Summary
Willem Pothof
De bescherming van de Amerikaanse mondiale positie : het geval van de Golfoorlog
Willem Pothof takes us back to the Gulf Crisis of 1990-1991 and explains why the military solution of this conflict was driven by global power aspirations of the United States of America. Top issues in international relations are nowadays more and more defined by power structures on the world political level. The author sketches the American position of power in the context of the basic security and economic transitions in the international environment at the end of the Cold War. Some of those fundamental changes posed a threat to the United States as a superpower and resulted in a declining global position of the US. Economic competitors and regional expanding powers had become the new threats in the period after the Cold War. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was indeed a sign to the one and only remaining superpower that a war was needed to protect its global interests. The war against Iraq had more than one useful outcome, but - at least in the perception of American policymakers - it was unavoidable because of the danger of damage to the American global position of power. Even the protection of oil supplies was not the mainspring of American policy during the Gulf Crisis. The article concludes that global power relations rule the world.