Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Five of Saudi Arabia’s six neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula face the Persian and Oman gulfs: Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Oman (Fig. 6-17). All are known for their oil reserves, from which they earn a consequential foreign income. On a GDP per capita basis, these five are all high-income countries; they are also highly urbanized and quite modern in certain ways but traditional in others; and all are monarchies in the (Sunni) Islamic tradition. Their response to popular demands during the short-lived Arab Spring was comparable to that in Saudi Arabia: overly modest political concessions combined with increased public spending to appease the masses. Another similarity is that they each contain a substantial population of foreign workers. The Gulf States, overall, maintain cooperative relations with the United States. They are generally anti-jihadist, and their economies are becoming ever more globalized. The rise of these states over the past decade or so is the result of a planned diversification away from a singular reliance on oil revenues— similar to what Saudi Arabia is doing." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 265]