The Strategy That Needs the Allies It's Losing

The United Arab Emirates has a principle about the Strait of Hormuz, and it was aimed at Iran.

international waterways cannot be subject to the will of any side. — Saqr Ghobash

That sentence was written to condemn Tehran's attempts to close the waterway. It now lands on Washington just as cleanly. The Gulf states want the Strait owned by no one; the administration has spent the week insisting it is American territory, a claim Trump repeated at a rally on August 16 ^[1]. The Gulf states' own stated principle repudiates the American claim as thoroughly as it repudiates the Iranian one — and the administration's fallback strategy depends on the very allies that principle is now alienating. On August 16 the administration scaled back. Trump said he was low-keying it, and JD Vance redefined the war's primary goal as keeping oil cheap for Americans, demoting nuclear non-proliferation to second place ^[2]. In place of military action, Trump promised unprecedented economic pressure — sanctions on exchange houses in the UAE and the confiscation of overseas Iranian assets ^[3]. That economic track has a requirement nobody in Washington has stated plainly: it only works if the Gulf states enforce it. Sanctions on UAE exchange houses need the UAE's own banks and regulators to cooperate. Secondary sanctions on trading partners need Saudi banking and Omani shipping lanes to comply. The pressure campaign is not something Washington can run alone; it is something Washington must run through the very allies it is now alienating. The territorial claim corrodes that cooperation. Saudi Arabia has blocked US military access to its airspace and Prince Sultan Airbase, and Mohammed bin Salman declined a G7 invitation ^[1]. The UAE — the Gulf state most supportive of US military action against Iran — is now watching its own commercial institutions targeted by the sanctions architecture ^[3][4]. The sanctions need the allies the claim is driving away. The Gulf states have already moved past both tracks. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan are negotiating a trilateral defense pact that combines Saudi financing, Pakistani nuclear capability, and Turkish military industry — explicitly framed as a hedge against what the negotiators call perceived American unreliability under Trump ^[5].

At the end of all of these, we have a proposal like this: all regional nations must come together to create a cooperation platform on the issue of security. — Hakan Fidan

Turkey has joined a Saudi-led coalition to secure the Red Sea — Saudi-led, not American-led, and aimed at Bab al-Mandab, not the Persian Gulf ^[6]. And the oil is still moving: the UAE, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are running a covert shuttle trade, transferring crude vessel-to-tanker in the Gulf of Oman, keeping roughly 9 million barrels a day flowing without US protection ^[7]. The ceasefire expires on August 17 with no extension — Pakistan claims a de facto extension, Iran denies it ^[8]. There is no diplomatic track. The coalition Washington built is defensive-only and already fragmenting: the UK refused offensive action, France conditioned support on a ceasefire ^[9]. And the economic campaign that was supposed to replace the war requires the cooperation of the same allies the territorial claim and the sanctions are pushing away. Washington is holding two levers, and each one cancels the other, while the region builds around both.