Over the past month, a number of commentators have suggested U.S. President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is a bad remake of President George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq invasion. And with good reason. We have the same narrative hooks: a loose interpretation of imminent threat, the specter of weapons of mass destruction, musings of regime change with no plan for the day after, the build-up of ground troops, and the very real risk of regional destabilization.
But perhaps Trump’s current conflict makes even more sense when understood as the bad remake of a different war with Iraq launched by a different Bush. For all Trump’s intermittent talk of regime change, his ambitions in Iran have always seemed less maximalist than 2003’s messianic quest to remake the Middle East. And even as the administration discusses deploying boots on the ground, its political commitment to this war certainly seems much lower. Beneath the bluster, the war’s goals—degrading Iran’s military, dismantling its weapons programs, and weakening its proxy networks—look like a more limited attempt to discipline an errant regional power. The war, in other words, aims at containment, not transformation.
Over the past month, a number of commentators have suggested U.S. President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is a bad remake of President George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq invasion. And with good reason. We have the same narrative hooks: a loose interpretation of imminent threat, the specter of weapons of mass destruction, musings of regime change with no plan for the day after, the build-up of ground troops, and the very real risk of regional destabilization.
But perhaps Trump’s current conflict makes even more sense when understood as the bad remake of a different war with Iraq launched by a different Bush. For all Trump’s intermittent talk of regime change, his ambitions in Iran have always seemed less maximalist than 2003’s messianic quest to remake the Middle East. And even as the administration discusses deploying boots on the ground, its political commitment to this war certainly seems much lower. Beneath the bluster, the war’s goals—degrading Iran’s military, dismantling its weapons programs, and weakening its proxy networks—look like a more limited attempt to discipline an errant regional power. The war, in other words, aims at containment, not transformation.
But if Trump is looking for a rerun of the 1991 Gulf War, he is likely to be disappointed. Like the director of many legacy sequels, Trump may find that the old formula for success no longer works today. The real problem is not confusion about which war the administration wants to replay, but that the conditions that once made limited war possible in the Persian Gulf no longer exist. Attempts to coerce Tehran along the lines of Baghdad in 1991 will fail because the contemporary international system can no longer sustain limited warfare without escalation.
Washington’s ability to wage a limited and successful war in 1991 was an expression of U.S. strength. As the undisputed global superpower at the end of the Cold War, the United States could confidently assert its new leadership role as guardian of the international order. In September 1990, President George H.W. Bush outlined to Congress his vision for a “new world order,” where “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle,” “nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice,” and “the strong respect the rights of the weak.” It was the promise of this new world order that Saddam Hussein had jeopardized by invading Kuwait, Bush argued, leaving the United States with no alternative but to support the rule of law and stand up to aggression. U.S. power was intrinsically connected to maintaining this emerging international order.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the first Bush administration put international institutions at the center of the emerging world order it was creating. With the Cold War deadlock lifted, Bush hoped in the war’s aftermath that the United Nations might at last realize the “historic vision of its founders.” But this was hardly a universalism in any sense that liberal internationalists would recognize, with the U.N. as an authority standing above the interests of individual states. Instead, the U.N. was understood as an expression of great power alignment—a tool by which the victors of 1945 could preserve the post-war settlement against revanchist powers capable of unsettling it. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recognized at Davos this January, the goal of this order was to project an image of impartial authority while concealing the mechanics of U.S. primacy behind the curtain.
Today’s war on Iran is a similar attempt to reassert the inviolability of a U.S.-led world order. In the Middle East, however, that order is now anchored in Israeli security doctrine as defined by Israel’s leaders. In the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has abandoned any pretense at diplomacy or restraint and moved toward a strategy of regional devastation. Despite a different emphasis, this thinking clearly aligns with Trump’s own affinity for using a wrecking ball to reset political conditions. From the Board of Peace to plans to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” upon the ruins of Gaza, Trump’s new “new world order” is narrower, more privatized, and more exclusionary than its 1991 predecessor. Yet, in his estimation, it is equally non-negotiable.
Understanding the 2026 war on Iran to be, like 1991, an effort at maintaining a U.S.-dominated world order helps cut through some of the confusion coming from Washington. If anything, the Trump administration’s shifting and contradictory rationales for the conflict only underline the parallels. The Gulf War was defined by an onslaught of media images and spectacle. As the first conflict in which footage was broadcast live from the battlefront, the unprecedented media stream provided a flood of information that left audiences around the world disorientated and distracted. The cascade of television coverage threatened to outshine combat as the real event.
In 2026, an already media-saturated environment has been transformed by artificial intelligence, which generates, amplifies, and circulates competing narratives at a baffling speed and scale, further eroding our ability to understand what the war is for or how it is unfolding. Jean Baudrillard could have been writing about today when he quipped the Gulf War represented the absence of politics pursued by other means. If 1991 was made for television, Trump’s war on Iran is made for meme-ification.
Behind the excess of images, morphing war aims, and proliferating justifications, there is a more hard-headed reality. The Trump administration has largely dispensed with even the formal deference to international law that helped frame earlier interventions. There is no attempt to assemble a broad coalition, nor to embed the use of force within a shared institutional process.
In 2026, U.S. power is exercised without mediating structures or even concern for legitimacy. Trump’s abandonment of the U.N. represents a further narrowing of the basis on which U.S. power rests. This means that while U.S. military strength is still formidable, Washington is unable to command the recognition, alignment, or de facto legitimacy that underpinned its global primacy in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s.
From Washington’s perspective, the 1991 Gulf War was a remarkable success. Iraq withdrew from Kuwait in just six weeks, the United States’ military power stood unrivalled, and Arab states fell in line behind a U.S.-led regional order that ushered in a decade of Pax Americana in the Middle East. Nearly 90 percent of the cost of the conflict was borne by Washington’s coalition partners; by some reckonings, the United States even turned a profit.
Those conditions are impossible to replicate today. The United States’ unilateral pursuit of security since 9/11 has eroded the credibility on which its leadership once rested, leaving the tools it previously used to stabilize the U.S.-led international system ineffective. The rest of the world no longer wants to emulate U.S. politics or economics. The United States now faces sustained competition—not least from China—for Gulf petrodollars. In the wake of the Iran war, Gulf Cooperation Council nations’ sovereign wealth funds are reportedly reconsidering their U.S. Treasury holdings, as well as $3 trillion of planned investments in U.S. tech, infrastructure, and real estate. Rather than a restoration of U.S. hegemony to its post-Cold War peak, Trump’s war looks more like an afterglow.
Today’s international system no longer allows limited war in the Gulf. The U.S. attempt to discipline Iran into abandoning its weapons programs and regional proxies is structurally unstable without the underpinning of U.S. primacy that was last glimpsed in the 1990s. Containment needs some form of legitimacy, hegemony, or international scaffolding to be successful. The risk today is not that a single miscalculation by the belligerents will trigger unpredictable escalation, but that escalation is already built into the confrontation when Washington does not recognize the limits to U.S. power in an international system it no longer leads.
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