Editor’s Note: Kristian Alexander is a Senior Fellow and Lead Researcher at the Rabdan Security and Defense Institute (RSDI), Abu Dhabi, UAE.

By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project

The latest exchange of attacks between the U.S. and Iran underline the fragility of their supposed ceasefire. Although efforts continue to reach a memorandum of understanding addressing the double blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, uranium enrichment, and other regional security concerns, the underlying disputes that fueled the conflict remain unresolved. Iran’s missile capabilities, nuclear ambitions, regional networks, and the security anxieties of neighboring states will thus continue to shape the strategic landscape.

For the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the war’s most consequential legacy may not be battlefield outcomes, but strategic lessons. Despite heavy military pressure, Iran has demonstrated an ability to impose costs through drones, missiles, and disruption of shipping. For GCC states, this reinforces the reality that geography, infrastructure exposure, and proximity to Iran remain enduring challenges. As a result, the post-war environment may accelerate both conventional arms competition and renewed discussion of nuclear hedging.

The Conventional Arms Race Is Likely to Accelerate

Regional defense modernization is already evident, though it is increasingly evolving beyond prestige acquisitions such as fighter aircraft and armored platforms. Rather than a classical arms race, the recent conflict is more likely to reinforce ongoing trends toward capability enhancement, resilience, and adaptation to emerging threats.

The war has highlighted the importance of systems designed to counter lower-cost, high-volume threats such as drones, rockets, cruise missiles, and saturation attacks. GCC states are therefore likely to prioritize integrated air and missile defense, counter-drone technologies, larger interceptor stockpiles, early-warning sensors, and cyber and electronic warfare capabilities. Governments may also invest more heavily in hardening critical infrastructure and protecting energy assets. The UAE’s calls for addressing not only Iran’s nuclear activities, but also ballistic missiles, and the Strait of Hormuz, further illustrate how Gulf states increasingly view these threats as interconnected.

The economics of modern conflict will also shape procurement choices. This is likely to encourage lower-cost defensive technologies, including interceptor drones, directed-energy systems, and locally produced munitions. Future acquisitions may therefore focus less on prestige platforms and more on layered defense, resilience, and domestic industrial capacity.

While such procurement may improve defensive capacity, it does not automatically produce strategic stability. Arms races often encourage worst-case planning, and larger arsenals can shorten decision-making timelines during crises and increase incentives for preemption.

A further danger is miscalculation under pressure. Fear of surprise attack, faulty intelligence, and misread signals can produce escalatory decisions even when no side initially seeks wider war. In a missile-rich or nuclearized environment, such errors become far more consequential.

The war demonstrated that critical civilian and dual-use infrastructure, such as ports, airports, desalination plants, pipelines, energy terminals, and shipping corridors, can be used as instruments of coercion. For the GCC, insecurity therefore extends beyond territorial defense to trade flows, investor confidence, tourism, and aviation stability.

Could the Conflict Trigger a Nuclear Arms Race?

A more difficult question is whether conventional rearmament could spill into nuclear competition. A near-term regional race for nuclear weapons is not inevitable, but nuclear hedging may intensify. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly signaled that it would not remain strategically passive if Iran were to acquire a nuclear weapon. Turkey and Egypt would likely need to reassess their own positions under such circumstances.

The danger is not merely one additional nuclear state, but a chain reaction. Once one power openly moves toward weaponization, rivals may conclude restraint has become strategically irrational. The risks would grow in a multi-state deterrence environment involving Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and external powers. Such a landscape could create overlapping red lines, alliance ambiguities, and competing escalation ladders, making crisis management far more complex.

At the same time, GCC nuclear decision-making does not occur in isolation. US–Iran negotiations demonstrate that the nuclear file is increasingly linked to ballistic missiles, sanctions, and the future security of the Strait of Hormuz.

Any assessment of proliferation risks in the Middle East must also account for the hostility between Iran and Israel. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) but is believed to possess a credible arsenal. Iran, by contrast, remains an NPT signatory and argues that uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes is a sovereign right protected under the treaty.

