March 4, 2026 | The National Interest
Why Iran’s Gulf Pressure Strategy Won’t Work
Iran’s reckless strikes on the Gulf States are consolidating regional opposition to the Islamic Republic.
March 4, 2026 | The National Interest
Why Iran’s Gulf Pressure Strategy Won’t Work
Iran’s reckless strikes on the Gulf States are consolidating regional opposition to the Islamic Republic.
Excerpt
Iran’s decision to launch missile and drone attacks across the Middle East in the wake of the US and Israeli strikes illustrates Iran’s retaliation strategy. Tehran believes that if it can increase the price of this war throughout the Gulf states and in other countries, those countries may pressure the United States to end the war. However, Iran’s strategy could backfire, leaving it even more isolated. It could also lead many countries that previously said they were opposed to escalation to be more amenable to seeing the regime in Tehran fall from power.
Iran’s wartime decisions resemble how Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein also misjudged the region and the world 35 years ago. In August of 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. Like Iran’s attack on the Gulf states, Iraq appeared to believe that its invasion would provoke little resistance and gather massive rewards in the form of increased oil wealth. Iraq had fought an eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s, and its army had come off relatively strong and flooded with Soviet-supplied weapons.
Iraq believed it could annex Kuwait and repay Iraq’s debts from the previous war. However, Baghdad steeply miscalculated global opinion and resolve. The Cold War had just ended. The United States was preparing to lead what George HW Bush would call a “new world order” of rules-based international cooperation. Invasions and annexations would have no place in this vision. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, one of the strongest countries in the region at the time, felt it could do what it wanted.
Where Iraq miscalculated was not only in the initial invasion of Kuwait but also in its unwillingness to climb down once it was clear that the United States had assembled an extensive international coalition to pressure Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Even when the US-led bombing campaign began, the Iraqis began to lash out. Saddam ordered three divisions to invade Saudi Arabia and capture the border town of Khafji on January 29, 1991, an offensive that ended in disaster.
Seth Frantzman is the author of Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machine, Artificial Intelligence and the Battle for the Future(Bombardier 2021) and an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies.