The Axis at Their Front Door: How the Gulf Lives With the Moscow-Tehran Alliance

At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz measures roughly 39 kilometres. On the northern shore, Iran operates Bandar Abbas, its principal naval base, home to the IRGC Navy's fast attack craft, coastal cruise missile batteries, and mine-laying capabilities. On the southern shore sit the ports that sustain the economies of the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar. Through this gap passes approximately one-fifth of the world's daily oil supply. When European capitals debate the legality of military action against Iran, they do so from a distance of 4,000 kilometres. The Gulf states measure the same question in minutes of missile flight time.

The Russian Umbrella Over Tehran

For decades, the Gulf's security calculus operated on a simple assumption: international pressure, led by the United States and channelled through the UN Security Council, would eventually constrain Iran. Russia's deepening alignment with Tehran has dismantled that assumption.

The trajectory is measurable. In 2016, Russia completed delivery of S-300 air defence systems to Iran, a deal originally signed in 2007 and frozen under international pressure. By 2022, the relationship had reversed direction: Iran began supplying Shahed drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, opening a channel of military co-production that neither side had previously risked. In January 2025, the two governments signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that formalised what had already become structural.

Russia provides Iran with something no amount of IRGC fighters or proxy networks can deliver on their own: diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council. When Houthi forces attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea through late 2023 and into 2024, Russia abstained on a UNSC resolution condemning the attacks and pushed amendments that would have weakened the text. When Western states sought tighter sanctions enforcement against Iranian weapons proliferation, Moscow consistently shielded Tehran from the sharpest measures. For Gulf capitals that had counted on multilateral mechanisms to contain Iran, the Russian umbrella transformed the threat from containable to persistent.

Proxies With a Return Address

The Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, IRGC-aligned militias within Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, Iranian-backed fighters in Syria: these are not disparate insurgencies but coordinated instruments of Iranian power projection. Gulf states have tracked this architecture for years. What the Moscow-Tehran axis changed is the cost of confronting it.

Since November 2023, Houthi forces have attacked more than 100 commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The weapons used, including cruise missiles and long-range drones, bear Iranian design signatures that Western intelligence agencies have documented extensively. The Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint now mirrors the Hormuz chokepoint: two narrow waterways, both within range of Iranian-supplied weaponry, bracketing the Arabian Peninsula from the south and the east.

For Saudi Arabia, the reference event remains the September 2019 attack on the Aramco facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais. Drone and cruise missile strikes, attributed to Iran by Saudi, American, and European investigators, temporarily knocked out roughly half of Saudi Arabia's oil processing capacity. It was the single largest disruption of global oil supply since Saddam Hussein's forces set Kuwait's fields ablaze in 1991. Tehran faced no military consequence. The lesson registered across every Gulf capital.

The Abraham Accords as Counter-Architecture

When the Abraham Accords were signed in the autumn of 2020, Western commentary focused on the historic normalisation between Israel and Arab states. In Gulf capitals, the calculus was different. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalised relations with Israel not primarily as a peace gesture but as the foundation of an anti-Iran security network.

The sequence matters. The UAE announced its normalisation agreement on 13 August 2020, with Bahrain following at the joint signing ceremony on 15 September. Sudan agreed to normalise ties on 23 October, Morocco on 10 December. Within months, Israel and the UAE established intelligence-sharing frameworks and conducted joint military exercises. Bahrain, which hosts the US Fifth Fleet and sits just 200 kilometres from Iran's coast, gained a direct security channel to Israel's missile defence capabilities and signals intelligence.

Saudi Arabia's parallel track has proceeded more cautiously. The Gaza war disrupted the timeline of formal normalisation, but the underlying logic has not changed. Riyadh's interest in a defence relationship with Israel is driven by the same calculation: when multilateral institutions fail to contain Iran, bilateral security networks fill the gap. Iran understood the Accords precisely in these terms and condemned them accordingly.

Europe's Debate, the Gulf's Reality

From Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or Manama, the European debate over whether strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities are permissible under international law sounds like a conversation from a different planet. European foreign policy statements on Iran consistently emphasise diplomatic engagement and the revival of the JCPOA framework. Gulf states, having watched the JCPOA collapse and Iran's nuclear programme accelerate, view this emphasis as either naive or negligent.

The disconnect is structural, not cultural. European capitals operate under the assumption that time permits deliberation. Gulf governments operate under the assumption that deterrence must be immediate. The 2019 Aramco attack demonstrated what happens when deterrence fails and the international community does not respond with force. From the Gulf perspective, Steinmeier's invocation of international law as a constraint on military action against Iran is not a principled position but a description of the mechanism that keeps Iran unaccountable.

This is the argument Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor compressed into a single phrase when he warned that Steinmeier's logic amounts to "a dream for the Moscow-Tehran axis." Gulf diplomats would not have used the same words. But the strategic assessment aligns.

From the Gulf to Europe

Iran's threat architecture is not confined to the Middle East. European intelligence agencies have repeatedly documented Iranian operations on European soil: the arrest in 2018 and subsequent conviction in 2021 of Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi for planning a bomb attack against an MEK opposition rally near Paris, the activities of IRGC-linked cells tracked by the Dutch AIVD and the German BfV, the years of tolerance extended to Hezbollah's so-called political wing in Europe before Germany finally banned all Hezbollah activities in April 2020.

Gulf states observe these European revelations with a mixture of recognition and frustration. Recognition, because the actor is familiar. Frustration, because Europe's response to Iranian operations on its own soil has remained measured where Gulf states would call it insufficient. The same network that targets dissidents in The Hague operates across the Persian Gulf. The same organisation that built financial infrastructure in German cities funds militias in Beirut.

The distance between the European legal debate and the Gulf's security reality is not merely geographic. It is attitudinal. Gulf states have calibrated their entire defence posture around the threat that Iran poses. Europe is still deciding whether to call it one.