Iraq was an ally of the USSR. Would anyone really have risked starting WWIII is the USSR hadn't disintegrated?
My feeling is the world would have quietly turned it's back on Kuwait in that situation and tried it's best to forget about it. Might have been a few harsh words flying backwards and forwards, but I just don't buy the West risking starting something with the other world superpower over a tiny, insignificant country which had a history as part of the province of Basra according to Wiki.
Quote:
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The Iraq-Kuwait dispute also involved Iraqi claims to Kuwait as a territory of Iraq. After gaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1932, the Iraqi government immediately declared that Kuwait was rightfully a territory of Iraq, as it had been associated with Basra until the British creation of Kuwait after World War I and thus stated that Kuwait was a British imperialist invention. Kuwait had been a part of the Ottoman Empire's province of Basra, something that Iraq claimed made it rightful Iraq territory. Its ruling dynasty, the al-Sabah family, had concluded a protectorate agreement in 1899 that assigned responsibility for its foreign affairs to Britain. Britain drew the border between the two countries in 1922, making Iraq virtually landlocked.
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There appears to also have been a number of other tensions between the two including Kuwait slant drilling into Iraqi oilfields, overproducing oil and thereby reducing the barrel price even though Opec had agreed not to do this. Iraq at the time had a tremendous debt from the earlier Iraq-Iran war and were suffering badly from this reduction in price.
So, given
all the issues, it's very possible the US would have turned it's back and the coalition would never have been formed. It would have been very easy to justify non-intervention, especially when the risk of pulling in the USSR was so high.
Without the 90-91 war, Nato would also have missed out on learning a lot of valuable lessons. Reorganisations would not have occurred until sometime after 1996 (instead of 91-95), new vehicles and weapon systems not researched and produced, doctrine not updated. Cold war assumptions and practises would have remained in play until fighting in 1996-97 caused them to be reassessed - probably too late to do any good since nukes started to rain down in July 97.