One expert said it was ‘highly unlikely’ the US Fifth Fleet will ever return to the Gulf state of Bahrain
At least a dozen US military sites across the Gulf region have been so badly damaged by Iran’s retaliation to US and Israeli attacks that their presence now creates significantly more vulnerabilities than it does benefits, a slate of Middle East experts argued on Thursday.
As per the report published in Middle East Eye, the original revelation about the state of the bases was first reported in The New York Times last month, in which they were described as “all but uninhabitable”.
The Trump administration has yet to acknowledge the extent of the damage sustained.
“This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month,” Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University, said at the Arab Center Washington DC’s annual conference.
“We are not seeing a full and accurate reporting of the extent of damage that has been done to US bases in the region,” he added.
Access to these sites – some of which are logistical hubs and not necessarily active bases – is tightly controlled by both the Pentagon and the Gulf states themselves: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman.
Last month, they banned the photography and dissemination of any videos of missiles in their skies, leading many to speculate whether the motive was to shield US bases as they launched attacks on Iran.
Gulf leaders had previously pledged not to permit the US to use bases on their territory for the war.
“My friends in the region, they’ll send me pictures of the base in Bahrain,” Lynch said, referring to Naval Support Activity on the island, which is home to the US Fifth Fleet and houses some 9,000 military personnel.
“The bases around the region are suffering real damage, and I think it’s very unlikely that we’re ever going to go back and put our Fifth Fleet back in Bahrain. It’s too vulnerable,” he added.
“So in a sense, the entire purpose of ‘America’s Middle East’ has come crashing down [and] we don’t have an alternative way yet of articulating or thinking about what might replace it.”
‘Less of a benefit, more of a liability’
Altogether, there are 19 disclosed sites run by the US military across the Middle East region – an area that runs from Egypt across to Iraq, and from northern Syria down to southern Oman.
These sites can encompass up to 50,000 soldiers altogether.
The deployment of US troops to the region dates back to the late 1950s, but the current size and scope of the active bases in the Gulf specifically materialised after the 1990 Gulf War, in which the US intervened to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
The deal was for protection in exchange for oil and petrodollars.
But in light of the US-Israeli war on Iran, that transaction hasn’t worked out so well for the Gulf, which now has severely depleted interceptor stocks, was forced to shut down airports and schools, and has most recently taken Iranian hits to its energy production facilities.
“When the benefits of a transactional approach like that begin to erode so much from one side, then that relationship is going to fray,” Shana R Marshall, associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, said at the conference.
It is, however, not the first time, she acknowledged.
Marshall pointed to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombings in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when 19 US soldiers were killed by the group later identified as Hezbollah in the Hijaz.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s stated grievances also initially revolved around the basing of US military forces in the Gulf, Marshall noted.
“Close relations with the US, whether it’s US military bases or promoting normalisation with Israel, or enforcing US sanctions or maintaining the dollar peg of their currencies, is less a benefit now than actually a liability,” she said.
Unexpected moves
While the last seven weeks of war have made it clear that the Gulf states can no longer fully rely on the US as a security partner, they may start looking to Israel as a security partner, Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said on the panel.
The reliance on the US was further hampered by the fact that this week’s ceasefire agreement did not explicitly end Iranian attacks on US-adjacent assets in the Gulf states, leading many in the Gulf to express a sense of betrayal.
“Those bases were not a deterrent against Iranian attacks. Instead, they became the target of those attacks. They became magnets for those attacks, and as a result, reliance on the American security umbrella really seems to be in shatters,” Parsi explained.
One outcome of this may be the Gulf turning towards Israel to make up for their inability to “find some sort of an arrangement with Iran”, he said.
This shift could take place even if there are no “US concessions” involved as there were in the Abraham Accords, Parsi added, referring to the 2020 normalisation agreements between some Arab nations and Israel, which were driven by particular US security guarantees.
“There may be some sort of a gravitation towards Israel among some of these [Gulf] states, if they believe that they either cannot or do not want to find a new relationship with Iran,” he said.
