By Samia Nakhoul, Alexander Cornwell and Timour Azhari
MANAMA, Nov 2 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump’s threat to strike Iran again confronts America’s Gulf allies with a stark prospect: another war decided in Washington in which the US bases built to protect them could instead make them targets for harsh Iranian reprisal.
Iranian missiles that struck US military bases and Gulf energy facilities in the last round of fighting exposed a vulnerability at the heart of Washington’s decades-old security
architecture. Rather than deterring Tehran, America’s sprawling regional footprint gave Iran fixed targets and the Gulf states hosting them pressure points it can exploit.
That prospect dominated discussions among ministers, policymakers and security officials at the annual Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain over the weekend, as governments weighed what another round of war could mean for US forces and the countries that host them.
The urgency has grown as Trump again threatened military action, saying he could launch “another little Operation Epic Fury” after Tuesday’s midterm elections, referring to the US-Israeli operation that began on Feb 28. Four European officials said the US had amassed enough forces and assets in the region to attack Iran at short notice, possibly as soon as this week.
"War is coming," said a fifth European official who has close contact with Gulf leaders. "Nobody is in favour of this war."
Egypt's Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told the Manama conference another round of fighting would be more dangerous and destructive than the last: “It will lead to nowhere.”
FROM SHIELD TO TARGET
Two of the European officials told Reuters any US attack would likely target Iranian nuclear sites, including research and development facilities. Among likely locations is Pickaxe Mountain, a site linked to Iran's nuclear program, although the officials said military action would probably be able only to weaken Tehran's capabilities rather than destroy them.
Iranian officials have told Reuters that Tehran has drawn up detailed target lists in retaliation for another US-Israeli attack, including undersea communications cables and military bases, some covert.
The strategy could widen the cost of war beyond the battlefield, with energy infrastructure, desalination plants, communications networks and highly visible targets in Gulf cities at risk.
Iran cannot match the United States and Israel militarily. But it does not need to, three delegates said. Its strategy is increasingly one of attrition: make US forces expensive to defend and sustain, turn the Gulf states hosting them into pressure points, and leverage any American retrenchment as evidence that Washington cannot protect its partners.
"What the Iranians really care about is the departure of US forces from the region," said Emile Hokayem, director of regional security at The International Institute for Strategic Studies, which organises the Manama conference.
Tehran's message to Gulf powers, he told Reuters, is mainly: "You spent four decades investing in the US and after 40 years, those bases didn't protect you, they exposed you."
Nowhere is that argument more potent than Bahrain, headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet and for decades an anchor of American military power in the region. Near its base in Juffair, the scars of strikes were still visible metres from residential areas: the corrugated iron roof and front of a warehouse were torn open and charred where projectiles had struck, while a radar facing Iran was missing a third of its dish.
The damage has forced Washington to confront a question far beyond Bahrain: whether to rebuild, harden or withdraw a military footprint built to project US power, not withstand sustained missile and drone attacks.
THE GULF PAYS THE PRICE
For Bahrain, fears of Iranian threats are layered onto an older sectarian and historical faultline. In 2011, mass protests led largely by the Shi’ite community challenged the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy. Bahrain's rulers crushed the revolt and accused Iran of manipulating the unrest, a charge Tehran denied.
Since the latest war began, some Iranian hardliners have again invoked Bahrain as Iran’s “14th province”, despite Tehran abandoning its territorial claim in 1970. Against that history, strikes on US facilities threaten not only America’s military presence in Bahrain but the kingdom hosting it.
"We're basically looking at the worst-case scenario," a Gulf official told Reuters, anticipating that the US would soon strike Iran, leading to Iranian retaliation against civilian infrastructure across the Gulf.
Another Gulf official said that “in the end, only one person decides” whether conflict resumes and how intense it becomes, a reference to Trump that underscored the Gulf states’ limited power to shape a conflict whose consequences they would bear.
In response to questions for this article, a White House official said “all options” remained available and Iran faced “the easy way or the hard way,” adding: “President Trump holds all the cards.”
“The Iranian campaign is to exhaust the Americans. It's not to win,” Hokayem added. “They can force you to spend more energy, more weapons, more money over time.”
RACING TO AVERT ANOTHER WAR
That concern is pushing Gulf states towards diplomacy. Senior officials from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan held talks with Iranian officials in Tehran last month, with Saudi Arabia saying the effort was intended to “prevent the return of military escalation.” Qatari officials also held meetings in Tehran and Doha over the weekend to avert renewed war.
"We are hoping that there is a diplomatic breakthrough. We don't really want to see another round of confrontation in the region," United Arab Emirates senior official Anwar Gargash told the Manama conference.
The UAE was, however, "braced for the worst," he said.
The European official close to Gulf leaders said there was deep pessimism about whether diplomacy can bridge the Washington-Tehran divide, with renewed war seen as a matter of when, not if.
The question is no longer whether Washington remains committed to the Gulf, but what a US security guarantee means when the infrastructure underpinning it is itself a target.
The contest may be shifting from who can inflict the greatest military damage to who can endure the costs longest. For Washington’s Gulf partners, the fear is that another round of war could leave them paying much of the price.
(Additional reporting by Alexander Cornwell and Timour Azhari in Manama and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai; Writing by Samia Nakhoul, Editing by William Maclean)
