The Ongoing Gulf War and the Dangerous Illusion that EDCA Sites are ‘not US bases.’

By: Anna Malindog-Uy

Headsight, The Manila Times

March 7, 2026

THE unfolding conflict in the Gulf between Iran and the United States-Israel axis has exposed a strategic reality that many governments hosting American military assets and bases have long tried to downplay: when a major power wages war, the territories from which it projects force become part of the battlefield.

Across the Middle East, countries hosting US bases — Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan — have suddenly found themselves inside the retaliation cycle of a war that is not fundamentally theirs. Iranian missiles and drones targeting US military infrastructure and assets have turned these host states into vulnerable nodes in a widening conflict. Their geography, once considered an asset in alliance politics, has become a liability in wartime calculations.

For the Philippines, this moment should not be viewed as a distant Middle Eastern crisis. It is a strategic preview. Because the same structural logic now unfolding in the Gulf is quietly taking shape in the Indo-Pacific, and Manila sits directly in its path.

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