After the US-Israel-Iran war — and the strikes that followed the cease-fire — the Gulf states find themselves dangerously exposed. Host Alistair Taylor is joined by MEI Associate Fellow Gregory Gause to discuss the war’s impact on the Gulf, their partnership with the United States, and whether the turmoil of recent months will push Gulf leaders to reassess their alliances and international engagement.
The Gulf’s Strategic Paradox: Lost Confidence in the US Security Umbrella, Enduring Trust in the Dollar
This essay argues that the current debate about the future of the international monetary system is not really about Gulf currencies, oil pricing, or de-dollarization in the narrow technical sense. It is about something deeper and more important: whether institutional trust can survive when geopolitical certainty is eroding.
Tripartite Gulf Power: The Diverging Geoeconomics of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, and the Implications for MENA and the Global Order
While acknowledging the centrality of security tensions and potential conflict in the Gulf, this essay intentionally sets aside a detailed treatment of military and hard-power dynamics, concentrating instead on the geoeconomic logics of capital, infrastructure, energy, and connectivity, through which Gulf states now articulate power in a fragmented world order.
A New Paradigm of Educational Borrowing in the Gulf States: The Qatari Example
More than in any other world region, the Arab Gulf states are experiencing a “higher education boom” in terms of the quantity and quality of institutions and programs now available. Over the past two decades, the Gulf states have imported a Western, largely American, model of higher education to address inefficiencies in labor markets and invest in their economic futures, to meet national reform agendas, and in some cases, to function as profit-making ventures.
Over the past decade, migration to the wealthy states of the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as an increasingly central facet of scholarly attention to the region. This attention has resulted in the exponential expansion of our collective knowledge, and the near future promises even more nuanced and microcosmic analyses as recent and current fieldwork in the region bears fruit. Nevertheless, there has been little discussion of the “labor camps” in which many of the unskilled migrants dwell during their sojourn in the Gulf states.
The oldest peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East, MEI’s flagship journal covers politics, society, and culture in the region.
