While natural resource wealth explains the survival and stability of the Gulf monarchies, it has also allowed their substantial outreach on the regional and international stages over the past decade. The economic power which Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have accumulated through the dividends of the oil boom since early 2004 has arguably provided these countries with a new advantage in their relations with external partners – particularly against the backdrop of the global financial crisis since 2008, and of the regional disorder since 2011. The leaders of these monarchies have been repeatedly using their financial capital as a bargaining chip to elicit concessions –or at least acquiescence– from their regional and international partners, as they implement strategies that are coherent with their own interests and founded upon their own perceptions of power dynamics in the region. Such natural resource wealth increasingly deployed abroad as a tool of statecraft suggests a need to examine an international scope of rentierism, which I label “Globalized Rentierism”. This paper will explore how the dynamics of Globalized Rentierism play out in arms trade, which is considered to illustrate such dynamics particularly well. For the monarchical regimes of the Arabian Peninsula, defense procurement has been about much more than acquiring the means to address internal and external threats per se: the purchase of state-of-art military arsenals has also served purposes of nation-building and state-branding. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, lucrative arms deals have been a way to secure continued interest, support, and protection by external partners. Recently, the strategic importance of exporting weapons dramatically increased for Western arms-supplying states because of changing economic circumstances and shrinking defense budgets. This has provided client states in the Gulf region with a growing “reverse influence” that they can exploit to augment their bargaining power vis-à-vis their arms suppliers. Globalized Rentierism is considered a particularly important research agenda because it elucidates a broader shifting of the dependency logics between the Gulf monarchies and their Western protectors. The Gulf states’ rising relative advantage in their previously established interdependent relationship with their external partners seems not only to bolster their power and assertiveness, but also to deprive the external partners of their capability to convince their client states to behave in compliance with their own strategies to ensure regional security and stability – as clearly shown in the Qatar crisis since its outbreak in June 2017, for instance.