For the primary time in years, all of the transferring elements of Gulf integration – customs, aviation, rail, safety, even actual property regulation – have been pulled in a single course and given deadlines. Piece by piece, the summit revealed a bloc discovering its full rhythm – not by proclamation, however by way of the regular, technical self-discipline of shared methods.
The Supreme Council’s assertion on December 3 was unequivocal on one level. The safety of the GCC states is “indivisible” and “any aggression in opposition to any certainly one of them is an aggression in opposition to all of them.”
It explicitly linked this to the joint defence settlement and King Salman’s long-running imaginative and prescient to maneuver the bloc from free cooperation in direction of one thing nearer to a union. It additionally pushed ministers to finish the remaining steps of financial unity, from the customs union to a standard marketplace for companies, and to report again on a “outlined timetable”.
In a area that has grown accustomed to ad-hoc coalitions and improvised disaster administration, the Bahrain summit felt like an try to make Gulf solidarity the foundational platform upon which all progress is now achieved.
A area ‘reawakened’ by struggle
Over the previous yr the Gulf has watched a long-range struggle between Iran and Israel, drone and missile strikes on Qatar, and a grinding battle in Gaza that has pressured each capital to reassess its assumptions about deterrence. The identical communiqué that created a civil aviation authority and a customs knowledge platform additionally described Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide, referred to as for worldwide safety for Palestinians and endorsed a United States peace plan that envisages a transitional “Peace Council” for the Strip.
For geopolitical strategist and founding father of The Geopolitical Enterprise Inc. Abishur Prakash, that is exactly the sort of setting wherein regional blocs both harden or hole out.
“Regional teams are being sprung to motion by geopolitics,” he says. “International uncertainty, tariffs and international shocks like struggle are pushing governments to depend on regional blocs greater than ever for stability. The GCC specifically has been ‘reawakened’ by occasions within the Center East, significantly the rapprochement with Syria and the Israeli strike on Doha. Arab states are turning to one another to experience the brand new, disruptive waves.”
In his view, the period of outsourcing safety to distant patrons is fading. “Areas are the brand new bulwark in opposition to international uncertainty and instability. Few can depend on the outdated stewards for long-term safety. The onus on fixing issues and navigating international storms hinges on how properly areas can work collectively, not overseas stakeholders.”
The Bahrain summit was the Gulf’s reply to this new age.
From coordination to near-union
Dr Elie Al Hindy, who chairs the Division of Safety and Strategic Research on the American College within the Emirates, cautions in opposition to calling Bahrain a pointy pivot. To him it’s extra like a decisive stride in an extended march that started years in the past with King Salman’s integration imaginative and prescient.
“I believe it isn’t a lot of a shift,” he says, “however a significant step ahead in the identical course of that has been established for some time now. We have now had a number of plans to maneuver the GCC ahead and develop its coordination, and develop the cooperation between them. The entire purpose is to maneuver from coordination and cooperation in direction of unity. And I believe immediately, the GCC has taken a significant step ahead in that course.”
What’s modified is that the strategic arguments that after divided Gulf capitals have largely been settled. For years, he notes, the unstated debate was who’s the principle menace: Iran, radicalism or Israel.
“This has been the fixed battle between the GCC international locations and the overseas coverage that led to totally different clashes,” he says. “Now it’s apparent that each one three are equal threats. However it’s clear that none of those might be a big menace if the GCC strikes within the course that we’re mentioning, which is stronger unity, stronger interconnectivity and stronger interdependence, plus essential strategic defence cooperation.”
That final phrase, “strategic defence cooperation”, issues. The summit framed Gulf safety as collective, not transactional. It reaffirmed the GCC’s position as “a elementary pillar in sustaining regional and international peace and safety” and poured unusually robust language into the sections on Gaza, Iran’s ambitions within the area, Yemen and Lebanon. Unity as an insurance coverage coverage.
One aviation market, one customs spine
If the politics supplied the logic, the economic system provided the instruments. Probably the most placing facet of the communiqué was the sheer quantity of integration recordsdata that moved from aspiration into implementation.
The leaders permitted the institution of a GCC Civil Aviation Authority, headquartered within the UAE, with a mandate that sector specialists are already treating as a severe try to harmonise regulation throughout the bloc reasonably than merely coordinate. They signed off a basic settlement for the long-discussed GCC railway and greenlit a “Customs Knowledge Alternate Platform” to be step by step launched from the second half of 2026. They ordered mechanisms to control cross-border commerce in companies and mutual recognition {of professional} {qualifications}. They even agreed unified guidelines for homeowners of collectively owned actual property to standardise how shared communities are run.
In line with Prakash, these steps are much less about bureaucratic tidiness and extra about repositioning the Gulf economic system for a post-hydrocarbon world.
“It’s an try to shift the GCC past vitality and into new arenas and financial progress areas,” he says. “That is additionally about aligning the GCC with the financial blueprints of Arab states, such because the UAE and Saudi Arabia, each putting historic emphasis on AI.
“Behind all this, the GCC desires to drive new regional connectivity that locations the economic system forward of geopolitics. The reverse is happening immediately.”
After all, symbolism nonetheless issues within the Gulf, and this summit had loads of it. For Mahdi Ghuloom, a junior fellow in geopolitics at ORF Center East, one element reduce by way of the noise.
“The extent of illustration, clearly, with the Omani Sultan being there in particular person and the Emir of Kuwait, was essential,” he says. The Sultan of Oman had not attended in particular person for roughly a decade – maybe a press release in itself.
