humanitarian register rather than a purely fiscal one.

The World Bank downgraded its 2026 GCC growth forecast from 4.4 percent to 1.3 percent; Oxford Economics projected outright recession in parts of the bloc for the second half of the year. Tourism and aviation, two pillars of Gulf economic diversification, absorbed disproportionate damage: Dubai hotel occupancy was projected by Moody’s to collapse from roughly eighty percent before the war to ten percent in the second quarter, more than thirty thousand regional flights were cancelled in the war’s first month, and jet fuel costs rose ninety percent above their annual average. Saudi Aramco, paradoxically, posted a twenty-six percent first-quarter profit increase on the back of price spikes and pipeline diversion, a reminder that the war’s costs and benefits within the GCC were never evenly shared, even among states formally aligned against the same threat.

II. THE GCC FRACTURE LINES: A BLOC DIVIDED BY ITS OWN EXPOSURE

The Gulf Cooperation Council entered the war already strained by years of Saudi-Emirati competition over capital, business climate, and regional influence, rivalries rooted in Vision 2030’s competition with the Emirati diversification strategy, divergent approaches to Yemen, and tension over the UAE’s deepening security relationship with Israel. These fractures were not confined to security policy alone. Even within economic coordination frameworks, divergence had begun to surface, most notably in the UAE’s decision to withdraw from OPEC production constraints, signaling Abu Dhabi’s willingness to prioritize national economic autonomy over collective alignment. The war did not create these divisions; it operationalized them into starkly different national strategies under fire.

Saudi Arabia, having normalized relations with Iran in 2023 under Chinese mediation, pursued de-escalation throughout the conflict, backing the Pakistani-led Islamabad process and explicitly warning that prolonged war threatened its diversification agenda and risked drawing the Houthis into renewed confrontation along its Red Sea export corridor. Bahrain and Kuwait, traditionally deferential to Saudi foreign policy, followed Riyadh’s lead in calling for accommodation.

The UAE took the opposite path. Having absorbed more Iranian strikes than any other state in the war, Abu Dhabi moved toward open operational alignment with Israel and the United States, accepting Israeli-made Iron Dome interceptor batteries and, according to reporting later in the conflict, conducting its own retaliatory strike on an Iranian refinery on Lavan Island, an action Washington reportedly welcomed rather than discouraged. UAE officials, including Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed and presidential adviser Anwar Gargash, publicly characterized Iranian strikes as terrorism and called for any eventual settlement to include reparations and binding security guarantees that the Islamabad Memorandum does not provide.

Oman and Qatar, by contrast, converted their long-standing role as Gulf-Iran intermediaries into wartime relevance. Oman’s foreign ministry maintained direct diplomatic contact with Tehran even after Omani territory and shipping were targeted, and Muscat notably extended congratulations to Iran’s new supreme leadership, a gesture neither Riyadh nor Abu Dhabi was prepared to make. The asymmetry between Gulf states’ physical exposure and their diplomatic posture toward Iran has, if anything, widened rather than narrowed the bloc’s internal divide. The state hit hardest, the UAE, has hardened; the states with functioning channels to Tehran, Oman and Qatar, have preserved them; and Saudi Arabia has attempted, with only partial success, to hold a centrist position between the two poles. Analysts at the Atlantic Council and elsewhere have concluded that a NATO-style integrated GCC security architecture remains unlikely precisely because Riyadh and Abu Dhabi each regard the other as an unacceptable candidate for regional leadership, a structural rivalry the war has reinforced rather than dissolved.

III. THE AMERICAN SHIELD: PERFORMANCE UNDER FIRE

The Gulf states’ arms purchases and basing arrangements with Washington were premised on an implicit promise of protection that the war’s opening days immediately complicated: none of the GCC states had been consulted before Operation Epic Fury began, despite hosting the American forces and infrastructure that Iran subsequently targeted in retaliation. The disjunction between the scale of Gulf financial commitment to the US relationship, recent pledges totaling roughly two trillion dollars in American investment, alongside extensive defense procurement, and the absence of Gulf input into a decision that exposed their territory to sustained bombardment, has become a defining grievance of the post-war period.

Washington’s subsequent diplomatic conduct deepened rather than resolved this grievance. The Trump administration pursued, and ultimately signed, an interim memorandum that left core Gulf security demands, explicit Iranian security guarantees, war reparations, dismantlement of Iran’s missile and proxy networks entirely unaddressed, deferring them to a sixty-day negotiating window with no guarantee of resolution. Israel, notably, was not a party to the US-Iran memorandum and has stated its intention to continue military operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon regardless of the agreement’s language, a reminder to Gulf capitals that even the framework meant to end the war does not bind all the parties whose actions shape their security environment. The result is an enduring rupture in Gulf strategic assumptions: the war demonstrated that an expensive, decades-deep American security relationship neither prevented a war that originated in decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem nor guaranteed Gulf states a voice in how that war concluded.

