US forces are leaving Iraq and Syria as Iranian strikes have broken the network behind America’s Gulf presence. Turkey, Iran and Israel will shape what follows, and the war has shown how unequally they are equipped to do so.

The US-led coalition’s military mission in Iraq formally ends on Wednesday, 30 September. Iraqi officials said on Monday that the last US combat and logistics personnel had already left, two days ahead of the deadline, although the Pentagon has not confirmed this and US officials say a small residual force of undisclosed size will remain to help Baghdad against Islamic State. US forces completed their withdrawal from Syria in April, handing Qasrak, their final base in Hasakah, to the Syrian army and leaving through Jordan to avoid attacks by Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq. The large US deployment in both countries, in place since the war against Islamic State began in 2014, is over. Baghdad has called 1 October the day Iraq becomes “free of any foreign military presence”.

Context: The withdrawal comes as the rest of the US network in the region carries damage it has never sustained before. Since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February, Iranian missiles and drones have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan, according to the Pentagon’s inspector general. Iran concentrated on the systems that let the bases see and defend themselves. It destroyed the radar of a THAAD missile-defence battery at Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan, more than 800 kilometres from Iran, damaged the region’s only AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar in Qatar, and struck radar and communications sites in at least seven countries, along with Patriot and THAAD positions, satellite terminals, an E-3 airborne warning aircraft and refuelling tankers.

The damage has also cost some bases their function. Naval Support Activity Bahrain, headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet, was hit on the first day of the war, and naval resupply moved to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which stretched supply cycles to 14 to 18 days. Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, told sailors on 31 August that the Navy was “not getting back in there anytime soon”.

At the same time, defending the network and Israel has drained the interceptors that protect it. Independent estimates put the US Patriot inventory at about 800 at the end of July, down from roughly 2,330 before the war, and THAAD at about 250, down from 452. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this month that the United States has used between one-half and two-thirds of its combined Patriot, THAAD, SM-3 and SM-6 stocks since June 2025, and that rebuilding them would probably take at least five years. The exit from Iraq thins the network further, removing Patriot and C-RAM counter-rocket systems in Erbil that formed a detection and interception layer on the routes Iranian missiles and drones take towards Jordan and Israel.

This combination has no precedent since 1945. American bases were attacked in Korea and Vietnam, but only inside the country at war, and the rear that sustained the fighting stayed intact. In Korea, airfields such as Kimpo and Suwon were overrun or evacuated as the front moved, and US air power fell back on Japan, which was never struck. In Vietnam, communist forces attacked air bases almost 500 times and destroyed or damaged 1,578 aircraft over a decade. According to a US Air Force-commissioned history, those attacks came on fewer than 2 per cent of operating days and did little to disrupt sorties, while the bases in Thailand and Guam that carried much of the air war were barely touched.

In the Iran war, the rear is the target. Iran has struck the US regional network as a whole, across eight host states and including its sensors, command links, fuel and logistics, while forcing Washington to spend national interceptor stocks it needs for other theatres. The nearest parallel is Japan’s attack across the Pacific in December 1941, which fell on American territories. The Gulf bases belong to independent states that host them by agreement, and each strike has pulled a host government into the war.

Nor does this withdrawal resemble the last time the United States left Iraq. The December 2011 withdrawal also followed an agreement, and several hundred US military personnel stayed on under the embassy. The rest of the American position in the region was then intact: the Gulf bases had never been struck, interceptor stocks were full, and Washington kept the option of returning, which it used in 2014. This exit coincides with damage to the rest of the US network, a drawdown of the weapons that defend it, and a defence strategy that tells regional partners to take primary responsibility for their own security. Together, these developments amount to a change in the American position with no recent parallel.

That strategy predates the war. The National Defense Strategy published in January told regional partners to “take primary responsibility for deterring and defending against Iran and its proxies”. The administration has applied it since. This month, when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked for US strikes on the Houthis, the Iran-aligned Yemeni movement now attacking the kingdom, President Donald Trump declined and offered intelligence and targeting data instead.

Analysis: The full consequences of these developments are hard to see while the war continues. It is not over, and Washington may attempt a last round of escalation before it accepts the outcome, including the Islamic Republic’s survival if Iran comes through. That round is unlikely to restore what has been lost. As a regional guarantee, the American security model in the Middle East is essentially over and highly unlikely to return in its old form. The Economist reached a similar judgement last week, arguing that decades of American hegemony over the region are about to end.

Washington also cannot simply rebuild what it had. Restoring Bahrain, Al Udeid in Qatar or Ali al-Salem in Kuwait in their pre-war form would rebuild targets Iran has shown it can reach. Dispersing forces across smaller sites multiplies the places that need radar, counter-drone systems and interceptors, the scarcest items in the US inventory, while Iran chooses which of them to attack. Unstaffed warehouses, fuel farms and fixed radars remain targets, and billeting troops in hotels hides little, since a US deployment brings vehicles, logistics traffic and security arrangements that local observers notice. Pulling back to Diego Garcia or Europe trades exposure for distance, as the Fifth Fleet has found. Gulf hosts, meanwhile, have learned that an American presence can attract attack as well as deter it.

