This file is a short May 1991 political polemic and investigative essay. Rothbard’s scope is deliberately narrow: he asks why the United States fought the Gulf War and answers by tracing a “Kuwait Connection” among Kuwaiti state wealth, Henry Kissinger, Kissinger Associates, Brent Scowcroft, oil companies, banks, and Republican foreign-policy elites.
Why, exactly, did we go to war in the Gulf?
Rothbard’s central thesis is that the war cannot be understood only through official language about aggression or international law. He begins instead with political economy: Kuwait’s ruling Sabah family possesses enormous oil-derived wealth, which he treats as illegitimate state extraction rather than property.
The Sabah tribe has no legitimate claim to the oil revenue; it did nothing to homestead or mix its labor or any other resource with the crude oil.
This libertarian property argument grounds the rest of the essay. If the Kuwaiti ruling class’s fortune is “ill-gotten,” Rothbard argues, then it is plausible that some of it would be used to cultivate defenders in Washington. The essay’s method is therefore not battlefield analysis but network analysis: follow consultancies, board memberships, banking ties, oil interests, and revolving-door appointments.
It is reasonable to assume that the Sabah family stands ready to use a modest portion of that ill-gotten wealth to purchase defenders and advocates in the powerful United States.
The major figure in this network is Henry Kissinger, presented as both symbol and operator of elite foreign-policy continuity. Rothbard connects Kissinger to Nelson Rockefeller, the Nixon and Ford administrations, Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, network television, Chase Manhattan, and finally Kissinger Associates. The conceptual hinge is the word “consulting,” which Rothbard treats as a euphemism for monetized access to state power.
Nominally, Kissinger Associates (KA) is an “international consulting firm” but “consultant” covers many sins, and in KA’s case, this means international political influence-peddling for its two dozen or so important corporate clients.
The most important case is Brent Scowcroft: former Kissinger Associates vice chairman, former and future national security adviser, and, in Rothbard’s account, a man with paid links to Kuwaiti oil interests before becoming a central architect of the Gulf War response.
Brent Scowcroft, it is clear, has enjoyed a long-standing and lucrative Kuwait connection.
Rothbard then broadens the web. Kissinger Associates’ board and clients connect to Midland Bank, partially owned by Kuwait; Fluor, with Saudi oil interests; ARCO and Santa Fe International, tied to Kuwait Petroleum; and William Simon, linked to Bechtel, Saudi business elites, and Chase Manhattan. The argument is cumulative rather than juridical: it does not offer a single smoking gun, but a dense pattern of overlapping incentives among Gulf monarchies, oil infrastructure, banks, and U.S. policymakers.
The essay’s relevance lies in its fusion of Rothbard’s antiwar libertarianism with a New Left-style power-structure critique. He recasts foreign policy as a product of class, corporate, and state alliances rather than national interest. Its final move is to reject the charge that such analysis is merely “conspiracy theory”; for Rothbard, the visible institutional pattern is itself the evidence.
In the same way, you don’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to see what’s going on here. All you have to do is be willing to use your eyes.
This work was divided into 1 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 1 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian