On May 25, U.S. President Donald Trump called on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan to join the Abraham Accords as part of a ceasefire deal with Iran. Like much of Trump’s foreign policy, this announcement seemed illogical and far-fetched. Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey have maintained diplomatic relations with Israel for decades, long predating the accords, and there is no indication that the other three will heed Trump’s call.
Yet deep within his bombastic Truth Social post lay a kernel of truth. Urging these countries to join the accords is not merely about normalization with Israel, but rather an attempt to create a political consortium — an ideological coalition upon which military and security decisions would hinge. That distinction matters enormously, because it clarifies what the Abraham Accords have always been: not just a normalization framework, but a forward-defense arrangement built around Israeli strategic interests.
Most of the states Trump is calling to join the accords — in fact, insisting that this “should be mandatory” — have reasons to resist. Kuwait, however, is undergoing huge transformations that are steadily eroding its institutional capacity to do so.
With its Arab nationalist tradition and historically robust pro-Palestine politics, Kuwait has always been an outlier as a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on the issue of normalization. But since the Emir Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah took office at the end of 2023, Kuwait has drifted steadily closer to the United Arab Emirates, and the domestic consequences have quickly followed.
Kuwait’s parliament — a rare democratic institution in the Gulf — was suspended indefinitely in 2024. A sweeping campaign of mass denaturalization has since affected an estimated 300,000 individuals, including citizens of Palestinian descent. The fabric of political participation that once gave Kuwait its distinctive Gulf character is being deliberately shredded in tandem with closer military and intelligence cooperation with Abu Dhabi.
A clear bellwether of this is the treatment of Kuwaiti nationals who participated in flotillas sailing to Gaza. Against a backdrop of shrinking civil society space, those individuals were treated as a national security risk, interrogated upon return, and placed under travel bans, according to contacts familiar with their cases. In a country where solidarity with Palestine was once constitutive of national identity, the targeting of Gaza activists by the state security apparatus signals a form of preparation for a public shift in policy vis-a-vis Israel.
Normalization requires a domestic environment in which public opposition can be repressed through the dismantling of institutional dissent, the removal of those most likely to mobilize against it, and the cultivation of external alliances that make it feel inevitable. And for the GCC, bringing Kuwait into a status quo of unofficial normalization would presumably make it easier, once the political conditions are right, for all remaining members to join the Abraham Accords.
Both Israel and the UAE need a success story with which to resurrect a framework discredited by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and further damaged by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Kuwait, stripped of its institutional buffers, reorienting quietly toward Abu Dhabi, and repeatedly targeted by Iran, is the most available candidate.
Despite the steady dismantling of its domestic institutions, Kuwait has remained restrained in its response to Iranian attacks. But earlier today, drone strikes on Kuwait International Airport left one person dead and 63 wounded — the highest single-day injury toll since the war began. Kuwait’s Foreign Ministry summoned Iran’s chargé d’affaires and ordered two diplomats to leave within 24 hours, stopping short of severing ties or expelling the ambassador.
The attack on the airport will certainly deepen public anger toward Iran, which has been building since February. That sentiment may prove the kind of political cover needed to sell normalization not as the government’s own strategic choice, but as a security arrangement that Iran’s belligerence left Kuwait no choice but to sign.
Putting the accords to the test
From the outset in 2020, the Abraham Accords were transactional in nature. Signatory Arab states (the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan) traded normalization for U.S. economic and security incentives, forsaking any organically conceived regional architecture for peace. Sudan was removed from the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list. Morocco received U.S. recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara — a territorial concession that had nothing to do with Israel or regional peace but revealed the logic underpinning the entire enterprise.
The UAE, the framework’s most likely architect based on government sources, anticipated gaining the most — notably the acquisition of F-35 fighter jets, which never materialized. Saudi commentators derided the accords as “free normalization.” But the UAE did acquire something arguably more valuable, if intangible: a degree of diplomatic immunity that insulated its increasingly aggressive foreign policy from scrutiny.
What began as a series of bilateral transactions soon crystallized into a formal architecture with security as the forefront. The Negev Forum, the ministerial framework that emerged from the accords in 2022, was explicitly security-oriented and focused primarily on countering Iran’s regional ambitions. This confirmed that the Abraham Accords and their contingent frameworks were always in service of a U.S.-Israeli forward-defense architecture, rather than fostering regional integration.
