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The drones hitting Gulf Arab states daily since the United States and Israel launched large-scale military operations against Iran in February are not merely Iranian. They are originally Iranian, yes. But these designs and production processes were improved and refined by Russia through years of battlefield testing against Ukrainian defenses. So, they were returned to Tehran from Moscow. Confronted with a threat that Ukraine has spent four years learning to counter, the United States found itself in unfamiliar territory. It was one of 11 countries requesting Ukrainian counter-drone assistance to defend against Iran’s attacks, despite the American president’s assertion that “we don’t need their help in drone defense.”
“Did we destroy Iranian Shaheds?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked while briefing reporters on the Ukrainian drone and electronic warfare specialists who had deployed as trainers to the Middle East. “Yes, we did. Did we do it in just one country? No, in several. And in my view, this is a success.”
This burgeoning Ukrainian-Gulf partnership is an early indicator of something bigger: For decades, the United States acted as the main “hub” for partner cooperation by providing key platforms, organizing regional cooperation frameworks, and managing capability-sharing via U.S. bureaucratic channels. This model has demonstrated specific, identifiable failure modes — speed, battlefield relevance, resource constraints, and bureaucratic friction — compounded by Washington’s growing unpredictability as a partner under President Donald Trump. Now, these partners are starting to bypass those constraints, producing a hybrid architecture that Washington has not consciously designed and does not yet know how to engage.
Given deepening coordination among adversaries, increased cooperation among U.S. partners is a positive development. It is in line with the Trump administration’s calls for allies and partners to do more with less U.S. involvement, and one that future administrations (including a potential Democratic one) can get behind.
Put differently, if a Democrat occupies the White House next, that new president should not seek a redo of the Biden administration’s effort to turn back the clock and recreate an international order that no longer exists. That effort failed already and would miss the mark in 2029. America’s allies and partners are already creating architectures that bypass the traditional U.S. hub, both within alliance structures and now, outside of treaty mechanism as we explore here. Where Washington found itself requesting rather than shaping how it was delivered, it should resist the instinct to reassert control over these new partnerships and instead position itself as a proactive co-participant and critical node in this emerging network.
For years, U.S. partners’ integration has been mostly limited to intra-regional constructs — and many of those are nascent, underdeveloped, and reliant on the United States as the hub. This is partially explained by the absence of robust multilateral frameworks outside of the formal alliances for such integration, including limitations on sharing sensitive defense capabilities and intelligence. Many of these limitations depend on U.S. involvement, as they are developed and supplied by the U.S. government and defense industry. U.S. involvement in turn has significantly slowed down such development and imposed restrictions on what could be shared with whom. For example, even among the Gulf Cooperation Council, integration has been lagging — despite the Council providing a natural framework for coordination and all of its member states relying heavily on the United States as their main security and defense partner. This lack of direct coordination has created a gap from which adversaries are now benefiting.
The war in Ukraine has accelerated a trend toward deeper alignment among U.S. adversaries. Russia has leveraged military, intelligence, economic, and political support from China, Iran, and North Korea. The Iran-Russia partnership is the most consequential of these relationships now that a new front has opened up in the Middle East.
Iran and Russia have used Ukraine as a battlefield laboratory to test and improve their capabilities in real-time and in real-world operations, particularly in the uncrewed tech space. Russia is now providing Iran with upgraded, battle-tested versions of the drones that Tehran supplied Moscow originally, as well as intelligence and cyber support. The Gulf, in effect, is facing a threat that Ukraine has been countering and adapting to for years — and on a much larger scale and more intensely than the region has faced in the past. As a result, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar have signed or are concluding 10-year security agreements with Ukraine, while Ukraine is holding similar talks with Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain.
The Gulf’s turn to Ukrainian innovation reflects a broader trend among U.S. allies and partners recognizing the need to cooperate outside of traditional U.S. channels. This trend is partially accelerated by the Trump administration’s preference for unilateralism, its emphasis on burden-shifting, and its willingness to forgo previously routine consultations — including, for example, not consulting NATO allies in the lead-up to the Iran war, where they nevertheless have been deeply impacted. U.S. foreign policy, particularly vis-à-vis allies and partners, has also become much more unpredictable in the Trump era.
While the Biden administration saw support for Ukraine as a national security imperative, Vice President J.D. Vance has described the reversal of that policy as one of his “proudest” accomplishments in the Trump administration. Compounding this, the U.S. government’s workforce cuts have reduced Washington’s capacity to facilitate the kinds of engagements it once managed routinely. The Iran war has also strained U.S. resources, delaying allies and partners’ procurements from and joint initiatives with Washington.
Partners now see a need to diversify the countries with which they cooperate to share intelligence and technologies, pursue broader acquisitions, and conduct joint training and exercises. In effect, partners are now turning to whichever ally or partner has the most relevant battlefield experience, regardless of region and without waiting for Washington to facilitate the connection.
Four years of battlefield innovation have granted Ukraine something that no other U.S. partner possesses: combat-tested organic capabilities that it can share without Washington’s permission or involvement. Cooperation between Ukraine and the Gulf Arabs, which was slow and limited before the U.S.-Israeli campaign began, accelerated rapidly as Iranian retaliation forced Gulf states to reckon with the capability gaps that Ukraine had spent four years learning to close. This dynamic is occurring because some of the Gulf states were taken aback by the scale and intensity of Iranian retaliation for their support for the United States and because partners focused primarily on acquiring state-of-the-art U.S. platforms seen as key to their deterrence and status as a modern military.
