"The number of countries ready to take part in ensuring the safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz has increased to 22, according to a joint statement by these states, cited by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"We express our readiness to take part in the necessary efforts to guarantee the safe passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. We welcome those countries that take part in the preparation plans," the statement says.
Last Thursday, a statement on joining the coalition to ensure the safety of ships in Six countries made the Strait of Hormuz: Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.

The coalition of them, the Baltic states — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the Scandinavian — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. From Arab countries, the UAE and Bahrain agreed to take part in it." The coalition members stated that all countries benefit from the safety of using sea routes.

On February 28, the United States and Israel began striking targets in Iran, including Tehran, with civilian casualties and deaths reported. Iran is carrying out retaliatory strikes on Israeli territory, as well as on US military facilities in the Middle East region.

The escalation around Iran has led to the de facto blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, a key supply route to the world market for oil and liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf countries, and has also affected the level of oil exports and production in the region. In this regard, US President Donald Trump called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and other countries to send ships to The Strait of Hormuz."

Подробнее: https://eadaily.com/en/news/2026/03/22/22-countries-will-be-engaged-in-the-strait-of-hormuz

"Earlier this month, Elbridge Colby, a senior official in the US Department of War, held a call with Saudi Arabian Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman, who is also the brother and top adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Iran’s attacks on US bases in the Gulf were heating up, and the US needed expanded access and overflight permissions. Saudi Arabia agreed to open King Fahd Air Base in Taif, in Western Saudi Arabia, to the Americans, multiple US and western officials familiar with the matter told Middle East Eye.

The base is important because it is farther from Iranian Shahed drones than Prince Sultan Air Base, which has come under repeated Iranian attacks. Taif is also close to Jeddah, the Red Sea port that has become a critical logistics hub since Iran effectively took control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Current and former US officials tell MEE that if the Trump administration is preparing for a longer war on Iran, Jeddah may be critical for sustaining US armed forces. Thousands of US ground troops are en route to the region from East Asia.

Saudi Arabia’s decision to expand base access, current and former officials say, underscores a shift in how the kingdom and some other Gulf states are responding to the US-Israeli war on Iran. “The attitude in Riyadh has shifted towards supporting the US war as a way to punish Iran for strikes,” a western official in the Gulf told MEE.

Trump and the Saudi crown prince have been holding regular phone calls for the last three weeks, the US and western officials told MEE.

The UAE has also told the US that it is geared up for a long war, putting no pressure on Washington to wrap up the conflict soon.

In a phone call earlier this month, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed told his counterpart, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that the UAE is prepared for the war to last up to nine months, the US official told MEE. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar lobbied US President Donald Trump against attacking Iran. While they host US military bases, the states insisted that they not be used as launchpads when the US joined Israel on 28 February to attack Iran.

Despite this, the Gulf states have paid the heaviest price for the US’s decision to go to war.

The UAE alone has intercepted 338 ballistic missiles and 1,740 drones since the start of the war.

Qatar suffered the worst attack of any Gulf state despite being a critical mediator that has consistently focused on de-escalation...Some states, like Oman, have said that Israel hoodwinked the US into launching an unlawful attack on Iran.

There is also anger at the US over its value as a security guarantor.

The US has been unable to replenish the Gulf states' Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defence interceptors. The US bases in the Gulf, meant to protect the Arab monarchies, have been targeted. Meanwhile, oil and gas exports have ground to a halt.

Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi wrote in The Economist this week that this is "not America's war" and that Washington’s allies needed to make clear to the US that it was dragged into a conflict with little to gain.

Busaidi’s remarks contrasted with those of Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. After Riyadh and the port of Yanbu were attacked by Iran, he delivered a blistering message to the Islamic Republic. One former US intelligence official described it as “fighting words”.

Farhan said Iran had committed “heinous attacks” which “are an extension of [Iran’s] behavior that is based on extortion and sponsoring militias, threatening the security and stability of neighbouring countries”.

"Saudi Arabia has repeatedly tried to extend its hand to the Iranian brothers…but the Iranians did not reciprocate,” he said, adding that the kingdom reserved the right to take “military action”.

While no one in the Gulf wanted a war with Iran, the Gulf states are approaching the conflict from varied, evolving perspectives as it drags into its fourth week, experts say...."
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-and-uae-inch-closer-to-us-israeli-war-on-iran

A differing perspective (it is always useful to look at sources that may or may not share one's viewpoint)

"...Eighteen days after the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran on February 28, 2026, many of the usual signs of state continuity are still visible. The Islamic Republic is still firing missiles and drones at Israel and other targets across the region, including advanced systems such as the Sejjil ballistic missile. State television is still broadcasting. Basij and IRGC units are still present on the streets. Mojtaba Khamenei has been installed as successor. No major elite split has yet surfaced. Parts of the regime’s regional network still exist. Shops still carry basic goods. And the nationwide uprising many expected has yet to materialize.

For many observers, these signs point to one conclusion: the regime has taken a severe blow, but it is still holding.

That reading may be fundamentally wrong.

These indicators are not false; they are simply being read through the wrong framework. They are taken as evidence that the system has absorbed the shock and remains solid. In reality, they indicate the opposite. The Islamic Republic prepared for the moment when its center would be hit, and its command structure would fracture. In that scenario, regional units keep firing, security forces keep repressing, and the state projects fragments of normality even as central control collapses. The activation of these mechanisms is evidence that the system has entered its collapse phase, not escaped it. What we are seeing is not resilience, but a regime preserving violence and surface function long enough to outlast the political patience of its adversaries.

