Details
On 8 June 2026, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)'s Regional Programme Gulf States, together with the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and with the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy (AGDA) and the Prince Saud Al-Faisal Institute for Diplomatic Studies (IDS) as partner guest institutions will host a closed-door roundtable on strategic competition and regional agency in the Gulf in Brussels.
Held against the backdrop of the 2026 US/Israel-Iran war, the dialogue will bring together policymakers, scholars, and experts from the United States, Europe, and the Gulf to assess how the conflict has reshaped great-power competition in the Gulf and what this means for the recalibration of European and transatlantic engagement in the region. Held under the Chatham House Rule, the roundtable will focus on the following topics:
- The post-war recalibration of US and European roles in Gulf security, and the implications of the conflict for transatlantic alignment;
- How Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states are leveraging their growing autonomy and economic statecraft, and what this reveals about shifting patterns of alignment in the region;
- The evolving great-power landscape in the Gulf, including the trajectory of the Russia-Iran-China alignment and the risks of strategic vacuums;
- What a durable security architecture for Europe, the GCC, and the United States might look like in light of these shifts, and the opportunities for US-EU-GCC cooperation.
The Brussels session has been added to the State of Play series as an extraordinary European-Transatlantic edition in response to the 2026 war. It follows the inaugural session held in Doha in December 2025, with in-region sessions to follow in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates later in 2026.