If the American guarantee is ending, the question is who shapes what follows. The Economist expects the post-American region to be shaped by three non-Arab powers: Turkey, Iran and Israel. The reading is broadly right, but the three are not equal. The war rewarded the ability to keep producing, replacing and firing weapons after the opening stocks ran out, and quality without quantity proved insufficient. By that measure the three differ sharply.

Israel is the most technologically advanced of the three and the region’s leading strike and intelligence power, and Washington calls it a “model ally”. Its limits are structural: about 10.2 million people, almost no strategic depth, and an army that depends on mobilising reserves for long operations. During the war, according to Pentagon data reported in May, the United States fired more than 200 THAAD and more than 100 SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors in Israel’s defence, while Israel fired fewer than 100 Arrow and about 90 David’s Sling interceptors. US law defines Israel’s qualitative military edge as superior means “possessed in sufficient quantity”, and that quantity comes from American production lines that will not reach their expanded output until around 2030. Washington can give Israel priority, but priority does not add missiles to a production line. Israel also has little political access to the Gulf, where Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman have no relations with it. It will remain able to strike across the region, while its capacity to shape the regional order depends on an American depth that is thinning.

Iran shows the other side of the same equation. Its weapons are technologically inferior, yet it has kept firing under the heaviest bombardment any state in the region has faced, because it combines mass with usable depth: about 1.65 million square kilometres, around 90 million people, missile production and storage buried in mountains, dispersed launchers and industry that can regenerate. That geography also rules out a ground invasion, leaving its enemies reliant on air power and blockade, the tools that depth blunts most. Iran’s limit is that its neighbours are organising against it, so its influence will run through coercion and the accommodation it forces on them. Saudi Arabia’s proposal in May for a regional non-aggression framework with Iran is an early sign of that accommodation.

Turkey combines what the other two each lack: the population, depth and self-sufficient industry that Israel does not have, and the technological sophistication and access to Gulf capitals that Iran does not have. It has 86 million people and a defence industry whose domestic content has risen from about 24 per cent in 2002 to roughly 80 per cent, with exports growing from $248m to about $10bn a year. Since the mid-2010s it has owned the full chain from sensor to strike, including drones, electronic warfare, precision munitions and intelligence, and has redesigned it around its own wars without needing another government’s permission.

The clearest evidence is Turkey’s conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). For three decades the PKK used northern Iraq’s mountains as a sanctuary that Turkish forces could raid but not hold, and gains made with US-supplied intelligence after 2007 proved temporary. Once Turkey fielded its own armed drones, munitions and intelligence network from the mid-2010s, it moved the war off its own soil, built permanent positions inside the Kurdistan Region’s border areas with KDP acquiescence, and pushed the PKK back through its mountain belts towards Gara. The PKK announced its dissolution in 2025, and Turkey’s August reintegration law takes effect only after its disarmament is verified, a sequence that reflects how far the balance had shifted.

The same system has changed outcomes elsewhere: the reversal in 2020 of the offensive on Tripoli by Khalifa Haftar, the eastern Libyan commander backed by the UAE, Egypt and Russia’s Wagner group; Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia that year; and the dismantling this year of the autonomous structure of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which Ankara had opposed for a decade. In the Gulf, where Israel has little access, Turkey reinforced its base in Qatar during the 2017 Saudi-led blockade and now runs a combined joint force command there. It has a strategic council with the UAE, and on 7 August it signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all. As Houthi attacks on the kingdom intensified this month, the three states’ chiefs of staff met to discuss support for Riyadh. Washington has adjusted to Turkey’s rise since the Biden years, from its warm response to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election in 2023 to Congress allowing the sale of US engines for Turkey’s KAAN fighter this year.

None of this means Turkey can replace the United States. It cannot reproduce America’s space-based warning, carrier groups or global logistics, its ballistic-missile defence is less mature than Israel’s, and it is unlikely to act as Washington’s regional subcontractor. What it offers the Gulf is a partner that manufactures what it fields, has shown it will commit forces, and is already present on the Arabian Peninsula. That makes it the power best placed to shape the order that follows American hegemony.

The likely result is a layered and more crowded order: an offshore United States providing intelligence, long-range strike and reinforcement from a much smaller footprint; Turkey as the most consequential regional military and industrial power, tied to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE; Israel as a strike and intelligence state with limited reach into the Gulf; Iran as the coercive power its neighbours must both deter and accommodate; and Gulf states hedging among them. The shape of that order is not yet settled. What is already clear is that every basing decision, arms purchase and alliance in the region will now be made in the knowledge that the American network was struck as a whole and could not be defended without emptying the stocks behind it.