New Delhi, June 26 -- JANUARY feels like another lifetime. At a gathering of bankers in Dubai, talk focused on whether the city's sizzling property market was due for a correction. At a tech conference in Doha, Qatar's capital, everyone wanted to discuss AI. War was already threatening the Middle East, but no one wanted to believe it would hit home.

For the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), a club of petro-monarchies, the months that followed were their greatest shock since 1990, when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. Perhaps the comparison seems overwrought. The first Gulf war killed hundreds of Kuwaiti civilians and caused an ecological disaster when Saddam's army set fire to oil wells; the consequences of this conflict are less visible....