The following year, Sudan’s descent into civil war was fueled in significant part by the UAE’s supply of weapons and mercenaries to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose conduct in Al-Fasher was documented by the UN as bearing the hallmarks of genocide. The implication of one member of the accords in the destabilization of another illustrates a deeper problem: The agreement appears to provide neither protection from external threats nor restraint against the actions of fellow signatories.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which began on Feb. 28, has put the Abraham Accords to its first serious test. The UAE and Bahrain were dealt some of the heaviest Iranian blows of any Gulf states. Emerging reports of Israel dispatching Iron Dome batteries and personnel to the UAE confirmed that the arrangement came with security perks for at least one signatory. What it did not provide, however, is meaningful protection. Neutral Oman and de-escalatory Saudi Arabia weathered the conflict in considerably better strategic and economic shape, without having signed anything.
Bahrain’s situation has been particularly stark. Already burdened by sectarian fragility and limited fiscal capacity, the island state was forced to secure a $5.4 billion currency swap with the UAE, a measure that points to how debilitating even a relatively short conflict has been for a small country that put itself in the line of fire.
Meanwhile, Morocco, geographically insulated from the Gulf theater, has survived the turmoil largely intact. But Morocco is also part of the Arab League, an institution the UAE has been openly contemptuous of for its failure to meaningfully support Gulf states under Iranian attack. The Arab League’s perceived passivity during the war handed Abu Dhabi the justification it sought to continue building its Abraham Accords coalition outside Arab consensus.
Israeli paramountcy and Arab fragmentation
The ongoing war has made one thing undeniable: The Abraham Accords not only failed to serve as a deterrent but actively invited greater exposure to the crossfire of U.S.-Israeli expansionism. Across the Gulf, the accords are increasingly seen as a one-way arrangement — one that uses the language of peace and economic integration as a guise to establish a security framework that shifts the frontlines of conflict away from Israel’s immediate geography.
The architecture of this forward defense, already visible in the “security zones” Israel has established in Gaza and Lebanon, is now emerging as a wider regional strategy. Israel is seeking to establish a military base in Berbera, Somaliland’s main port on the Gulf of Aden, positioning Israeli military infrastructure at the mouth of the Red Sea for the first time. Further north, it was recently revealed that Israel had constructed two covert military bases in Iraq’s western desert, one predating the ongoing war on Iran, the other used during the 12-day war in June 2025, without Baghdad’s knowledge or consent.
What appears to be taking shape is a form of Israeli paramountcy: regional military predominance exercised across multiple theaters, operating beyond Israel’s borders, and built on technological and intelligence advantages with full impunity.
The presence of U.S. bases in the Gulf had already provoked uncomfortable conversations about sovereignty, particularly after reports that some of the strikes on Iran were launched from Gulf territory (which were officially denied). Joining the Abraham Accords in this environment would compound the sovereignty deficit and formalize participation in a security architecture from which the benefits flow overwhelmingly toward Israel.
The UAE has signaled it would deepen ties with Israel in the wake of Iran’s attacks. That may well materialize in the form of a permanent Israeli military base on Emirati soil — a prospect, in light of the Iron Dome deployment during the war, that no longer seems far-fetched.
Trump’s proposal to annex Abraham Accords membership to an Iran deal misreads the regional consensus entirely. A loose but consequential alignment is already forming between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt, with Qatar and Oman drawn increasingly into its orbit. It is driven not merely by shared unease about Israeli expansionism, but by the suspicion that the UAE has become its most willing Arab accomplice.
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The Abraham Accords provided Abu Dhabi with a kind of diplomatic immunity, allowing it to conduct an outsized and aggressive foreign policy while maintaining a veneer of respectability. Its weapons supply to Sudan’s RSF has unsettled both Riyadh and Cairo. Its sponsorship of the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in Yemen, whose forces launched an offensive near Saudi and Omani borders in late 2025, feeds an encirclement anxiety that Riyadh takes seriously.
The UAE’s support for Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, in his internal drone wars and assertive pursuit of Red Sea access, threatens Egyptian interests directly. And its facilitation of Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, a breakaway entity whose separatist logic mirrors that of the STC in Yemen, signals a willingness to fragment Arab League member states. When Somaliland recently announced it would open an embassy in Jerusalem, condemnation came swiftly — from Arab capitals and beyond, including Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. The UAE and Bahrain remained eerily silent.
The accords, in the eyes of most of the region’s long-established states, represent a subscription to a project of Israeli paramountcy and Arab fragmentation — a plan to engineer a “New Middle East” along lines that serve Israeli strategic objectives exclusively. To join them now is to acquiesce to a “Rubble Doctrine” that normalizes permanent war as a substitute for political resolution.