IV. IRAN AFTER THE MEMORANDUM: CONSTRAINED, NOT CONTAINED

The Memorandum leaves Iran’s nuclear program in a genuinely ambiguous position. Rather than dismantling Iranian enrichment capacity, the agreement requires both parties to maintain a status quo pending final terms, commits Iran only to a future, unspecified mechanism for down-blending its enriched uranium stockpile, and includes no enforceable cap on the ballistic missile program or restrictions on Iran’s regional partners. Arms control specialists have characterized the deal as fundamentally a non-nuclear agreement, one that halted active combat without resolving the proliferation concern that triggered the war in the first place. Iranian leverage in the subsequent sixty-day negotiating window is reinforced by the memorandum’s economic provisions: immediate Treasury waivers permitting Iranian crude exports, a commitment to terminate the full architecture of UN, IAEA, and US sanctions on an agreed schedule, the release of frozen assets, and most strikingly, a stated commitment to develop a reconstruction and economic development plan for Iran valued at roughly three hundred billion dollars, to be financed in part by regional partners.

For Gulf states already absorbing direct war damage in the tens of billions of dollars, the prospect of underwriting Iranian reconstruction, even framed as a stabilization investment rather than a concession represents precisely the leverage inversion that Kuwaiti and other regional security analysts had anticipated as a structural risk of any negotiated settlement reached without Gulf participation. Iran emerges from the war diplomatically rehabilitated by the optics of having endured assassination of its top leadership and sustained bombardment without total collapse, while several of the states that absorbed the bulk of its retaliatory fire are now being asked, implicitly, to help finance its recovery. The reputational and narrative shift compounds an underlying competitive threat: Iranian energy re-entry into international markets, once sanctions relief proceeds on schedule, will pressure the OPEC+ production architecture that Saudi Arabia has relied on as its primary instrument of oil-market statecraft, while Iranian gas development at South Pars, sharing the same geological reservoir as Qatar’s North Field will sharpen competition in Asian LNG markets precisely as Qatar’s own Ras Laffan capacity remains degraded from wartime strikes.

V. STRATEGIC ADAPTATION: HEDGING AFTER EXPOSURE

The war has accelerated diversification strategies that GCC states had pursued cautiously before February 2026 and are now pursuing with evident urgency. Within a month of the first Iranian strikes, Ukraine concluded ten-year defense cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, reflecting Gulf interest in lower-cost, combat-tested counter-drone systems as a complement to American point-defense systems that proved insufficiently dense to intercept the volume of Iranian drone and missile traffic. Gulf capitals have simultaneously revived interest in the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor as a hedge against Hormuz vulnerability, and Saudi Arabia is reportedly examining further expansion of its overland pipeline capacity infrastructure investments that function as insurance against a repeat closure rather than confidence that one will not recur.

The deeper adaptation is institutional and psychological rather than infrastructural. The shared experience of exposure is unlikely to produce GCC unity, precisely because the war’s differential impact UAE hardline, Saudi accommodationist, Omani and Qatari intermediary has widened rather than narrowed the bloc’s strategic divergence. The BRICS framework that several Gulf states joined as a hedge against Western dependence proved unable to produce so much as a joint statement on the war, paralyzed by the simultaneous membership of Iran and the UAE on opposing sides of the conflict, a vivid demonstration that multipolar hedging strategies offer diversification of economic exposure without offering a coherent alternative security architecture. What emerges instead is a GCC moving toward parallel, state-specific hedging: deeper but separately negotiated security relationships with Washington, selective technology and defense partnerships with Ukraine, India, and China, and continued economic diversification pursued nationally rather than collectively, even as the rhetoric of Gulf unity persists in summit communiqués.

The Gulf’s Way Forward: Aftermath and Strategic Trajectories

The aftermath of the 2026 war is not defined by destruction alone, but by the exposure of structural limits that had long been obscured. External guarantees have proven conditional, deterrence has become more contested, and internal fragmentation remains unresolved. These conditions now shape the pathways available to Gulf states.

The first trajectory is collective balancing. The shock of exposure pushes GCC states toward deeper coordination in defense and strategic planning. This reflects a balance-of-power response, where shared vulnerability compels unity. If realized, it could restore a degree of regional agency, though it requires overcoming entrenched political divisions.

The second is adaptive dependency. Gulf states adjust to the new environment while maintaining reliance on external security providers. This aligns with dependency dynamics, where adaptation occurs within existing hierarchies rather than through their transformation. Stability is maintained, but vulnerability persists beneath the surface.

The third is fragmented hedging. Diverging threat perceptions and strategic priorities lead states to pursue individualized policies, strengthening bilateral ties or selectively accommodating regional actors. This reflects hedging under uncertainty, but in the aftermath context, it risks accelerating internal fragmentation and reducing collective resilience.

Source: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMihwFBVV95cUxQRlVEajI0MFBHWml3SElhSEVCSzNBTEg0TkNPbkJIck5HZ29nMmJxQ3lvQ0VzUnJPRXp3bFJSYk9zeE1hV3p6M1FmZ0FLYUhxOFZoeFRmbEE4YlNiOXc5ZTloY3lMVnhCM2poR19pdVU2T1l6Rm9NXzluaHhwaVkxeTM3aHU2TTQ?oc=5