On diplomacy, he’s extra cautious. Mediation over Sudan, Gaza or Lebanon has largely been pushed by particular person capitals, not the GCC as an establishment. But even right here, Ghuloom detects a subsequent section taking form, significantly round safety cooperation with Washington. “The following step for the GCC by way of safety integration can be executed in coordination with the US, which is important,” he explains.
Not in anybody’s pocket
If the GCC is rising extra assured internally, it is usually loosening its dependence on any single exterior patron. For Al Hindy, this is without doubt one of the most vital shifts behind the Bahrain summit.
“In the present day, the US is now not so within the Gulf oil and now not depending on the Gulf oil,” he says. “But in addition the Gulf international locations are now not depending on American safety. After all, all of them have wonderful cooperation with the USA. However immediately, the GCC is transferring past this dependence into opening all doorways and opening all connection.”
He lists wonderful relations with China and Russia and “very strategic financial cooperation with Europe”. The important thing level just isn’t a pivot away from Washington a lot as a deliberate diversification of choices. “The GCC is now not within the pocket of the USA, if we might name it,” he says. “It’s immediately balancing all its choices and opening all its selections and all its doorways to make sure the very best positioning within the altering world order.”
Ghuloom’s studying of exterior ties is extra granular. The GCC’s formal relationship with the European Union, he notes, stays tangled in unresolved commerce negotiations and disputes over sustainability and due diligence guidelines. Brussels will possible proceed to advance by way of one-to-one offers with Gulf states, significantly the UAE, reasonably than by way of a bloc-to-bloc settlement. Italy, nevertheless, is rising because the companion of selection inside Europe, symbolised by the Italian prime minister’s look as visitor of honour on the summit.
China and ASEAN matter, too. But, as he places it, “none of those come near how the GCC is growing its relations with the US”. Probably the most significant safety integration nonetheless carries an American accent.
The Gulf as laboratory of the brand new economic system
If geopolitics is one driver of unity, economics is one other. Al Hindy is unusually bullish on the Gulf’s place within the international innovation map.
“That is the place the wealth is within the sense that that is the area that’s attracting the newest innovation, the newest companies,” he says. He factors to a mannequin first developed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE and now being “strongly adopted and with an enormous transformation in Saudi Arabia”. The Gulf, in his view, has turn into “this large land of alternatives” that draws expertise, capital and expertise.
“It’s ready to take action as a result of wealth that it has by way of funding, but in addition the wealth by way of being the area the place all of the minds from the world can come and work collectively and join collectively and have the flexibility to create one thing new,” he argues.
“That is now not the USA underneath Trump. This can’t be China. And naturally, Europe has fallen within the sense of being a frontrunner in innovation and expertise and so forth. Nobody on the earth immediately can play this position besides the GCC.”
It’s a provocative declare, and one which many in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen would contest. But the underlying remark rings true. Few areas immediately supply the identical mix of capital, infrastructure and urge for food for experimentation because the Gulf. From AI to wash vitality, the GCC has turn into a sort of open-air laboratory for applied sciences that older economies have grown too politically or fiscally constrained to check at scale.
That can also be why the Bahrain summit frolicked on the unglamorous enterprise of AI laws, catastrophe administration and financial integration, adopting outputs from its advisory fee and aligning them with nationwide methods corresponding to Saudi Arabia’s Imaginative and prescient 2030 and the UAE’s AI-heavy improvement path.
The European Union represents the excessive watermark of formal integration. It has a single market, a courtroom, a standard forex for many members and a extremely intrusive regulatory equipment. It additionally has an extended path of crises and bitter debates about sovereignty and id. ASEAN has gone the opposite method. It has prized consensus and non-interference, transferring slowly on financial integration and much more slowly on safety.
The GCC is carving out a 3rd path. Prakash just isn’t satisfied that the GCC has already turn into a world “agenda-setter”. “For now, it doesn’t really feel that method,” he says. “Plainly the GCC is evolving right into a driver of regional connectivity that may weave Center Japanese states collectively in ways in which hold geopolitics at bay. Whether or not the GCC globalises its new concepts will depend on how properly they are often rolled out and performance.”
A brand new yr, a more durable sort of unity
So what, in the long run, did the Bahrain summit obtain? It didn’t create a federation or resolve each stress between member states, and it didn’t magically flip the GCC right into a fully-fledged diplomatic actor.
What it did do was extra sensible, and arguably extra consequential. It embedded the language of indivisible safety in a doc that additionally created the institutional {hardware} to make that safety believable.
“The GCC has an excellent potential on the earth economic system to be that area that creates all these new concepts,” Al Hindy says. “I believe that each one the leaders are actually very conscious of that, and that is what made them actually take this daring step ahead in direction of creating this future imaginative and prescient of the GCC.”
As 2025 bleeds into 2026, the Gulf finds itself at an uncommon juncture. Its neighbourhood is aflame. The outdated safety ensures are softer. But its personal capacities – monetary, technological, diplomatic – have by no means been stronger.
Bahrain won’t be remembered because the summit the place the GCC all of the sudden turned a union. It could, nevertheless, be remembered because the second the Gulf actually began behaving like a bloc settling into its stride.
If that momentum holds, the picture we are going to recall from this winter won’t be the household {photograph}, however the realisation {that a} new Gulf order, painstaking and technical, was already being assembled in Bahrain lengthy earlier than anybody selected to call it.
This piece was initially revealed as the duvet story of Arabian Enterprise journal’s January 2026 challenge.
