The United States has remained the preeminent external power since the Gulf states’ early years of independence, exerting influence through a dense network of bilateral and regional arrangements. The petrodollar arrangement, under which the U.S. provided a security umbrella to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and, in return, they priced and stabilized oil in U.S. dollars and reinvested the proceeds into dollar assets, entrenched a mutually reinforcing partnership. Washington institutionalized this security provision through formal and informal defense arrangements such as military bases, advanced defense infrastructure, and the deploy ment of troops in the region. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, the number of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia alone exceeded half a million personnel, attesting to the level of engagement.1 This deeply entrenched, decades-old security frame work underpins the U.S. primacy in the region. Crucially, these arrange ments extended beyond traditional security cooperation to encompass macroeconomic governance, regime security, and elite consensus building, thus profoundly shaping the domestic and foreign policies of the GCC countries across multiple sectors.