The Western Alliance After the Cold War

Report Outline
Special Focus

Introduction

Go to top

Overview

It's difficult to say whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was surprised by the U.S. reaction to his Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait. But once President Bush decided to send naval forces to the Persian Gulf and U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, Saddam may very well have expected the Soviet Union, a longtime ally and supplier of military aid, to denounce “American aggression.” And Saddam also may have assumed that America's West European allies would sit out the crisis. Given their dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the Europeans might have been expected to pay lip service to countering Iraqi aggression, but little more.

Times have changed, however, and Saddam's biggest miscalculation in his plan to annex Kuwait may have been to ignore the shift in world alliances that has occurred during the past year. The Soviet Union, instead of jumping to Saddam's defense, denounced the invasion and joined its fellow members of the United Nations Security Council in supporting economic sanctions against Iraq. It was the first time the U.N. body had agreed to such punitive action since 1977, when it voted for a ban on arms sales to South Africa. The Security Council broke precedent again Aug. 25, when it authorized the naval forces of the United States and other countries to enforce the trade sanctions against Iraq. And Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev reiterated his country's support of U.N. action against Iraq in a joint communiqué after his Sept. 9 meeting with President Bush in Helsinki.