On June 3, an Iranian drone killed a resident and carved a hole through Kuwait International Airport, grounding flights, shattering terminal infrastructure, and prompting Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to post a prayer for his Gulf neighbors on social media.
That same day in Washington, the House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution 215-208, directing President Donald Trump to end the war with Iran, with four Republicans crossing the aisle.
Two events, separated by thousands of miles, tell the same story: Iran is winning the political war in Washington while losing the geopolitical war it swore to fight across the Arab world.
Tehran’s strategy was always coherent on paper. By battering the Gulf states that host American forces and are normalized with Israel, Iran hoped to fracture the coalition, peel the Arabs from Washington’s orbit, and make the Abraham Accords too costly for any government to defend.
For months, Iran has fired more projectiles at Gulf Arab capitals than at Israeli territory. According to data from the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, Iran fired more than twice as many ballistic missiles and roughly 20 times more drones toward the Gulf than toward Israel.
Iran targets Kuwait with ballistic missiles, drones
Kuwait alone intercepted 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones before the June 3 airport strike. The UAE reportedly intercepted close to 2,000 drones and hundreds of ballistic missiles since the war began.
The theory of the case for Tehran was deterrence through punishment. Bomb the normalization partners hard enough, and they recalculate. Qatar hedges. Oman stays neutral. Saudi Arabia slow-walks any deal with Israel. The axis of Abraham dissolves before it ever consolidates.
It has not worked. It has done the opposite.
Kuwait, which in June 2025 expressed “deep concern” over US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and implicitly blamed Washington for violating international law, has now joined the joint Arab condemnation of Iran.
That rhetorical trajectory, from soft neutrality to open denunciation, was not driven by ideology. It was driven by Iranian drones hitting a civilian airport, again and again. Repeated bombing of civilian infrastructure has a clarifying effect on public opinion.
The UAE, facing the highest volume of Iranian strikes of any Gulf state, has banned most Iranian passport holders from entry, signaled openness to joining US military efforts to secure the Strait of Hormuz, and made clear its intention to deepen bilateral ties with both Washington and Israel.
Bahrain, which also normalized with Israel under the Abraham Accords, has broadly aligned with the UAE’s more assertive posture.
Tehran had a durable ideological frame through which to depict the Abraham Accords signatories as part of a broader regional alignment with Israel. By bombing them, Iran validated that frame for the very audiences it needed to peel away.
Iran spent months bombing its own diplomatic future in the Gulf. Tehran is now selling itself to the region as the new sheriff of the neighborhood, but no sheriff burns down the towns he wants to govern.
Which brings us back to Washington.
On the day Iranian drones killed a man at Kuwait’s airport, House Republicans crossed the aisle to limit Trump’s war powers. The war powers resolution passed 215-208 with four Republicans joining Democrats, the clearest congressional rebuke of the conflict yet.
The vote matters less as legislation, since Senate passage remains uncertain and a presidential veto is likely, than as a political barometer. “People are tired of $5-a-gallon gas and $6-a-gallon diesel, and fertilizer we can’t afford to put on our fields in Kentucky,” said Rep. Thomas Massie after the vote.
That is the real vulnerability Iran has found. Not in the Gulf, where its drones are being shot down, but in Ohio and Kentucky. Iran cannot outlast American air power. It has always bet it can outlast American political will.
This is the uncomfortable truth Israel must absorb. The erosion of congressional support for the war is not happening because Iran is winning on the battlefield. It is happening because wars without clear objectives, without authorization, and without a defined endpoint generate attrition at home.
Tehran studied Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. It knows the question is never whether America can win. It is whether America will stay.
Stripped of its institutional buffers and repeatedly targeted by Iran, Kuwait may be the next Gulf state to deepen ties with the Abraham Accords framework.
The Gulf is drifting toward Israel faster than any normalization summit could have achieved. But the House war powers vote signals that the window for sustained American pressure on Iran is narrowing.
The writer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx.