The Gulf States Thought Their Money Made Them Matter to White Empire. It Didn’t.
Watch White Supremacy Suddenly Remember Iranians Are "Aryans" — Because Admitting Brown Muslims Are Anything Other than the Walking Stereotypes of the Gulf Kingdoms is Unthinkable.
The smoke rising over the skylines of Dubai, Doha, and Manama in March 2026, as Iranian missiles and drones slammed into airports, oil refineries, and civilian neighborhoods, was not merely the smoke of war. It was the funeral pyre of an illusion—the illusion, nurtured for decades by the Gulf monarchies, that their vast petrowealth, their gleaming towers of glass and steel, and their obsequious deference to Washington could purchase them protection, relevance, and respect. It purchased them none of these things. It purchased them contempt.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, laid bare the pathology of the colonized bourgeoisie—that class of native elites who serve as intermediaries for imperial power, who confuse their proximity to the colonizer with genuine sovereignty, and who enforce the colonial order upon their own people in exchange for the trappings of privilege. I call it internalized colonialism, others call it a colonial mentality.
The Gulf monarchies—the House of Saud, the Nahyan and Maktoum dynasties of the Emirates, the Hashemite throne in Amman—are the contemporary embodiment of this archetype. They are Fanon’s colonized bourgeoisie draped in white robes and golden watches, managing the affairs of empire in the “Middle East” while their peoples are kept in states of political paralysis and spiritual dispossession.
The relationship between these monarchies and Western power has always been unequal, always exploitative, and always ultimately disposable. Arms flow eastward. Oil flows westward. And in between, a ruling class enriches itself on the proceeds of this transaction while performing, with increasing desperation, the role the West has assigned it—the role Edward Said identified as the exotic, compliant Other: wealthy, eccentric, ultimately harmless. Walking stereotypes manufactured for Western consumption. Not authentic civilizations with real agency, but set pieces in the theater of empire.
The Grand Resistance
But something has shifted in West Asia—shifted with a ferocity and permanence that the architects of the American-led order did not anticipate and cannot reverse. Peoples have risen who refuse to perform the role assigned to them. They refuse to bow. And in their refusal, they have demonstrated something the Gulf monarchies, with all their billions, could never buy: self-respect.
Only self-respect makes a people matter. No volume of petrodollars, no number of arms contracts, no performative luxury can substitute for it. The Palestinians—besieged, bombed, their civilization systematically dismantled—continue to resist with a moral ferocity that has forced the world to look, to witness, to confront the full depravity of what is being done to them. The Lebanese resistance, battered by Israeli bombardment, refuses to capitulate. The Yemeni Houthis, dismissed by Western analysts as a marginal insurgency, disrupted global shipping lanes and exposed the fragility of the imperial supply chain. And Iran—the great adversary of American hegemony in the region—stands defiant, launching its missiles at the very bases and installations the Gulf states hosted for their supposed protectors.
Nobody earns more genuine respect in a world structured by white supremacy than those who expose it as the myth it is. Not those who play along with it, not those who grovel before it, but those who stand against it at the cost of their own lives. These peoples are animated by something the Gulf monarchies forfeited long ago: faith, history, and a sense of dignity that cannot be purchased or bombed into submission. They are not the caricatures Western media has manufactured—the bearded fanatics, the irrational zealots. They are the opposite of the stereotype: the bearded proud peoples, rooted in their religion and civilization, whose spiritual strength makes a mockery of the empire that sought to define them.
“Be wary, then, of those who will now attempt to reclassify Iranians as “Aryans”—in order to absorb Iranian civilizational defiance into the Western narrative and deny its significance. Empire, when it cannot destroy, co-opts. When it cannot defeat, it redefines”
Honorary Whites
History offers an instructive parallel. When Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, it did not merely win a naval engagement. It shattered the myth of innate European military superiority that had undergirded the entire colonial project. When Japanese forces swept the British from Singapore in 1942—that supposedly impregnable fortress of empire—and drove the Dutch from Indonesia, the facade of Western invincibility crumbled across Asia and could never be fully restored. The colonized peoples of the world watched. And they remembered.
Japan was not welcomed into the Western order because it was admired or trusted. It was grudgingly accommodated—even granted the grotesque designation of “honorary whites” by apartheid South Africa—because it had demonstrated, through force and defiance, that it could not be ignored. This is the bitter lesson the Gulf monarchies refused to learn: that respect in the imperial system is never given freely. It is extracted—through resistance, through the willingness to fight, through the readiness to die rather than kneel.
