Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration assembled a multinational coalition to levy sanctions against Iraq and to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty by force. In the United States, Operation Desert Storm is widely celebrated as a decisive political and military victory. From the vantage point of many across the Middle East, however, the Gulf War constituted a tragedy that betrayed the longstanding ideal of Arab solidarity and, as in 1967, humiliated the imagined pan-Arab nation. Although Arab leaders were initially unanimous in their condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the subsequent American intervention—which hinged on the acquiescence and collaboration of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab states—fundamentally transformed popular Arab interpretations of the conflict: what had begun as a dispute among Arab neighbors was now perceived as an American war of imperialism. As hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops poured into Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein and his proponents across the Middle East appropriated the rhetoric and symbols of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism to vindicate the annexation of Kuwait. Meanwhile, anti-American protests erupted in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Morocco—members of the U.S.-led coalition—as well as Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, and the occupied Palestinian territories. Contemporary observers in the United States were quick to dismiss Arab expressions of antiwar sentiment, yet the paper will suggest that these movements are critical to grappling with widespread disillusionment in the Arab state system. More broadly, the Gulf War offers an opportunity to reassess the impact of the end of the Cold War on the Middle East. George H.W. Bush maintained that the Gulf War heralded a New World Order for the post-Cold War era. However, the failure of Arab antiwar movements to effect lasting change, and the swift return to the regional status quo ante bellum thereafter, reflect that, for Arabs, the Gulf War was a thoroughly conservative event.