According to U.S. President Donald Trump, “the biggest surprise” of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East has been Tehran’s drone and missile attacks on countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Key transport hubs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha have shut down, strangling a significant part of global aviation, tourism, and trade.
How are the Gulf states planning to keep their people safe and get travel and trade back online? Will they try to respond with force? And, longer term, how do the events of the past week shift their geopolitical choices? Firas Maksad, a geopolitical risk expert focused on the Gulf states, and Mina Al-Oraibi, the editor in chief of The National newspaper in the UAE, joined FP Live to share their sense of how the region’s leaders are rethinking regional alliances amid their most tense moment in a generation.