Closing the Gulf embassies is John Kiriakou’s assessment of a decision that was announced while he was on the air on 3 March 2026, days into the American and Israeli war against Iran.
He broke off from a question to report it. “Hey, before I answer, uh, the United States just announced that it is closing its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. This is dramatic.”[1]
Why he read it as dramatic
The measure of the decision, for Kiriakou, is the war it is not being compared to. “All through the the first Gulf War, we never closed any embassies.”[1]
The single exception he allows proves the threshold rather than lowering it: “obviously, we had to close Kuwait because it was it was attacked and invaded and our our diplomats were held as hostages, human shields in Iraq.”[1][2] An embassy closed because the country it stood in had ceased to exist as an independent state is not a precedent for closing two that had not been invaded.
His conclusion is about what Washington expects rather than what has happened. “To close two American embassies means that the White House and the State Department have decided that this is going to get a whole all hell of a lot worse than what it is right now.”[2]
The evacuation that could not happen
Asked what obligations American missions carry toward United States nationals in a war zone, Kiriakou said the usual answer was that Washington gets them out — “Usually, the US does that. Usually” — and then explained why the usual answer had failed. The difference was speed: “we’re we’re so deep into a hot war so quickly, like there was months in the run-up to the Gulf War. There’s no time to do it.”[3]
What the State Department had issued instead was an instruction without a means of complying with it: an announcement “urging all Americans in the Persian Gulf to get out. But, there’s no flights. There are no flights.”[3]
The gap was being filled, in one case, by a host government rather than by Washington. “Today, the the UAE government said that any person, any Westerner, stuck in a hotel and unable to evacuate will have all of his hotel bills paid. So, just stay, relax, protect yourself, and we’ll figure things out later.” Kiriakou attributed it to national character rather than policy: “That’s the Emiratis. That’s how they are. They’re very generous.”[4]