The Gulf has entered a new era of instability. If its leaders think they can rely on old alliances, they are wrong | Nesrine Malik
I keep coming back to the fact that this happened at an international airport, a place where ordinary people are just trying to catch a flight. Thirteen dead, three hundred wounded. The Houthis made a statement about how far they are willing to go. The timing feels deliberate, as if they're testing exactly how much pressure the Gulf's security apparatus can absorb before something breaks.
What worries me more than the missile itself is the assumption that the old alliances will hold. The Gulf states have spent decades building a web of relationships, from Washington to Cairo, that were supposed to guarantee their safety. But this attack shows that those guarantees are looking more like wishful thinking. No amount of diplomatic capital or defense spending can make a capital city immune.
I'd want to know how the Gulf leadership plans to respond without escalating into a full regional war. Because if they retreat into their usual playbook of more airstrikes and proxy battles, they're only feeding the cycle that produced this attack in the first place. The old rules of engagement are clearly dead, and nobody in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi seems ready to admit it yet.