ABSTRACT
Introduction The apparent first marker of the post-Cold War period in the Middle East was the Kuwait crisis and operation ‘Desert Storm’ – featuring a remarkable display of Great Power and transatlantic unity. This chapter highlights how this episode contrasts against both the Cold War period and against the subsequent Iraq War of 2003. In the first of the chapter’s two main parts, the transition from ‘Cold War’ to ‘post-Cold War’ in this theatre is sketched, showing how it began in fact a decade earlier and was essentially driven by local and regional dynamics. The global end of the Cold War did combine with the exceptional nature of the Kuwait crisis to produce the extraordinary, explicit, and legally-mandated international collaboration that resulted in Iraq’s eviction from Kuwait and the accompanying series of UN Security Council resolutions. However, policies soon again became less consensual: as the US adopted its ‘dual containment’ policy for the Gulf in 1993, Russia and European states alike veered off the US path. Moscow gradually returned to an arguably natural position of strategic and economic rivalry with Washington. European-US relations over Gulf security are the subject of the second main part of the chapter. From a background of common interest during the 1980s, culminating in the allied operation against Iraq in 1991, relations thereafter diverged sharply. The sanctions regime against Iraq was questioned by several European allies from the mid-1990s onward. In the case of Iran, the Europeans rejected the US sanctions approach from the beginning and pursued a policy of engagement instead. George W. Bush’s first term in office (2001-4) in combination with the effect of the September 2001 attacks brought both a further shift in US policy and acute transatlantic disagreements. The US policy of regime change in Iraq was fiercely opposed by France, Germany, and several other European states, with the Iraq War in 2003 resulting in a major transatlantic crisis – even if intra-European differences on this issue were perhaps just as stark. There were also significant – if less severe – differences with regard to the question of how to deal with Iran and its alleged nuclear programme: Washington opted for sanctions, exclusion, and the threat of military force and regime change, while the Europeans opted for negotiations. In this case, however, a
more coordinated Western policy began to emerge by the end of 2006. Iran apart, European policy coordination on the Gulf remained generally embryonic, contrasting with its growing involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict.1
