On 18 March 2003, the United States attacked Iraq in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Twelve years previously, on 16 January 1991, it had attacked the same adversary in Operation Desert Storm. Yet the two Gulf Wars were radically different. Whereas Desert Storm had been launched in the hope that a new world order might emerge, Iraqi Freedom signified the return of an imperial America resorting unilaterally to preventive warfare representative of aHobbesian conception of international politics. Why did the promise of peaceful inter-state conflict resolution implied during the first Gulf War give way to the explicit triumphof the might-is-right principle during the second? Is the shift in America's foreign behaviour but a parenthesis - or the first stage of a long-term process likely to undermine the prevailing Lockean anarchy? This book aims to answer these questions."