For the people of the Gulf, the question hanging over this year’s Manama Dialogue was a simple one: will the bombs come again? It was asked in the shadow of real memories. When war between the United States and Iran erupted on Feb. 28, beginning with joint American and Israeli strikes followed by Iranian attacks on Gulf nations, it was residents of the UAE and Bahrain who lived under the missiles, not the officials now gathered in Bahrain’s capital to debate what comes next.
Anwar Gargash, the presidential adviser of the United Arab Emirates, told the audience at the annual security summit, organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, that his country hopes a diplomatic breakthrough is possible in the Qatar-led mediations now underway. “We don’t really want to see another round of confrontation in the region,” he said. But behind the diplomatic language stood the experience of a country that absorbed the largest share of Iran’s airborne assault. Before a ceasefire was reached in April, the UAE faced more than 3,000 drone and ballistic missile attacks aimed at airports, military and oil facilities, according to the IISS. Most were intercepted. Yet the scale of the barrage explains why Gargash described the war as a watershed year for the region and the world, and why he said the UAE and its neighbors are nonetheless braced for escalation.
Bahrain’s own ordeal was laid bare at the forum by its foreign affairs minister, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani. At the height of the fighting, Iran fired 500 drones and nearly 200 ballistic missiles toward the small kingdom, home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. The strikes hit the naval base, residential buildings, the financial district and a water desalination plant, the kind of infrastructure ordinary families depend on daily. For Bahrainis, the war was not an abstraction; it landed on homes, on the water supply, on the commercial heart of the capital.
Al Zayani welcomed “every effort to reduce tensions, prevent escalation and create opportunities for dialogue,” but he also described what he called a continued pattern of Iranian attacks or threats against sea, air and data facilities, endangering the region’s stability and prosperity. Iran, he said, has kept it up even after the ceasefire, threatening underwater data cables as recently as last month. He pointed to attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels on neighboring Saudi Arabia as part of the same pattern. “These attacks are part of one continued pattern,” he said. “The hands may change, the approach doesn’t.”
Meanwhile, the Houthis’ summer campaign has brought that pattern directly to Saudi civilians. The rebels have escalated strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure and airports, saying they respond to Saudi airstrikes on Sanaa airport. They have hit critical oil pipelines and disrupted air traffic in the kingdom, inconveniences and dangers that ripple outward to travelers, workers and communities far from any front line.
Diplomacy, for now, offers the region’s people the hope of a reprieve. Iranian negotiators are in Qatar discussing a proposal that could soon reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. In an interview shared on his Telegram channel, Araghchi said no direct talks are underway with Washington and that the outcome depends on American answers to what he called the “Iranian questions.” Tehran, he said, hopes the U.S. will choose “diplomacy over other paths,” and is ready for both defense and diplomacy depending on Washington’s “rationality.”
Gargash welcomed that possibility but tempered it with realism. The crisis demands “a lot of wisdom, with political tools being our main tools,” he said, because military solutions “will only complicate the current very complicated scene” and will not bring any quick off-ramps. Yet he acknowledged that “the rules of logic” show the American and Iranian positions remain far apart. “If these positions are not bridged, then we have to worry about the worst,” he said. Another round of war, he argued, serves neither the region nor Iran.
Egypt’s foreign minister Badr Abdelatty, speaking a day earlier, put the stakes bluntly: “The second round (of escalation) will be more dangerous, more destructive, and it will lead to nowhere.”
Beneath the warnings about escalation lay a quieter frustration aired at the forum: the Gulf’s six-member Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman, never mounted a coordinated defense during the war. Each country worked separately with U.S. command and control centers in the region, an arrangement that, according to the IISS, at times hindered the overall defensive effort. Gargash offered a rare candid admission of the shortfall. Nationally, he said, each state performed, sometimes even bilaterally. “In one of our most critical crises, we collectively have not risen to the challenge,” he said.
For the region’s residents, that admission carried its own weight. Gulf nations have spent billions of dollars since the ceasefire to bolster their defenses, and Gargash said the war has made the U.S.-UAE relationship “even more important” and central to his country’s ability to protect itself. But interception systems and spending, the recent past has shown, are not the same as safety. What people across the Gulf are waiting for, in Manama’s conference halls as in their own neighborhoods, is a diplomatic outcome that keeps the missiles grounded.