The Gulf Wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were bookends to what looks like a generational war with characteristics similar to both the Vietnam conflict and the larger Cold War. For U.S. military and diplomatic historians, the Gulf Wars have been a reconstruction of those earlier conflicts, demonstrating similar processes and events that shed light on the continuing development of U.S. national security institutions. The first chapter sketches the author's original concepts for analyzing U.S. foreign relations and modern international relations and how they relate to the Gulf Wars. Chapter two contextualizes the First Gulf War as a part of the final stage of the Cold War and the first moments of the post-Cold War international system. The third chapter interprets the origins of the First Gulf War within the context of both U.S. Cold War and Iraqi history. The chapter covers the chronology of 1990-91, emphasizing institutional and political as well as military aspects of the war. The fourth and fifth chapters explain the evolution of U.S.-Iraqi relations from the end of the First Gulf War through the end of the Clinton administration and the transformative events of September 11 during the second Bush administration. The final chapters bring all the themes of this monograph together. The concept of the technocratic state, neoconservative doctrine, the nature of scripts in national cultures, foreign policy, and leadership systems are all taken into account as are the tectonic forces of globalism on the nature and course of international wars.

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