But the Iran war is now demonstrating to Gulf Arabs — as the war between Russia and Ukraine did to NATO — that large, sophisticated, and expensive platforms and assets are often less useful when the adversary relies on cheap, low-tech platforms such as one-way-attack drones. As the U.S. experience in the Middle East has shown, shooting down small, cheap drones with large, expensive interceptors is not a viable or sustainable solution. It is in countering these drones that Ukraine’s experience is instructive for a number of U.S. partners from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific: Ukraine has developed defensive systems that are orders of magnitude cheaper than the exquisite kit that the United States sells for air defense.
Another complicating factor is the Gulf states’ ties with Russia. Moscow’s decision to return upgraded drones to Tehran has made Gulf states’ Russia equities — which they once sought to sustain — less tenable as a reason to avoid deeper cooperation with Ukraine.
Even NATO allies have been slow to absorb Ukraine’s battlefield lessons. For example, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, during NATO’s Hedgehog 2025 exercise in Estonia, 10 Ukrainian drone experts quickly simulated the destruction of two NATO battalions in what a NATO military participant characterized as a “horrible” outcome for NATO forces. The United States was not a participant in the exercise. As Bryan Daugherty has argued in these pages, NATO should “start treating Ukraine as the strategic priority that it has proven itself to be” and learn from Ukraine’s battlefield experience.
Lessons from Ukraine’s experience are even more relevant in the context of another U.S. partner, Taiwan, which is preparing for a potential conflict with a conventionally superior (and nuclear) power, which we consider briefly here as evidence of the bypass network’s appeal in other regions. In the Indo-Pacific, Taiwan stands to benefit from Ukraine’s lessons learned and innovation during the four years of its war with Russia as Taipei plans for its China contingency.
Ukrainian armed forces have developed asymmetric capabilities that would greatly benefit Taiwan’s military. In particular, some of the very gaps Taiwan needs to fill in its own tactics, techniques, and procedures, including hardware design and system integration, are ones for which Ukraine has developed creative solutions — for example, faster adaptation to adjust to the adversary’s rapid countermeasures. And where Taiwan’s drone and counter-drone industries have been slower to develop — with plans to field roughly 49,000 drones by 2027 — Ukraine produced an estimated 4 million in 2025 (with a production target of 7 million in 2026), according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, and has developed kill chains in the air and at sea.
As the wars in Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated, cheap, organic capabilities can blunt a larger adversary’s advantages. Taiwan can draw directly from Ukraine’s experience to bolster its own asymmetric approach. While civil society and private sector cooperation is a positive first step, some of this work should move to government-to-government channels, which Ukraine and Taiwan currently lack. Taipei is already setting up such initiatives elsewhere, having signed memoranda of understanding with several countries, including Czechia, Japan, and Poland, for advanced drone technology cooperation.
A burgeoning bypass network among U.S. partners is not a threat to be managed or a trend to be reversed. Rather, these growing connections are a structural reality with which Washington needs to engage on terms that benefit U.S. national security interests. If it continues playing a reactive role, Washington risks ceding influence over the form this network takes — and the priorities and interoperability standards that shape it.
This network’s durability should not be overstated: Ukraine’s ability to export counter-drone expertise depends in part on Western intelligence infrastructure and Kyiv’s survival as a functioning state, while other partners’ willingness to deepen cooperation with Ukraine largely hinges on their assessment of long-term U.S. commitment to their region. But the bypass network exists whether or not the United States engages it. A reactive Washington does not make the network go away; instead, such a posture simply ensures that the United States has less influence over how the network evolves.
The Trump administration’s shift toward the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) — whereby allies buy equipment from the United States to send to Ukraine rather than Washington providing that equipment directly — illustrates the problem. Although Washington’s credibility as a predictable supplier is under strain because of potential diversion of weapons and munitions already committed to Ukraine, the administration has created a base for ally-partner cooperation but is implementing it as a burden-shedding opportunity rather than a network-building tool. This is the wrong posture for a country that still has significant interests in how this architecture develops. As the administration’s request for assistance from Ukraine for counter-drone technology demonstrates, there is an imperative to promote this kind of cooperation because of the unique capabilities and experience Ukraine has developed on the battlefield.
What that imperative demands is a shift from a hub posture to a node posture. Rather than acting as the final arbiter of which partner can share capabilities with whom, Washington should embed itself in the partner-to-partner transfer process. Rather than routing all intelligence sharing through bilateral channels and limiting what partners can share with each other, it would participate in the multilateral frameworks partners are already building. And rather than treating battlefield-tested tactics, techniques, and procedures as inputs to be evaluated and validated by U.S. doctrine, Washington would treat them as a primary source — integrating them on the same terms it would integrate lessons from its own operations.
That the United States was one of 11 countries requesting — and receiving — Ukraine’s assistance after the administration has spent more than a year seeking to limit U.S. engagement with Ukraine exposes the need to reframe the relationship. Washington should treat Ukraine’s battlefield innovation as an intelligence and doctrine asset rather than a charity case and seek opportunities to leverage those lessons Ukraine has learned in support of partners from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. Ultimately, the Trump administration should seek to position the United States as a critical node in the network rather than the hub that validates it.
Ariane Tabatabai, Ph.D., is vice president of research, security, and defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She previously served in a number of roles at the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense, most recently as deputy assistant secretary of defense for force education and training.
John Drennan is a visiting fellow at the Europe in the World Programme at Egmont – The Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels, with the support of a Council on Foreign Relations Robert A. Belfer International Affairs Fellowship in European Security. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Image: President of Ukraine via Wikimedia Commons
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