Why are the Arab states so reluctant to fight?
The answer is not simply cowardice, pacifism, or a lack of military resources. The problem is structural. Many Arab societies possess powerful traditions of martial pride, tribal loyalty, religious sacrifice, and personal courage. Yet the modern Arab nation-state is often disconnected from the social structures from which those traditions emerged.
Tribal solidarity can produce determined fighters. Religious belief can inspire sacrifice. Loyalty to a clan, dynasty, or local community can generate extraordinary resilience. But these forms of allegiance do not automatically translate into a willingness to fight and die for the borders, ministries, and institutions of a modern state.
This is the central weakness confronting many Arab governments. Their leaders fear not only the external enemy, but also the limited ability of their own populations to absorb casualties, economic disruption, and prolonged uncertainty on behalf of a national project that may lack deep emotional legitimacy.
Outside Egypt, and perhaps Syria during the height of Ba’athist Arab nationalism, few Arab regimes have successfully created a durable national mythology capable of mobilizing society for a major conventional war. Even where patriotism exists, it is often layered beneath older loyalties: family, tribe, religion, region, and ruling dynasty.
This creates a serious strategic burden for the United States.
Washington’s alliances with Arab governments are largely based on shared interests: energy, trade, weapons, intelligence, regime stability, and opposition to Iranian expansion. But an alliance of interests is not necessarily an alliance of sacrifice. The United States may sell its partners advanced aircraft, missile-defense systems, and intelligence capabilities, yet it cannot easily manufacture the public willingness required to endure a long and costly war.
Israel is fundamentally different. Whatever its internal divisions, Israel possesses a strong national identity, a collective memory of existential danger, and institutions capable of mobilizing large parts of society. The American-Israeli alliance therefore has something that Washington’s relations with many Arab capitals lack: a shared strategic language of national survival and military sacrifice.
This is also why Iranian attacks on Jordan could prove strategically foolish. Jordan is one of the few Arab states where the monarchy enjoys a meaningful degree of historical legitimacy and where a distinct national identity has gradually developed. An external assault could strengthen, rather than weaken, loyalty to the king and create precisely the national consolidation Iran should wish to avoid.
The Gulf monarchies present a different challenge. Their partnerships with Washington are strong, but they remain primarily economic and strategic arrangements. Their governments fear Iran, but they also fear uncontrolled escalation, domestic instability, attacks on infrastructure, and the political consequences of a war they may be unable to explain as a truly national cause.
If conflict is framed instead as a religious war, another contradiction emerges. Sunni Islam possesses its own traditions of holy struggle, but a Christian-led United States would find it difficult, and potentially dangerous, to align itself openly with a Sunni religious mobilization against Shiite Iran.
Moreover, the relative moderation of several Sunni governments is not always the product of a fully developed liberal theology. It is often enforced from above by rulers who fear radicalization and understand that uncontrolled religious fervor could ultimately threaten their own regimes.
The same forces that might be mobilized against Iran could later be redirected against the monarchies themselves, or against the United States.
This makes America’s Arab alliance system a double-edged sword. Washington has partners that want protection from Iran, but not necessarily societies prepared to wage war against it. They want American deterrence, American weapons, and American security guarantees, while avoiding the social and political costs of direct confrontation.
The result is an alliance network that may contain Iran, but is poorly constructed to defeat it.
In the end, only Israel currently combines the military capability, national cohesion, political motivation, and willingness to accept sustained risk necessary for a serious campaign against the Islamic Republic.
That is the uncomfortable reality behind the reluctance of the Arab states to fight: their armies may belong to modern states, but their political systems have not always created modern nations prepared to go to war.
