Gulf states' multi-alignment — Hussein Ibish on hedging as doctrine

Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (AGSIW), has been the most consistent English-language analyst of Gulf monarchy strategy since the institute's 2015 founding. His 2023-2024 essays in *Bloomberg Opinion*, *The National*, and AGSIW's own platform have developed the most empirically grounded account of what Gulf diplomats call hedging and what Western analysts call multi-alignment.

The doctrine has three working components. First, simultaneous deepening rather than substitution. The Saudi-China crude yuan settlement does not replace the dollar pricing of the rest of Saudi exports. The UAE-China trade growth has not displaced UAE-US trade in absolute terms. Both relationships scale at the same time. Second, asymmetric specialization. Each external partner is engaged on the files where it has the most to offer: the US on security guarantees and advanced military platforms, China on trade and infrastructure and 5G-era technology, Russia on energy-market coordination via OPEC+, India on labor flows and increasingly fintech. Third, no exclusivity demands. Gulf capitals refuse to be asked to choose, and refuse to be drawn into framing their partnerships as substitutes.

Ibish's framework distinguishes the Saudi and UAE variants within the broader doctrine. Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman has been more openly willing to take public positions that irritate Washington — the 2022 OPEC+ output cut before the US midterms, the 2023 reception of Xi Jinping in Riyadh — and the 2024 defense-pact draft negotiation. The UAE under Mohammed bin Zayed has been quieter and more transactional, with the strategy executed across multiple files simultaneously rather than as headline events.

The Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran resumption of diplomatic relations in March 2023 was, in Ibish's reading, the most important demonstration of the doctrine's payoff. Riyadh got a tangible de-escalation with Iran. Beijing got a public diplomatic win. Washington was informed in advance but not consulted. The arrangement traded on Chinese mediator-neutrality that Washington structurally cannot offer, while leaving the Saudi-US security relationship untouched on files where China cannot substitute.

The 2024-2025 stress test is whether the doctrine survives a second Trump administration. Ibish's prediction is that it does, but with sharper political costs and more frequent Saudi-UAE-US bilateral friction over Gulf engagement with China and Russia. The structural logic of the doctrine — small powers in a contested region maximizing optionality — does not depend on which faction holds the White House.

­Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, has produced the most consistent English-language analytical reading of the Gulf Cooperation Council member states' post-2017 foreign-policy evolution. The institute's working-paper series and Ibish's columns at Bloomberg, The National, and Foreign Policy have tracked the gradual codification of what is now best described as a doctrine of multi-alignment — a strategic posture in which the GCC states maintain simultaneously deep relationships with the United States (security), China (commerce), the broader Asia (energy markets), Russia (specific bilateral interests), and increasingly Africa and Latin America (investment and influence build-out).

The Saudi Arabian case is the most institutionally elaborated version of the doctrine. The Saudi-US security relationship, anchored by the 1945 USS Quincy agreement and the subsequent fifty years of US Central Command forward infrastructure in the Kingdom, has remained operative across the post-2018 tensions over the Khashoggi assassination, the Yemen war, and the OPEC+ production disputes. Concurrently, the Saudi-China relationship has deepened: Xi Jinping's December 2022 state visit produced the China-GCC summit and a series of bilateral agreements covering energy, infrastructure, technology cooperation, and currency settlement. The two relationships are not perceived as incompatible by Riyadh; they are perceived as serving different functions in the kingdom's broader strategic portfolio.

The United Arab Emirates' version of the doctrine has been more visibly active than the Saudi version. The Emirates host substantial US military presence (Al Dhafra Air Base, Jebel Ali port for US Navy logistics), maintain the most developed Israel relationship of any Arab state through the post-2020 Abraham Accords, run the most extensive Chinese investment infrastructure (the Khalifa Port-Cosco partnership, the Mohamed bin Zayed AI University, the Dubai-China trade lane), and host the largest set of Russian-related commercial activity of any GCC state since 2022. The doctrine's coherence is maintained by the Emirati framing of each relationship as a discrete commercial-and-strategic channel rather than as a bloc affiliation, with the leader-ship-level coordination ensuring that the channels do not produce mutually incompatible commitments.

Qatar's variant of the doctrine has been shaped by the specific historical experience of the 2017-2021 Saudi-UAE-Bahrain-Egypt blockade. The post-blockade Qatari posture has emphasised multilateralism, mediation services (the Doha channel on Iran, Afghanistan, the Sudan conflict), and a deliberate diversification of commercial-and-political relationships that includes Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, multiple European states, and a continuing US security relationship anchored by Al Udeid Air Base. The Qatari role as a mediator-of-first-resort for regional crises is the specific function the doctrine emphasises.

The Iran dimension within the GCC's multi-alignment doctrine is where the post-2023 reformulation has been most visible. The March 2023 Iran-Saudi rapprochement, the gradual UAE-Iran commercial-and-diplomatic normalisation, and the Omani-Qatari long-standing channels with Tehran together constitute a regional accommodation with Iran that runs alongside, rather than in opposition to, the continuing US security relationships. The accommodation does not displace the underlying Iran-GCC strategic rivalry on questions like Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, or the regional security architecture; it manages the rivalry at lower diplomatic temperature.

The doctrinal implication that Ibish's running analysis emphasises is that the GCC states have moved beyond the pre-2018 framing — in which security relationships with the United States were the load-bearing centre of the foreign-policy architecture — into a multi-vector configuration in which no single relationship is privileged. The shift has been driven by perceptions of US reliability that have fluctuated across multiple administrations, by the rising absolute and relative weight of Asian (particularly Chinese) commercial relationships in GCC economies, and by the internal diversification of GCC economies away from hydrocarbon-dependent revenue models. The doctrine is durable across leadership transitions in the GCC states because it is institutionally embedded in commercial-and-diplomatic infrastructure rather than personality-dependent. The specific calibration of the doctrine adjusts to political conditions in Washington, Beijing, and Tehran; the underlying multi-vector framework is stable.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.