Why is there no joint GCC goreign policy toward Iran?

Abstract

Since 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has come through war, occupation, blockade and the Arab uprisings. The US–Israel war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026 was expected to be one more test of that kind, and perhaps the defining one. Nearly six months later, after a ceasefire was reached, patched and finally lost to renewed fighting, it has turned out to be something else. What the war asked of the GCC was the one thing its design was never meant to provide: a single policy toward the state that shapes its security environment more than any other. The first round of fighting lasted forty-two days. Iran fired more than 6,000 missiles and drones at seven Arab countries, most of them its own Gulf neighbours,1 before a Pakistani-mediated ceasefire took effect on 7–8 April.2 Drone attacks launched from Iraq by Iran-aligned groups continued after that. The truce frayed through May, was shored up in mid- June by a memorandum named after Islamabad, and collapsed on 8 July, when Iranian attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz tipped the region back into open war. The fighting was still under way in mid-August, by then in its sixth month. Through all of it the six members never spoke with one voice, and they barely worked from the same script. The two most telling Gulf decisions of the whole crisis came in a single August week, and neither ran through the council: Saudi Arabia signed a mutual-defence treaty in Mecca with Turkey and Pakistan, and Oman sat down with Iran, alone, to settle the future of the Strait of Hormuz...