Introduction

In 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar viewed this new source of instability as an opportunity to revise elements of the existing regional balance of power through proxy warfare. Over time, however, this assessment soured, as proxy warfare no longer appeared to be a policy tool with the potential to achieve a new favorable regional order while insulating their homelands from threat. As a result, they increasingly shifted to proxy strategies aimed at managing specific crises with an eye toward maintaining the regional status quo.

To varying degrees, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar were insulated from the Arab Spring’s destabilizing effects. Due to their monopoly on domestic security services and vast hydrocarbon wealth, they were able to use combinations of violent repression, welfare spending, and sectarian appeals to stave off more widespread protest movements.¹ The Gulf monarchies’ relative stability amid the Arab Spring in turn enabled them to develop proxy relationships with armed groups in states that were experiencing the greatest upheaval during the Arab Spring.

All three of these Gulf monarchies saw the early years of the Arab Spring as an opportunity to assert their regional ambitions, an approach this report terms “revisionist.” For Saudi Arabia, this meant reasserting what it saw as its rightful role in leading the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the association of Arab Gulf countries created under Saudi leadership in Riyadh in 1981, and replacing a potentially threatening regime in Syria.² However, of the three, Saudi Arabia took the most cautious approach due to concerns that revolution could spread within the Arabian Peninsula, potentially challenging the absolute monarchy of the Al Saud royal family.³

For the UAE and Qatar, both founded in 1971, the Arab Spring provided an opportunity to assert their own ambitions to regional leadership. Prior to the Arab Spring, both states had pursued hedging strategies, offsetting the risks of associating solely with one powerful state (first Britain and later the United States), by balancing among multiple regional powers.⁴ Both invested heavily in military cooperation with the United States from the 1990’s, purchasing U.S.-manufactured weapons systems, hosting U.S. military bases, and sometimes even engaging in coalition interventions alongside the United States and NATO. The UAE earned the nickname “little Sparta” from U.S. generals who admired the capabilities of UAE pilots in Afghanistan.⁵ While the UAE tended to hew more closely to Saudi Arabia’s policies and Qatar tended to strike out further on its own, the Arab Spring offered both small states the opportunity to assert regional leadership.

One of the first opportunities for the Gulf states to alter the regional balance of power came in the early months of 2011, when the Obama administration made clear its willingness to intervene in Libya. Muammar al-Gaddafi had previously clashed with the leadership of the Gulf monarchies, in particular Saudi Arabia, over their relationship with the United States among other issues. Gaddafi’s intelligence chiefs reportedly ordered a covert plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2003,⁶ and at a 2009 Arab League summit, Gaddafi announced to King Abdullah in front of the rest of the Arab leaders, “I have been waiting for six years to tell you that you are the liar. You were made by Britain and protected by the United States.”⁷ The 2011 Libyan uprising and the signal that the United States would back intervention offered the opportunity to replace a long-time erratic opponent with a potential ally.

Meanwhile, through the summer and fall of 2011 and into 2012, the Assad regime’s violent repression led Syria’s peaceful protest movement to disintegrate into civil war. The Syrian civil war represented another opportunity for Saudi Arabia and the UAE—and to a lesser extent Qatar—to replace the Assad regime, an important strategic partner of their regional rival Iran, with a more friendly government. Overthrowing the Assad regime also held out the further promise of eliminating the “land bridge” that served as a supply route from Iran to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The notable exception to the Gulf states’ revisionist approach—in which the Gulf monarchies saw the Arab Spring-wrought instability as an opportunity to gain regional influence by replacing oppositional regimes with friendlier proxies—was in Bahrain, where the GCC, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, deployed troops to stabilize the regime and suppress Bahrain’s nascent protest movement. The intervention demonstrated Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies’ fears that revolution elsewhere in the Greater Middle East could come home to roost in the GCC. The Saudi leadership in particular hoped to not just suppress opposition in Bahrain but also to send a message to their own restive Shia population in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.⁸

However, while it is difficult to pinpoint a precise turning point, the combined influence of four factors by about 2014 led these three Gulf monarchies to change their calculations and adopt proxy warfare strategies aimed more consistently at managing crises that threatened their spheres of interest and maintaining the political status quo for the region rather than revising the regional balance of power.

