In this paper I examine how the Ottoman government’s deteriorating relations with Great Britain and growing involvement in supporting German foreign policy in Asia impacted Ottoman fortunes in the Arabian Peninsula prior to World War One. In particular, I focus on a series of reports from Ottoman consular officials spread throughout the western Indian Ocean in the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. These reports reveal a profound change in the tenor of the Ottoman government’s relationship with their British counterparts in the region in the final decades preceding the outbreak of the war. Although a growing number of publications have examined Ottoman involvement in the European theater of World War One, events in the Ottoman Empire’s southern frontiers bordering the Arabian Peninsula have been relatively neglected. Yet developments in southern Iraq and the territories bordering the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden proved to be decisive in shaping the Ottoman government’s confrontation with the Allied powers and particularly the armies of Great Britain. My paper utilizes documentary evidence drawn from the Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives produced by Ottoman provincial officials from Iraq and Yemen and Ottoman consular agents in the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. These reports dispatched to Istanbul from provincial governors in Basra and Ottoman consular agents in places like Bombay, Karachi, and Bushehr reveal increasing unease with British designs on the region at the same time that Istanbul's support for German diplomatic initiatives in the region was on the rise. Yet the attempt to substitute the diplomatic support of Great Britain with rival Germany opened a wide swathe of Ottoman frontiers bordering the western Indian Ocean to new vulnerabilities. I argue that increased tension with the British government in parts of the Persian Gulf and the southern Arabian Peninsula combined with an increase in diplomatic cooperation with the German government in Asia undercut strategic relationships that had maintained Ottoman security in the southern Arabian Peninsula prior to the outbreak of World War One.