The Third Gulf War Follows Directly From the Last Two
On the escalating logic of American action in the Middle East.
Time has a way of compressing history. The Hundred Years’ War was a series of three separate wars that must have felt as distinct to its contemporaries as the World Wars feel to us now. But those three wars were a long time ago, so we lump them together into one conflict. Besides, we are wise. We have seen the direction of History and know they were all fought over the unresolved question of England’s rivalry with France.
I suspect future historians will apply the same compression to the three Gulf Wars of the unipolar era. While 1991, 2003, and 2026 are distinct in many ways, they all revolve around repeated attempts by the hegemon to impose its order on a region that it appears to understand less and less each time.
Together, the three wars trace the arc of America’s unipolar moment, from its triumphant emergence in 1991 to its hubristic peak in 2003 to its current retreat. Each phase of the campaign is defined by deepening contempt for the rest of the world and increasing disconnect from its own national interest. In 1991, the United States had a reason to fight; in 2003 it manufactured one; in 2026 it didn’t bother. Maybe this time the bombing was “out of habit,” Trump explained recently, which, he added, is “not a good thing to do.”
The First Gulf War was the coronation of the new arrangement: a 34-nation coalition, UN authorization, Arab states fighting alongside NATO allies. The USSR stood by meekly, Gorbachev hoping for more loans for his tottering regime. The coalition liberated Kuwait and stopped. A miracle, the hegemon actually working within the rules it claimed to uphold. But Saddam remained in power, and the sanctions regime that followed was corrosive to American credibility. The first war’s restraint preserved the legitimacy of American primacy but also left unfinished business.
The Second Gulf War was unipolarity at its hubristic peak. The 9/11 attacks produced the Bush Doctrine, with unilateral preemption as America’s formal strategy. The hegemon would no longer just react to aggression but reshape regimes by force if necessary. Everything present in 1991 was by now degraded or absent. The coalition was thinner and there was no Security Council authorization. The casus belli of Weapons of Mass Destruction was hotly contested before the invasion and collapsed shortly after. France and Germany broke openly with Washington; Arab states were skeptical or hostile. The war dramatically expanded Iranian influence across the region, eliminating its most powerful rival and creating space for proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Iraqi militias. The second war’s chief beneficiary became the next target.
And so to the Third Gulf War. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched airstrikes across Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with members of his family. The strikes came one day after Oman’s foreign minister announced a breakthrough in nuclear talks, with Iran agreeing to forgo enriched uranium stockpiles and accept full IAEA verification. Peace, the mediator said, was “within reach.” Three weeks into the war, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed for commercial shipping and a fifth of the world’s oil supply is offline.
Each subsequent war has stripped away another layer of hegemonic restraint, with the legal justifications thinning and the deference to allies vanishing. The role of Israel across the three campaigns traces this arc nicely. In 1991, Israel had to be actively sidelined. Saddam launched missiles at Tel Aviv to provoke an Israeli response that would break the Arab coalition, and the entire American diplomatic effort depended on keeping Israel out of the war. Bush pressured Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s prime minister, not to retaliate and deployed Patriot batteries as consolation. Israeli involvement was the thing that had to be suppressed for the multilateral framework to hold.
By 2003, Israeli strategic interests had moved into the background of the war. The neoconservative case for remaking the Middle East overlapped heavily with Israeli strategic thinking, even though Ariel Sharon, the prime minister at the time, privately told Bush that Iran was the real threat. Israel’s role was part of the war’s intellectual scaffolding without being visible on the battlefield.
In 2026, there is no hidden scaffolding. The United States and Israel launched the war together as open co-belligerents. The evolution of Israel’s role from suppressed to implicit to explicit mirrors the pattern of increasingly unconstrained American behavior. Geopolitical alliances that were hidden in 1991 to maintain coalitional cohesion are now acknowledged openly with no concern for the impact on the coalition.
Why the erosion of concern for international standards of action? It’s clearly not just Trump, because the crucial break was 2003. Bush invented a casus belli and established the precedent that the hegemon could wage elective war. Trump is doing something even dumber but in some ways less radical by operating in the space Bush opened. So any causal story has to explain the whole arc, not just the endpoint.
Is there something about unipolarity itself that makes restraint unsustainable over time? Is it domestic, with the political economy of primacy capturing foreign policy? Is it ideological, with the logic of liberal hegemony curdling into something more sinister? These are all interacting explanations, not competing ones. But as any realist will tell you, unipolarity is always permissive. When no peer competitor can check you, restraint becomes voluntary. The 1991 coalition wasn’t held together by American goodness but by the residual habits and institutions of bipolarity. That model reflected a world where the United States felt it needed legitimation. But once unipolarity was unquestioned, why bother?
There’s also a feedback loop specific to the Gulf at work here, with each war creating the conditions for the next. 1991 left Saddam in place and imposed a sanctions regime that created the political space for finishing the job in 2003. That war in turn destroyed Iran’s chief rival and turned the Islamic Republic into the dominant threat to U.S. interests in the region, creating the target for 2026. Each intervention produced the crisis that the next intervention was supposed to solve. It’s a common imperial problem.
The Hundred Years’ War had a winner. France reclaimed its territory and England’s continental ambitions were finished. Who wins the Gulf Wars? Not Iran certainly, but not the United States, either. Each subsequent war has decreased American influence, pushed the Gulf states closer to China, and undermined the institutions America claimed to lead.
The first war was fought to announce the new global order. The second paid tribute to that order while breaking its rules. The third disregarded it completely. Four decades of the same hegemon trying to impose its will on the same region, in a single arc from multilateral restraint to unilateral preemption to something so thoughtless it doesn’t need naming at all. Maybe it’s just habit.
Seva Gunitsky is the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. He writes at hegemon.substack.com.
A version of this article was originally published in Hegemon.
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With apologies to Apollo's trainer, Trump thought bombing Iran would be a damn show, and it turned out to be a damn fight.