Western, Russian and Regional Interests in the Gulf
A Region the World Could Not Ignore
In 1990 the Persian Gulf produced roughly a quarter of the world’s oil and held around two-thirds of its proven reserves. Every barrel exported by sea had to pass through one narrow choke point: the Strait of Hormuz, just thirty-nine kilometres (21 nautical miles) wide at its narrowest. Whoever could threaten Hormuz could threaten the global economy. That single geographical fact shaped how Washington, Moscow, London and Tel Aviv thought about the Gulf, and why an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would never be treated as a private quarrel between Arab neighbours.
Oil was not the only reason outsiders were involved. The Cold War, the Iranian Revolution and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict all converged on the Gulf, each pulling rival powers towards different local clients. By 1990 these threads had braided into a regional order that was visibly unstable — one in which Saddam Hussein could plausibly read different signals from different capitals at the same time.
By 1990 the Gulf held roughly two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves, and around a fifth of that oil moved by sea through the Strait of Hormuz. The 1979 Iranian Revolution had already shown how violently regional change could shock the global economy.
Cold War Patterns and the 1979 Reset
For most of the Cold War the United States had backed the Shah of Iran as its anchor in the Gulf, while the Soviet Union signed friendship treaties and arms deals with Iraq. The 1979 revolution shattered the pattern: Iran turned hostile to Washington overnight, US embassy staff were taken hostage in Tehran, and within months the USSR invaded neighbouring Afghanistan. Both superpowers were suddenly without a comfortable client in the region.
Through the 1980s, the United States quietly tilted towards Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, sharing satellite intelligence and removing Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982. This was realpolitik: Washington did not approve of Saddam, but it preferred a strong Iraq to a victorious Khomeini. The Soviets continued to sell weapons to Iraq, while also opening cautious channels to Iran. By 1989, with the Berlin Wall down and Mikhail Gorbachev seeking better relations with Washington, the rules of the game were visibly changing — but old alignments and old client relationships had not.
OPEC tried to manage the world oil price by setting member quotas. Each barrel above quota meant a lower price; each barrel below meant a higher one. In 1989–90 Saddam wanted prices high so he could pay his $80 billion war debt. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates kept producing above quota, pushing prices down. Saddam estimated that every $1 fall in the oil price cost Iraq about $1 billion a year in revenue. To him, Kuwaiti overproduction was not just business — it was, in his rhetoric, an act of economic war on a country that had bled defending its neighbours.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as Recruitment Tool
Tensions in the Gulf could not be cleanly separated from the older quarrel further west. The First Intifada, which broke out in December 1987, dominated Arab television screens just as Iraqi soldiers were coming home from the Iran front. Images of Israeli soldiers confronting stone-throwing Palestinian teenagers played nightly across the region, and US support for Israel was a fixture in every public-opinion poll from Cairo to Karachi.
For aspiring jihadist movements, this was a recruitment opportunity. Veterans returning from the Soviet-Afghan war found audiences willing to believe that the United States was the patron of every Arab grievance — the dispossession of Palestinians, the propping up of monarchies, the bases on Saudi soil. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not cause the 1990 Gulf crisis, but it gave Saddam useful pan-Arab cover (he later tried to link any Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank), and it helped shape the worldview that produced al-Qaeda later in the decade.
Why the Outside Powers Could Not Stay Out
By 1990 the Gulf had a settled pattern of outside involvement. The United States kept a small naval presence and close ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the smaller Gulf states — many of which hosted American advisers and bought American weapons. Britain, France and other European powers maintained commercial and arms links. The Soviet Union still saw Iraq as a long-standing client, although Gorbachev was now willing to coordinate with Washington at the UN. Iran was isolated and rebuilding. Israel watched warily, fearing that any large Arab army — especially one armed with chemical weapons and Scud missiles — could be turned westward.
This is the world Saddam was trying to read in the summer of 1990. He saw a superpower (the USA) preoccupied with Eastern Europe, a rival superpower (the USSR) in retreat from Afghanistan, and Arab neighbours he believed owed him gratitude. He underestimated how completely a serious threat to Gulf oil supplies would unite outside powers across that whole spectrum.
It is tempting to imagine that with the Berlin Wall down, the superpower contest evaporated. In the Gulf it lingered. The USSR’s arms-export relationships with Iraq did not end overnight. American basing arrangements with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait pre-dated 1989 and outlived 1991. Old patterns of Western and Russian interests — oil security, arms markets, regional influence — survived the end of European communism intact. The 1991 Gulf War was the first major crisis of the post-Cold War order, but its players were still using Cold War muscle memory.
Outside involvement in the Gulf was driven by three overlapping interests — oil supply (Strait of Hormuz, OPEC), Cold War alignments (Soviet-Iraqi arms ties, US-Saudi defence links), and the pull of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. None of these disappeared in 1989, and all of them shaped responses to the 1990 invasion.