The 1991 Gulf War made the Persian Gulf an American military lake

Evidence

The Gulf War was the first post-Cold War resource war between civilizations. At stake was whether the bulk of the world’s largest oil reserves would be controlled by Saudi and emirate governments dependent on Western military power for their security or by independent anti-Western regimes which would be able and might be willing to use the oil weapon against the West. The West failed to unseat Saddam Hussein, but it scored a victory of sorts in dramatizing the security dependence of the Gulf states on the West and in achieving an expanded peacetime military presence in the Gulf. Before the war, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the United States jostled for influence over the Gulf. After the war the Persian Gulf was an American lake. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 696

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s resource-war thesis and to later arguments about oil and Western security dependence; also echoes Milgrom’s institutional framing in a different domain.