Conflict Without Labels: The Gulf’s Emerging Security Risk

In the Middle East, conflict is increasingly waged without ever being called “war.” Missiles strike, drones fly across borders, and air defenses light up the night—but officials reach for softer labels when describing the violence: retaliation, counterterrorism, limited response, incident, one-off operation.

This vocabulary is intended to control escalation. Too often, it does the opposite. Between 2024 and 2025, nine cross-border episodes involving Iran, Israel, and the United States—including strikes that spilled onto Qatari territory—highlight a core legal fact: these are uses of armed force. International law does not require a formal declaration for violence between states to be consequential. Legal categories such as the use of force, armed attack, and self-defense focus on the acts themselves, not the labels that governments attach. That distinction is critical. When attacks are framed as “below war,” they become easier to sell domestically, easier to defend diplomatically, and easier for allies—and enemies—to tolerate. Regardless of intention, the result is that repeated force becomes normalized precisely because it is linguistically minimized.

When Retaliation Becomes Routine

Since the October 7, 2023 attacks, Israel and Iran have escalated their long-running regional military conflict. In 2024, the two countries moved through a sequence of direct exchanges that many observers treated as episodic “retaliation” rather than a sustained armed contest. In 2025, escalation accelerated into a short, intense Iran–Israel war, alongside U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. During the same cycle, Qatar repeatedly became a target of attacks: Iran first struck the Al Udeid joint U.S.-Qatari air base, and later Israel carried out a strike against Hamas negotiations in Qatari territory. These were not merely bilateral “messages.” They placed a host state, and the broader Gulf region, inside the blast radius of other actors’ choices.

Governments rightly note that each strike differed. Some were larger, some smaller; some targeted military assets, others hit politically sensitive sites. Some were justified as self-defense, while others were framed as counterterrorism; others avoided legal justification altogether. These distinctions matter for legality, proportionality, and responsibility.

The more fundamental point, however, is often overlooked. Any missile or airstrike that crosses a border without the territorial state’s consent is presumptively a use of force under Article 2 (4) of the U.N. Charter. Whether that use of force reaches the higher threshold of an “armed attack”—the legal trigger commonly associated with the right of self-defense—depends on scale and effects. Yet in practice, many states now behave as if every hostile act justifies (and indeed requires) a military response, treating legal thresholds as a matter of narrative rather than fact.

The Overlooked Implications of Cross-Border Strikes

This “threshold drift” has at least three consequences. First, it weakens deterrence clarity. Deterrence depends on credible red lines, but red lines cannot be credible if the same conduct is alternately treated as war, terrorism, self-defense, or an “incident” depending on who conducts it. When states and their partners apply different labels to comparable acts, the message is clear: rules are about the actor, not the act.

Second, lowering the threshold for violence increases the risk of miscalculation. If leaders believe that they can frame strikes as “below war” and avoid escalation, they may authorize actions they would otherwise avoid. Yet it is adversaries who are impacted. One side’s “limited operation” is the other’s proof that restraint is futile, creating an incentive for further escalation.

Third—and most underappreciated—strikes between regional adversaries endanger third states. The Gulf is densely packed with strategic infrastructure, energy nodes, shipping lanes, and foreign military installations. When rivals trade strikes, particularly onto third-party territories, host states are forced into involuntary roles: they become staging grounds, targets, or both. Their sovereignty becomes a variable in someone else’s deterrence equation. Qatar’s recent experience is a clear warning: regardless of how individual actors rationalize particular operations, third-territory “spillover” is no longer hypothetical. Inconsistent political responses by allies compound these risks.

That risk is heightened by the current U.S.–Iran impasse over whether military force will be used again, and on what terms and at what magnitude. The public debate is often framed in the same language that normalizes escalation—“limited strike,” “surgical option,” “one-off response” —as if careful phrasing can keep violence contained. But in the context of threshold drift, even a narrowly scoped action aimed at discrete targets can generate strong incentives for visible retaliation. Iran’s most credible retaliatory pathways are very unlikely to target the aggressor’s territory. Instead, they include pressure on nearby military facilities hosting U.S. forces, disruption calibrated to signal resolve while staying “below war,” and indirect action by aligned non-state actors. For Gulf host states, the spillover dilemma is structural: territory, airspace, and critical infrastructure can become both staging ground and target regardless of formal consent. An impasse, in other words, is not a pause; it is a period in which miscalculation becomes more likely.

Measures to Minimize Gulf Escalation

The policy solution is not to treat all acts as morally equivalent. States must restore discipline to classification and response, so that legal standards constrain behavior rather than follow it. To begin with, all cross-border strikes ought to be considered a use of force under international law until proven otherwise. Governments need to stop laundering escalation through euphemism. When officials refuse to use precise terminology, they make violent escalation more likely.

Transparency is equally essential when self-defense is invoked. If a nation claims it is acting under the right of self-defense by carrying out a retaliatory strike against another nation, it should be able to publicly articulate the basic rationale—necessity, proportionality, and why non-force alternatives were inadequate—and promptly notify the U.N. Security Council as required. This should not be demanded only from adversaries, but from partners as well. A transparency norm will not eliminate conflict, but it makes it harder to use “self-defense” as a catch-all political solvent.

Host states must also build third-territory safeguards, especially when hosting foreign forces. Pre-agreed protocols should limit operations likely to trigger retaliation on their territory without consent. That includes consultation requirements, tighter controls over the use of bases and airspace, and crisis hotlines designed for the Gulf’s congested skies. Allies often treat basing arrangements as purely operational, but they carry legal and political weight that can either reduce or amplify host-state exposure.

Finally, institutionalized documentation is crucial. A Gulf-centered incident registry—recording the facts of cross-border strikes, the legal claims asserted, and the responses by affected states—would cut through partisan narratives and create a basis for consistent diplomacy. In a region where escalation often moves faster than formal investigations, disciplined record-keeping is an underrated tool of stability.

In a volatile context in which the interactions between Iran, Israel, and the United States have become difficult to predict, these measures will not end the confrontation. However, they can narrow the space in which states exploit ambiguity. The central risk today is not the periodic exchange of missiles, but rather the idea that war can be downplayed through language, even as the actions themselves carry full-scale consequences. If the Middle East is entering an era of repeated cross-border strikes normalized as “incidents,” third states will continue to pay the price. The Gulf’s security—and the credibility of the rules designed to restrain force—depends on restoring a basic principle: the law should classify acts by what they do, not by who does them.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Gulf International Forum.