TEHRAN — United States President Donald Trump has said the U.S. plans to seek compensation from countries it “protected” during its war on Iran.

In an interview with CBS News correspondent Ross Douthat that aired Sunday, Trump said such countries would “pay us any and all costs we had for the war”.

“We’re going to get all that money back,” Trump said. “They’re going to do it, 100 percent. Because without us, they wouldn’t exist.”

Such condescending language toward regional Arab states is difficult to stomach. Trump is, in fact, humiliating these countries.

Iran would not have fired a single shot at its southern neighbors had American fighter jets not taken off from U.S. military bases in those countries to bomb Iran.

Even years before the current war and the previous year's war against Iran, Iranian officials had made it clear that no territory or country would be safe if it were used as a launching pad for attacks against the Islamic Republic.

The presence of U.S. military bases in these countries has proved to be a major liability rather than an asset.

Far from protecting them, these military bases have made the Persian Gulf Arab states more vulnerable to attacks.

These countries have become victims of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. They have lost billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues as a result of Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint through which about one-fifth of the world's energy supplies pass.

Iran closed the Strait in response to the illegal war.

The war against Iran has proved as detrimental to these countries as Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The claim that these countries would not "exist" without the United States is utter nonsense. Even before the June 2025 war against Iran and the current conflict, Tehran had put forward proposals for collective security arrangements in the Persian Gulf region.

Trump also explicitly spoke of compensation from Israel, which he said “wouldn’t exist” without US military intervention. 

This was yet another deceptive remark by Trump. For years, it was Israel that had threatened to launch military attacks against Iran, and it finally acted on those threats in June 2025 and again in February 2026, jointly with the United States.
  
The reimbursement demand comes after Trump and his Republican party took a drubbing in midterm elections, which the president has conceded was partly due to public discontent over the Iran war.

The US president has since declared the war “effectively over” militarily, while defending his decision to start the conflict as “a very good decision”.

Here’s what to know about Trump’s demand for repayment, and what it could mean for the US and its allies:

Trump is misleading Americans because Israel was a direct participant in the war against Iran from the outset. Iran was just defending itself. 

It is quite clear that Trump's remarks about Israel are intended to placate Americans who oppose Israel's warmongering policies in West Asia.

“We decapitated their [Iran’s] nuclear arsenal,” he said. “If I didn’t do that, there would be no Israel right now. Israel would be gone.”

Previously, Trump has said he would seek repayment from Persian Gulf Arab countries that benefit from the U.S. military presence around the embattled Strait of Hormuz, where U.S. forces have been escorting vessels.

“We’re protecting a very rich portion of the world, we’re spending money, and so what we’ve done is we’re going to be reimbursed for protection,” Trump said during a press briefing in July.

He named Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait as countries that should pay.

But while Israel jointly launched the war on Iran with the U.S., Gulf countries have said that they were not even informed about Washington’s plans, and have since borne the brunt of Iran’s retaliatory attacks. As members of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), they have called for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

The cost of the war on Iran is $47.1bn as of mid-October, according to the U.S. military.

But the full cost is likely to be even higher, as that figure excludes the cost of repairing damage to US military bases across the Middle East.

The Congressional Budget Office in September estimated the conflict would carry an additional cost of $2bn-$3bn for each month it continues.

There is serious doubt that Trump will actually seek repayment from allies. 

Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s comments are “best understood as political signaling rather than a serious policy proposal.”

Arab states on the southern shores of the Persian Gulf in particular are likely to take Trump’s comments “with a grain of salt,” added Bader al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University and associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program.

“I think what [Trump] stated on an American news channel was for domestic consumption, and I think that’s how most of the Gulf states will take it,” said al-Saif.

Stefan Lukas, an analyst specializing in Middle East and North Africa security and foreign policy, also pointed to Trump’s domestic political considerations, saying the president has been “looking for someone to blame … and has been doing everything in his power to divert attention from the midterm election results”.

Lukas told Al Jazeera it is unlikely that Washington’s Arab allies in the region will face large compensation payments “or anything similar”.

However, he suggested that Trump could be more serious about seeking economic concessions from Israel, particularly after announcing that the country would no longer receive US aid after the end of this year.

That is partly because, from Trump’s perspective, “Israel pushed him into a disastrous war with Iran”, Lukas said.

Al-Saif said Trump could be “very innovative” in defining what constitutes repayment for the war, potentially pointing to existing trade agreements or investment from the Persian Gulf.

“There’s many agreements for him to go back to and to claim,” said Al-Saif. “There have been a lot of [Gulf] pledges for investment in the U.S.”

Farid Boussaid, an assistant professor in Middle East politics at the University of Amsterdam, said Washington could push for further Persian Gulf investment and present it as compensation.

“This will most likely be indirect and take the form of commercial investments in the U.S., buying of U.S. weapons systems – on top of what has already been ordered – and investments into close associates of Trump’s financial dealings,” said Boussaid.

Trump has repeatedly made misleading claims about foreign investment and trade agreements in the past, portraying them as payments or gifts to the U.S.

After a July 2025 trade deal with the European Union, Trump claimed the bloc had given the US a $600bn “gift” that could be invested in “anything we want”. However, the framework agreement referred only to an expectation that European companies would invest $600bn across strategic sectors in the U.S. through 2028.

The same month, Trump described a $550bn investment pledge from Japan, under a new U.S.-Japan trade agreement, as being “like a signing bonus that a baseball player would get”.

During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly claimed that Mexico would pay for a border wall – which was never completed and which Mexico did not pay for. Trump later qualified his claim to say that Mexico would reimburse the U.S. for the wall or pay for a “piece” of it, which also never happened. Trump at one point claimed that the benefits of a trade pact he negotiated with Mexico would cover the cost of the wall.

How Persian Gulf countries will react to Trump’s demands is being debated by some analysts. 

Having already suffered extensive financial losses during the war, Washington’s Persian Gulf Arab allies will not take well to being asked to pay more for a war they did not start, say analysts.

Quilliam said Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf region would likely respond to any demand for direct repayment with “quiet resistance”, arguing that they “already contribute significantly to the cost of regional security through defense cooperation, investment and economic partnerships with the U.S.”

These states also pay for the maintenance of several large bases that the U.S. uses for military operations in the region.

Boussaid said Persian Gulf Arab states will be particularly averse to such a demand as “the U.S.-Israeli war led to considerable damage to their [civilian] and military infrastructure when Iran struck back”.

Al-Saif added that Trump’s “condescending language does not bode well for partners long invested in the relationship with the U.S.”

As for Israel, it looks unlikely to “reverse its longstanding role as a recipient rather than a provider of support in its relationship with the US”, according to Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani, assistant professor of politics and international relations of the Middle East at Durham University.

“While Israel and the United States continue to share intelligence and coordinate on regional security issues, any request for Israel to shoulder a meaningful share of the financial burden would run against established practice and Israel’s present resource constraints,” she said.