Atlantic Council
February 20, 2026
SCOWCROFT CENTER FOR STRATEGY AND SECURITY
Issue brief Great-power competition in the Gulf Written by Jonathan Fulton
Bottom lines up front As the unipolar moment ends, Gulf leaders have an unusual opportunity to shape their own region, with preferences for stability and economic development. Though interests, not ideology, drive Gulf states’ partnerships, Gulf leaders have shown they value the predictability that a rules-based international order creates. De-escalating the region’s longstanding tensions remains the Gulf priority it was pre-October 7, 2023.
The future of the global order It has become accepted wisdom that we have entered a multipolar world. Political and business leaders, pundits, and academics frequently use this multipolarity as a starting point to describe the current churn in which we find ourselves. This, however, is really an unsatisfying explanation of the global order. As Jo Inge Bekkevold pointed out in Foreign Policy, “Polarity simply refers to the number of great powers in the international system—and for the world to be multipolar, there have to be three or more such powers. Today, there are only two countries with the economic size, military might, and global leverage to constitute a pole: the United States and China.” Even this is contentious; China absolutely has global interests, and increasingly a global presence, but whether it has global power is debatable. In his influential 2013 book, China Goes Global: The Partial Power, leading
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China expert David Shambaugh described the country’s global footprint as broad but shallow across most indicators of power— including global governance and diplomatic, economic, military, and cultural power. His assessment of China as a trading superpower but a regional power in most other areas, which looked unlikely to last when the book was published, has become only more prescient after more than a decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. Despite a more expansive global presence via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and a wide range of regional forums meant to facilitate cooperation and coordination with Beijing, China’s influence and power have yet to meet expectations. In reality, the United States remains the only true pole in the international order, although the Donald Trump administration has channeled popular frustration with this global leadership among US voters, many of whom have come to reject the burden