First, by 2014, it had become increasingly clear that proxy warfare strategies were riskier than the Gulf monarchies had imagined in early 2011. Rather than achieving quick victories in Libya and Syria as they had hoped, the monarchies found themselves in complex quagmires with dwindling hope for an outright military victory.

Second, the Obama administration signaled that it would not support further military revisionism in the wake of the Libya intervention. The administration’s decision to not use direct force against the Assad regime in Syria in August 2013 made this stance clear. Formal negotiations leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran deal as it is known colloquially, began in November 2013, with formal signing of the agreement taking place in July 2015. The negotiations and eventual agreement further stoked Gulf state fears that the United States was retreating from the region altogether, leaving a security vacuum in its wake that called for a more conservative approach to regional instability.

Third, the divergent goals of the Gulf monarchies in many of the same arenas increasingly came into conflict. This strategic divergence was at the root of the diplomatic dispute between Qatar and the other GCC states, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that first burst into the open in March 2014 and flared up again beginning in 2017. As a result, the Arab Gulf monarchies increasingly saw themselves in competition not only with their traditional regional opponent Iran, but also with one another, creating a far more complex web of competitive relationships that increased their perceptions of risk.

Finally, Iran and ISIS both benefited from the post-Arab Spring instability, increasing the threat they posed to the Gulf monarchies. Iran doubled down on its support for the Assad regime in Syria and deployed its own proxy Shia militias there to support the regime’s forces, while in the spring and summer of 2014, ISIS was able to win a significant swath of territory extending from Mosul to Raqqa. Both Iran’s increased presence in the Levant—where Syria formed an essential part of Iran’s desired “land bridge” linking it to Hezbollah⁹—and ISIS’s territorial victories posed a significant threat from the perspective of the Arab Gulf monarchies.

As a result of these four factors, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies became increasingly status quo-oriented. Rather than seeing ongoing conflicts in the region as a strategic opportunity, the monarchies began to see some of the actors involved in these conflicts as potential threats. Their proxy strategies, in turn, became oriented towards crisis management, or maintaining rather than revising the regional balance of power. This led the Gulf monarchies to participate in the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition intervention, to intervene against an insurgent group they saw as an Iranian proxy in Yemen, and to deepen their competition in Libya. However, this transition did not eliminate Gulf opportunistic aims entirely, whether in Libya or as reflected in the competition in the Horn of Africa.

As the ten-year anniversary of the initial Arab Spring protests approaches, this shift in the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies will play a central role in defining the security landscape in the Middle East. The Gulf monarchies are unlikely to pursue further regional revisionism on the scale of their early Arab Spring interventions, at least in the near-term. Instead, we should expect them to wage proxy wars more often where rivals—whether Iran, Islamist groups, or other Gulf monarchies—encroach in places they perceive to be in their immediate sphere of interest.

Regional intervention in proxy wars often transforms relatively localized conflicts into destabilizing regional wars that spill across borders. Proxy wars across the Greater Middle East have spilled across borders, threatening the stability of neighboring states and providing potent breeding grounds for organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda, with security implications not only for their hosts but also for the world. They have also generated humanitarian crises, contributing to massive levels of human displacement that has significant impacts on the domestic politics of countries where refugees arrive as well as international security implications.

U.S. policy in the region should focus on using America’s considerable leverage over these three Gulf countries—all U.S. security partners—to end their interventions in conflicts in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. The United States should also use its diplomatic tools to promote political settlements in these conflicts and among the Gulf states, particularly in the ongoing diplomatic dispute between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Qatar on the other. As long as these wars continue, they provide avenues for adversarial actors to intervene and gain a foothold—not to mention the staggering humanitarian costs of these conflicts.

The rest of this report is divided into four sections. The first section examines each of these three Gulf monarchies’ strategic interests in the early post-Arab Spring period from 2011 through 2014 and goes on to look at how these interests shaped their proxy interventions in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. The second section examines the four factors that led the Gulf states to change their strategic assessments, and the third section examines the interventions that followed that turning point. Finally, the conclusion discusses what the Gulf states’ shifting approach means for U.S. policy in the Middle East.