Beyond the Single Security Guarantor? Emerging Polycentrism Across Scales, Multi-Alignments, and Securitization and Militarization in the Gulf
For decades, Gulf security rested on the assumption of a reliable US guarantee. That assumption is now contested. Shifts in US domestic politics, a more transactional approach to alliances, uneven responses to attacks on Gulf territory, and regional wars have pushed Gulf states to diversify their security partnerships without abandoning Washington. Rather than a single extra-regional pole reproducing a clear hierarchy under its security umbre ...
Abstract
For decades, Gulf security rested on the assumption of a reliable US guarantee. That assumption is now contested. Shifts in US domestic politics, a more transactional approach to alliances, uneven responses to attacks on Gulf territory, and regional wars have pushed Gulf states to diversify their security partnerships without abandoning Washington. Rather than a single extra-regional pole reproducing a clear hierarchy under its security umbrella, constellations of actors across scales, with asymmetric capabilities and unequal reach, are forging deeper links and estranging relations – often, simultaneously – in a complex web of multi-alignments and strategic hedging patterns, creating new tensions between interdependence and autonomy. The Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (2025) and the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement (2026) are clear examples. They sit alongside deeper ties with China, India, the EU, and other powers from outside the region, as well as evolving coalitions with actors across the broader Middle East and in conflicts in peripheral and adjacent spaces. Against the backdrop of US policy volatility, this workshop interrogates these emerging practices, policies, strategies, alignments, alliances, and arrangements through the lenses of polycentrism, securitization, and militarization in International Relations, exploring the conditions, drivers, processes, outcomes, and implications – or lack thereof – for security and defense as constitutive of order(ing).• How is the changing US-GCC relationship shaping the emergence of polycentric politics? • What patterns of (multi)alignment arise and what do they deliver in practice? • Are these relations informed by securitization and/or militarization dynamics? Who defines the threat, what is threatened, and with what material and ideational consequences? Where are security and military logics defining policy, strategy, agreements, and with whom? • How are polycentrism and multiplicity amidst securitized and/or militarized relations impacting on the governance of spaces, flows, and peoples within and around the Gulf?
Description and Rationale
For more than four decades, security in the Gulf rested on an implicit bargain with the United States. From the Carter Doctrine to the 1991 Gulf War and beyond, this produced an order in which bilateral ties with Washington shaped Gulf states' defense postures, procurement, and threat perceptions. That bargain has been eroding for some time. The limited US response to the 2019 attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais, the Houthi strikes on Abu Dhabi in 2022, and the Israeli strike on Doha in September 2025 fed a perception in Gulf capitals that American protection had become conditional, selective, and increasingly hostage to Washington's domestic political cycles.
Events since then have turned this slow erosion into an acute test. The US-Israeli war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026 made the Gulf a direct theatre of conflict. Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, commercial traffic collapsed, Gulf territory and facilities hosting US forces came under attack, and a sequence of blockades, ceasefires, and renewed hostilities followed. Washington's posture became openly transactional, as shown by the July 2026 proposal whereby the US would act as a paid 'guardian' of the Strait, first through a levy on cargo and then, after Gulf pushback, through Gulf investment in the US. At the same time, the war in Yemen reignited. From July 2026 the Houthis resumed strikes on Saudi Arabia and declared a blockade of Saudi shipping, and in September they pushed along the Red Sea coast towards Bab al-Mandab while hitting energy infrastructure in the Kingdom's south, precisely when the closure of Hormuz had made the Red Sea a route vital for Saudi exports.
Gulf states have responded not by abandoning Washington but by diversifying around it. The Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (September 2025) and its extension to Turkey in the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement (August 2026), which treats an attack on one signatory as an attack on all, are the most visible expressions of this diversification. These arrangements coexist with deepening ties to China, India, the EU and other extra-regional powers, with Omani and Qatari mediation, and with continued, if renegotiated, security and arms relations with the United States.
The result is not a tidy shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. It is a crowded and uneven field of overlapping, partial, and sometimes contradictory commitments across scales. Security logics are also spreading beyond conventional defense to ports, pipelines, desalination plants, maritime corridors, data and emerging technologies, while defense localization reshapes economies and institutions. The workshop is situated in this moment, when the question is no longer whether Gulf security is changing but what is emerging in place of the single guarantor.
