In April 2023, an attempted coup in Sudan devolved into a full-fledged civil war between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces. This followed two coups in the previous four years. Countries that have a coup d’état tend to be at greater risk for more coups, a phenomenon known as the coup trap. This is not the first time Sudan has been in the coup trap: between its independence in 1956 and 1989 it suffered five coups and ten coup attempts. Syria (1949-1970) and Iraq (1936-1941, 1958-1973) went through similar periods before, as in Sudan, consolidated authoritarian governments emerged. What caused these intensive periods of coup after coup, and what allowed one regime to end the cycle and consolidate power? I argue most post-coup governments are uniquely vulnerable to coups because they deliver unsustainable coalitions to power, set up ineffective ruling bodies through the military, politically polarize the officer corps, and normalize armed protest for officers with grievances. The coup trap ends when chance or the evolution of tactics ends these conditions, for example when coups from the top or failed coups allow the ruling coalition to narrow and increasing violence deters coups from below. To test these arguments, I use materials from the U.S. and U.K. archives, memoirs of political and military actors, and the extensive body of secondary literature on this period to collect data on the 51 failed and successful coup attempts in these three countries. For each attempt, I record information about the coalitions supporting it, motivations, mobilization of military units, foreign support, civilian involvement, the composition of the resulting government, and the fates of the losers. Using this information, I take a mixed-methods approach to test my hypotheses. I use causal process observations to theorize ways these characteristics heighten or diminish coup risk, then I fit survival models to test the effects of individual coup characteristics on the fates of governments. This paper represents an improvement in how we understand coup-making in general and in the Middle East. It moves the focus from “coup-proofing” as a policy choice to the circumstances that make coup-proofing possible. It also takes regional-level explanations for the decline in coups, such as the decline of Arab nationalism after the 1967 war or the increase in governments’ rent income, and tests if they can explain the changes in behavior of military and political forces in these three countries.