"American forces they host have become the main reason their hotels and energy infrastructure are under Iranian attack" [energy infrastructure]
This directly states the inversion mechanism: US presence, meant to deter, now causes the attacks it was supposed to prevent, making the host states worse off for hosting it.
Reasoning from this article
This is a classic security dilemma inversion — the defensive asset becomes the offensive target. The structural dynamic generalizes: wherever a great power stations forces in a contested region, those forces can become leverage points for adversaries to coerce the host state rather than protect it. The article suggests this dynamic is now severe enough to make US withdrawal a net security gain for Gulf states, a significant structural shift from the post-WWII forward-basing logic.