A month ago, Operation Epic Fury launched with U.S. and Israeli forces striking Iranian nuclear facilities, IRGC command infrastructure, and ballistic missile stockpiles. The media was split between calling it a catastrophe in the making and predicting a regional war that would drag in every nation with a stake in the Middle East.
They were right about the regional war part. They had the wrong countries in mind.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates just joined the ground operation against Iran.
That’s not a footnote. That is one of the most significant geopolitical shifts in the modern Middle East — two Sunni Gulf states, both of which share long proxy conflict borders with Iran, both of which were part of the Abraham Accords diplomatic framework, formally committing forces alongside the United States and Israel in an active military campaign against the Islamic Republic.
The operational picture as of this week:
– Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capability degraded by approximately 70%
– Over 30 Iranian naval vessels destroyed
– More than 700 ballistic missiles eliminated in storage
– Ballistic missile attacks against U.S. and Israeli forces down 90% from day one
– Over 6,000 U.S. combat sorties flown
– More than 1,000 senior IRGC and Basij commanders killed in the operation
– Reports indicate Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was among those killed in decapitation strikes
Secretary Hegseth said this week that the mission objectives remain “laser-focused.” He’s not wrong. The military campaign has accomplished in weeks what decades of sanctions and diplomatic pressure failed to do.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have been in an undeclared war for decades. The battlefields were always somewhere else — Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon. Houthi drones hitting Saudi oil facilities in 2019. Iranian-backed militias destabilizing Iraqi governance. Hezbollah running Lebanon’s political system on Tehran’s behalf.
The pattern was always the same: Iran acted through proxies, maintaining plausible deniability. Saudi Arabia absorbed the attacks, retaliated quietly, and avoided direct confrontation.
The decision to commit ground forces openly — alongside the United States and Israel — represents something Saudi Arabia has never done before. It means the Kingdom calculated that the moment of plausible deniability is over. Iran has been weakened enough, and the U.S. commitment is firm enough, that Riyadh no longer needs the cover.
The Abraham Accords, signed during Trump’s first term, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states — the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco. Critics called it a paper agreement with no real strategic weight. What we are watching this week is the strategic weight of that architecture being demonstrated in real time. Arab states and Israel, on the same side, against a common threat. The critics were wrong.
When Sunni Arab nations formally join a military campaign against Shia Iran, the terms of any eventual peace negotiation shift dramatically. Iran’s most powerful propaganda play — that it stands for the Muslim world against Western and Israeli aggression — collapses when Saudi Arabia is standing on the other side of the line.
The April 6 deadline on the Strait of Hormuz is still the nearest hard waypoint. Iran has filed a counter-proposal — asking for reparations, Strait sovereignty guarantees, and security pledges. Counter-proposals are not rejections. You don’t file terms when you’ve walked away; you file them when you want different terms. The back-channel negotiations Secretary Rubio referenced this week are where the real movement is happening.
But Iran is now making those calculations with a coalition it didn’t anticipate. The United States. Israel. Saudi Arabia. The UAE. That is not the adversary Tehran war-gamed for.
The war the media said would isolate America just got joined by two of the wealthiest, most strategically positioned nations in the Arab world. The isolation is running in the other direction.
