Case Two: The Persian Gulf in 1990-1991 – Leadership and Legitimacy

Post-Vietnam America reacted to the outcome of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991 with a mixture of cathartic triumphalism and military technophilia. Reality was more complicated. The Gulf War of 1991 was characterized by a series of paradoxes. The response to the Persian Gulf crisis exposed the realities of an interdependent world. But it also seemed to usher in a new age of US military and economic preeminence. The war and crisis pointed to the uniqueness of military and economic capabilities as separable instruments of influence, although it also emphasized the relationships among political, military, and economic capabilities and objectives. During the Cold War, economic issues were frozen within the paradigm of strategic priorities. In the post-Cold War world urged forward by Gulf War I, “geoeconomics” would compete for pride of place with geostrategy. On the other hand, the economic foundations of global security became more unpredictable and nonlinear outside of their Cold War context. 1