A sharp public rebuke from Iran’s top foreign affairs spokesperson has laid bare a dramatic breakdown in what was once a steadily improving relationship between Iran and Kuwait, bringing long-simmering regional tensions to a head.
Last week, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, took to social media to label Kuwait as “part of the fire of the wicked,” warning that “the smoke of ingratitude and the absence of foresight will blind the eyes of the ungrateful.” The fiery comments came amid a wave of Iranian missile strikes targeting U.S. military installations hosted on Kuwaiti territory, part of a broader campaign Tehran has waged against American bases across the Gulf region since the start of 2024. Leveraging its long-standing strategy of asymmetric warfare to avoid direct confrontation, Iran’s strikes have inflicted substantial damage on the targeted facilities.
Kuwait has pushed back firmly against Iranian claims, denying that it allows the U.S. to launch offensive strikes from its soil and dismissing Iran’s attacks as “criminal aggression.”
To understand the current rupture, it is necessary to unpack the decades-long, roller-coaster history of relations between the two neighboring Persian Gulf states. The first major fracture came just one year after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, when Saddam Hussein launched his 1980 invasion of Iran. Kuwait aligned firmly with Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, providing billions of dollars in loans to Baghdad, opening its ports to Iraqi weapons shipments, and granting critical logistical support for Iraq’s war effort.
Dr. Alam Saleh, a Middle East affairs lecturer at the Australian National University, notes that Kuwait’s stance grew out of two core strategic fears. After the Islamic Revolution, Kuwait’s ruling Al-Sabah monarchy worried that Iran’s new revolutionary government would seek regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf, and would incite Kuwait’s large Shia population to rise up against royal rule. During the war, Iran was widely blamed for a string of attacks on Kuwaiti targets, including oil tankers, the U.S. and French embassies, Kuwait International Airport, and multiple hijackings of Kuwait Airways flights. But Saleh emphasizes that direct responsibility for these attacks on the Iranian state has never been definitively proven.
The dynamic shifted dramatically in 1990, when Saddam turned on his former ally and invaded Kuwait. Saddam justified the invasion by claiming Kuwait was using American-assisted drilling technology to overextract oil from the shared Rumaila field, driving down global oil prices and crippling Iraq’s already war-debt-burdened economy. Days before the invasion, a meeting with then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie left Saddam believing the U.S. would not intervene in the conflict, giving him what he saw as a green light to seize the territory he had long claimed as Iraq’s own. But the U.S. ultimately led a 42-nation coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.
In the wake of the invasion, Iran stepped in as a key partner for Kuwait, extending critical humanitarian assistance that is still referenced by Iranian officials today. As more than a million Kuwaitis fled the invasion to neighboring countries, Iran welcomed tens of thousands of refugees, including foreign workers, stateless people, and Iraqi nationals opposed to Saddam. The Iranian government set up temporary refugee camps in the southwestern border province of Khuzestan, providing food, shelter, safe passage, political asylum, and evacuation flights for those stranded by the conflict. Contemporary records show that British MPs who visited the camps praised Iran’s response to the crisis, with Conservative MP Michael Jopling noting in a 1991 parliamentary debate that “the Iranians seemed to be dealing adequately with the massive crisis which confronted them.”
Before retreating, Iraqi forces launched a campaign of systematic sabotage against Kuwait’s critical infrastructure, blowing up oil facilities, dumping millions of barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf (creating the largest marine oil spill in recorded history at that time), and igniting more than 600 burning oil wells. The toxic smoke from the wells spread as far as southwestern Iran, causing widespread air pollution, public health risks, and environmental damage in Iranian territory.
Iran again contributed to international recovery efforts, sending a team of 47 experienced oil industry experts and engineers to help extinguish the fires. Having built extensive expertise in oil facility repair and firefighting during the Iran-Iraq War, when Iraqi forces repeatedly targeted Iran’s energy infrastructure, the Iranian team was assigned to the heavily damaged Burgan oil field, Kuwait’s largest. Operating in dangerous conditions amid unexploded Iraqi landmines, the team successfully capped 28 burning wells. The operation was widely seen as a goodwill gesture that helped repair bilateral relations, as both countries now shared Iraq as a common enemy.
Over the following decade, relations warmed steadily. “Throughout the 1990s Iran and Kuwait expanded diplomatic dialogue, trade and security cooperation while managing their differences pragmatically,” Saleh explained.
But the growing U.S. military presence in the region, anchored in Kuwait, created a new fault line in the relationship. Following the Gulf War, the U.S. began building and expanding military bases across the Middle East; today, it hosts 13,500 troops across five bases in Kuwait, more than any other Middle Eastern country. Some analysts have even argued that the U.S. deliberately encouraged Saddam’s invasion to create a pretext for a permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf to control regional oil production.
Tehran has long viewed the permanent U.S. military presence in the region as a threat to its sovereignty and a form of Western imperialism. “Iran opposes all long-term US military bases in the Persian Gulf, arguing that they undermine regional security, but generally separates this issue from its bilateral relations with Kuwait,” Saleh notes. Still, public evidence confirms that Kuwait has served as a key logistics and command hub for U.S. regional operations, contradicting Kuwait’s claims that it does not allow its territory to be used for offensive strikes. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kuwait joined Bahrain in secretly launching airstrikes against Iranian drone and missile storage facilities, a move that deepened Iranian anger. Tehran has also criticized Kuwait for backing former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hardline policy toward Iran, which Iranian analysts view as evidence of Kuwaiti complicity in anti-Iran aggression.
The latest source of tension is Kuwait’s recent ratification of a five-year defense pact with Pakistan, the country that has been tapped to mediate between Iran and the U.S. in ongoing negotiations. While Kuwait and Pakistan first signed a defense partnership in 2023, the new agreement expands cooperation to include military training, personnel exchanges, intelligence sharing, and technology collaboration. While the pact itself is not unusual, analysts note its timing is significant, signaling a shift in Kuwait’s approach to regional security amid ongoing regional conflict.
Iran has responded cautiously so far. “Iran will monitor the agreement but is unlikely to oppose it unless it is used against Iranian interests,” Saleh observed. “Since Pakistan has also acted as a mediator, Tehran is expected to maintain constructive relations with both countries while closely watching developments in the Persian Gulf.”