That is the essence of Tehran’s calculation. It does not believe it can defeat the United States and Israel in a long conventional war. It believes Washington will not fight such a war for long. Its strategy, then, is not victory but endurance: keep shooting, keep coercing, keep signaling continued function, and keep imposing costs until the Americans decide the game is no longer worth the price. To understand why the usual indicators can mislead, it is necessary to go back to the mid-2000s. Under IRGC commander Aziz Jafari, the Revolutionary Guards reorganized around the logic of asymmetric warfare. Iranian planners understood that they could not match the United States in classic naval, air, and armored war. So they built a structure meant to survive decapitation, fragmentation, and prolonged disruption.

One key part of that design was the network of ten regional IRGC headquarters. Each sits above parts of the country’s thirty-two Guard corps and their attached Basij units. These commands were built to control local brigades, battalions, security formations, and regional military assets with substantial autonomy. Their purpose was explicit: if the command structure in Tehran were badly damaged or destroyed, the regime would still retain armed regional organs able to suppress unrest, confront internal threats, and continue fighting external enemies without waiting for the center to tell them what to do.

This was the logic of “mosaic defense”. If the chain of command broke, the system would not freeze. It would fragment into semi-independent pieces and keep operating. Regional formations would continue firing and repressing even if central coordination became weak, intermittent, or impossible.

That is why continued missile launches should be handled carefully as evidence. They do not show strategic coherence. They show that the regime has entered the phase it prepared for its worst day: preserving violence after coherent command has begun to fail. Abbas Araghchi all but admitted this when he was asked about Iranian strikes on Oman, one of Tehran’s closest regional partners. “What happened in Oman was not our choice,” he said, adding that military units were “independent and somehow isolated” and were “acting based on instructions … given to them in advance.” In other words, the missiles are still flying not because the political center is fully in control, but because the system was built to keep firing after the center’s grip had already started to fray.

That is also why the deaths of top IRGC commanders such as Salami, Rashid, Pakpour, and many others do not automatically produce silence. The machine keeps firing because it was built to outlive them. What looks like resilience is in fact the functioning legacy of a doomsday design. The same logic applies to the streets.

The regime’s urban repression system did not depend simply on armed men standing at street corners. It relied on an elaborate structure of surveillance, monitoring, command centers, drones, neighborhood bases, police stations, and rapid-response deployment. During the January 7 and 8 uprising, that system operated on multiple levels. Personnel sat in command centers such as Tharallah Headquarters in Tehran before walls of monitors linked to cameras across the city. Mobile units deployed camera-equipped drones over neighborhoods and streets. Helicopters monitored urban movement from above. Security forces were stationed in hundreds of neighborhood-level Basij compounds, IRGC facilities, and police posts, ready to be dispatched wherever needed. It was a meticulously designed and repeatedly rehearsed system for suppressing dissent with speed and precision.

That infrastructure is now badly damaged. Tharallah Headquarters has been struck. Numerous neighborhood-level bases in Tehran have been bombed, destroyed, or evacuated because they can be hit at any time. The same pattern is not limited to Tehran. Bases in towns and even villages have also been targeted.

The result is not the disappearance of repression, but its degradation. Basij and IRGC units can still appear, still shoot, and still kill. But they no longer operate with the same surveillance depth, the same aerial visibility, the same command-and-control confidence, or the same dense local infrastructure that made repression so effective in the past. A system that can still shoot is not necessarily a system that can still control.

That distinction matters because January remains central to the political mood. In roughly one hundred cities, protesters effectively seized urban space before the regime reasserted control after nightfall and in the following hours. It regained control because it still possessed the integrated machinery to observe, track, dispatch, surround, and overwhelm. This time, the conditions are different. If protesters return and seize the space again, the regime will be far less able to retake it quickly. And this time the skies are not empty. American and Israeli aircraft and drones are already overhead. The most common question, “Why are Iranians not protesting?”, is also one of the most misleading. The answer is not necessarily that the regime has restored control, that society has rallied around the flag, or that people have accepted the system. A simpler explanation is that many are doing exactly what they have been told to do: stay home, for now.

Since the war began, the message from key anti-regime voices has not been to flood the streets immediately. It has been caution. Pahlavi has urged people to stay indoors for safety, stock essentials, continue strikes, maintain nighttime chants, and wait for the decisive moment. Quiet streets, then, do not prove regime control. They reflect tactical restraint by a society that remembers exactly what happens when people move too early.

The same interpretive error appears in the succession question.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation has been cited as a sign of continuity. But continuity in name is not the same as continuity in power. In a system built on the theology of Velayat-e Faqih, the leader’s physical presence is one of the primary instruments of authority. Yet nearly three weeks into the war, the new supreme leader remains a ghost.

His first and only statement was read by news anchors over a handful of still photographs, and even those have been rare. Several looked so artificial that many Iranians mockingly called him “the first AI-generated leader in the world.” There has been no live speech, no public appearance, no visible projection of sovereign authority. Whether he is in a Tehran bunker or somewhere else under heavy protection, his total invisibility sends the same message to the elite: the center is hiding rather than holding. He looks less like a sovereign projecting command than the head of an underground cell struggling to stay alive. This is not a transition of confidence. It is a transition of survival, with a leader constrained by decapitation risk and the remnants of a badly damaged, fragmented IRGC calling the shots around him.

Silence Inside the Elite Does Not Mean Cohesion
The absence of visible defections is also easy to misread..."
https://parpanchi.substack.com/p/what-looks-like-resilience-in-iran?r=47mb3v