You Say You Want a Coalition?

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Thirty-five years ago, a U.S. administration built an international coalition and received congressional authorization to fight a major war in the Middle East. Today, an American president leaps into war with a videotaped announcement and not a peep of public debate. In this episode, historian Jeffrey Engel compares and contrasts the First Gulf War of 1990-91 to today's U.S.-Israeli onslaught on Iran. In some important ways, today's conflict was made possible by the earlier war, which, at the time, was considered a decisive victory. But there were unintended consequences: the U.S. has been unable to extract itself from the Middle East.

Historian Jeffrey Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. He's the author of When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.