However, Iran’s legal arguments have long been undermined by its own conduct. Years of concealment, restrictions on inspectors, enrichment levels far beyond ordinary civilian requirements, and repeated crises with the International Atomic Energy Agency have made Tehran’s purely peaceful narrative difficult to sustain. Recent U.S. intelligence assessments reportedly suggest that the war may have caused only limited new damage to Iran’s nuclear timeline, reinforcing concerns that military pressure alone cannot resolve the proliferation challenge and might actually incentivize it.

Iranian officials continue to insist that any postwar arrangement must recognize a domestic enrichment capability. Reports suggest Tehran may accept a temporary moratorium while resisting the surrender of enriched stockpiles including nearly 1000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%. The central policy debate is no longer whether Iran will retain some nuclear capability, but how extensive that capability can become while remaining subject to meaningful verification and oversight.

This unresolved asymmetry will impact a renewed nuclear race. If regional states conclude that non-proliferation rules are applied unevenly or that Iran is exploiting civilian cover while preserving military-relevant options, they may feel greater pressure to hedge.

Despite these pressures, nuclear weapons are poorly suited to many of the threats facing Gulf states. They cannot prevent drone attacks, sabotage, cyber operations, maritime harassment, proxy warfare, or disruption of shipping lanes. A nuclear deterrent cannot intercept drones over urban centers, secure offshore infrastructure, or reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Moreover, the pursuit of nuclear weapons would carry serious diplomatic and economic costs. The UAE offers a contrasting model through the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant, developed in cooperation with the Republic of Korea. The UAE’s program has emphasized international safeguards, transparency, civilian electricity generation, and a voluntary renunciation of domestic enrichment and reprocessing. However, recent drone incidents near the UAE’s Barakah facility and Iran’s Bushehr reactor reinforced concerns that even peaceful civilian nuclear infrastructure may increasingly be viewed through a security lens during periods of regional confrontation. Strikes near nuclear-related facilities or attacks on surrounding infrastructure can generate fears of radiological release and market panic even without a reactor breach.

Iran may conclude that missiles and drones have imposed costs but did not provide sufficient deterrence against U.S. and Israeli military action, increasing pressure to strengthen its nuclear posture. At the same time, overt weaponization could provoke renewed strikes, harsher sanctions, and deeper isolation. Iran is therefore likely to continue pursuing strategic ambiguity: preserving scientific expertise, maintaining elements of the fuel cycle, rebuilding damaged facilities, and retaining the option to scale activities upward if diplomacy collapses.

The most immediate proliferation risk may therefore be a quieter race for nuclear latency: enrichment know-how, missile delivery systems, scientific manpower, reactor infrastructure, and shortened breakout timelines. Such a trend would make the Middle East more nuclear-capable without formal declarations of weaponization, increasing mistrust, hedging behavior, and crisis uncertainty. The spread of technical expertise, enrichment capacity, and latent nuclear infrastructure may pose a greater long-term challenge to regional stability than the immediate emergence of new nuclear weapons states.

Implications for GCC Security

For the GCC, the strategic paradox is clear. The region may emerge from the war with stronger air defenses, expanded procurement, improved interoperability, and renewed momentum behind local defense industries. However, these gains come with significant costs. Defense budgets may rise further, critical infrastructure may become permanently securitized, and threat perceptions may remain elevated long after active fighting ends.

The Strait of Hormuz will remain central to this equation. Even if Iran cannot dominate a prolonged conventional war, the persistent ability to threaten shipping, insurance markets, and energy flows gives Tehran a form of deterrence that military losses do not erase. More broadly, Gulf insecurity is increasingly multi-domain, encompassing enrichment, missiles, drones, maritime security, sanctions, proxy activity, and the protection of civilian nuclear infrastructure. If nuclear uncertainty also grows, the Gulf could face a more heavily defended but less predictable strategic environment. In other words, the GCC may become more militarily resilient without becoming fundamentally more secure.

For GCC states, the central challenge is therefore not simply acquiring more weapons. It is building a sustainable security architecture that combines deterrence, resilience, diplomacy, and crisis management. Without such a framework, the post-war Middle East risks entering a cycle in which each round of rearmament produces not reassurance, but deeper insecurity.