Breaking Out of the Dissertation Isolation

A Word from the Fellows

By:?Daniel Chardell

Writing a dissertation is a notoriously isolating experience. In an age of lockdowns, social distancing, and virtual meetings, that has never been truer. If finding opportunities to share works in progress and receive feedback can be difficult even in the best of times, the pandemic has only underscored the importance of collaboration. For this reason, I was thrilled to present a draft chapter of my dissertation to the America in the World (AWC) fellows earlier this month.?Drawing on U.S., Iraqi, and United Nations archival materials, a range of Arabic-language sources from across the Middle East, and interviews with former officials, my dissertation offers a new international history of the Gulf War of 1991. I argue that the war became a totem for contending American and Arab visions of a post-Cold War political order in the Middle Est, inadvertently unleashing a violent and inconclusive struggle to renegotiate Arab sovereignty at the onset of what Hal Brands calls the “unipolar moment.”

The draft chapter that I presented to the AWC fellows reassesses the impetus behind the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The academic literature on the Gulf War largely attributes Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait to Iraq’s dire economic straits after the eight-year war with Iran, during which Baghdad accrued billions of dollars in debt to Kuwait. According to this narrative, Saddam reasoned that seizing Kuwait would allow him to annul his debts, capture a commanding share of the world’s proven oil reserves, and acquire a long-coveted outlet to the Persian Gulf all in one fell swoop. Conventional wisdom holds Saddam’s greatest blunder was his timing. If only Iraq had invaded Kuwait one or two years earlier, when the Soviet Union still had the wherewithal to stand up to the United States, or one or two years later, when an overstretched Washington was preoccupied with crises elsewhere, Saddam just might have gotten away with his aggression.

This popular narrative falsely suggests that Saddam’s decision-making took place in a vacuum, as if the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 were a fortuitous accident of history that just happened to coincide with the collapse of communism and the advent of American unipolarity. Using Iraqi and U.S. sources, I demonstrate that Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait was in fact inextricable from his interpretation of the end of the Cold War, which he feared augured a new era of unchecked American and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Between late 1989 and early 1990, an increasingly paranoid Saddam concluded that the United States and Israel were bent on exploiting Soviet retrenchment in order to subvert his regime, which, in his mind, stood as the Arabs’ last line of defense against American designs on the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Throughout the first half of 1990, Kuwaiti oil overproduction—which drove oil prices to historic lows to the detriment of the Iraqi economy—convinced Saddam that the Kuwaiti royal family was complicit in this broader American-Israeli conspiracy to destabilize the Iraqi regime. Seen in this light, the invasion had less to do with Kuwait?per se?than with the alleged U.S.-led conspiracy it supposedly served.

The AWC fellows were the first ones to read my draft chapter, making the workshop a perfect venue to receive initial feedback and gauge the effectiveness of my argument. Each of the fellows in attendance offered thoughtful comments that will help me strengthen the chapter and eventually transform it into a standalone article for publication in an academic journal. Workshop organizer Ashlyn Hand encouraged me to elaborate on the role of emotion in Saddam’s decision-making, particularly with respect to his view of Arab dignity. John Gleb and Andrew Goodhart, for their part, provided particularly useful comments on how to explain Saddam’s worldview without lending credence to his conspiracy theories. I am especially grateful to Joseph Ledford, who kindly offered to share a trove of documents he collected during his research at the Reagan Presidential Library that will help me further explore the evolution of the U.S.-Iraqi relationship during the final years of the Reagan administration.

In all, the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the works in progress session was enormously beneficial—not only to my work, but also to helping me break out of the isolation that inevitably accompanies dissertation writing.

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Daniel Chardell is an America in the World Consortium Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University, where his research focuses on twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations, the Middle East, and the Cold War.?

Drawing on U.S. archives and Arabic-language materials, his dissertation uses the Gulf War of 1991 as a lens through which to explore contending American and Arab visions of post-Cold War Middle Eastern order.?

Alongside his studies, he worked as a research assistant to Robert Zoellick in preparation of Zoellick’s book,?America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy?at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Prior to Harvard, he was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a B.A. in history from the University of Michigan.