Three years after the intervention in Jordan, events in the Middle East led the British to return to the region to defend Kuwait against the threat of annexation by Qasim's Iraq. This intervention was codenamed Operation Vantage. It provided the opportunity to utilise and implement lessons from Suez and Jordan, and to demonstrate to the British public and the international community that lessons from these previous crises had been learned for the long term. Furthermore, policy-makers at the time could not have predicted that the lessons from Vantage might prove invaluable for informing the planning of an operation almost thirty years later, when the need to defend Kuwait against Iraqi attack reoccurred. Following the 1958 Iraqi coup, attempts were made to establish diplomatic relations between Britain and the Iraqi revolutionaries.

Humphrey Trevelyan, who had been the British Ambassador to Egypt during the Suez crisis, was sent to represent the government on the ground but relations between the two nations did not improve. A few months later Iraq withdrew from the Baghdad Pact. At the same time, the dynamics between Britain and Kuwait – a British protectorate – were also changing. Kuwait had been signifi- cant to Britain for decades as part of a major trading route between India and the Mediterranean. It offered one of the few harbours in the Northern Gulf with waters deep enough to dock British ships and in 1775, when the Persians invaded Basra, many trading routes had been diverted to Kuwait where the British East India Company established new offices.

Kuwait was run by a line of hereditary Sheikhs owing allegiance to Turkey, but had operated semi-autonomously since 1756. In 1896 the hereditary line was broken following the assassination of Sheikh Muhammad Al-Sabah by his half-brother, Mubarak. This change in leadership, combined with resurgent Ottoman aggression, made Mubarak concerned over annexation by Turkey. In 1899, fearing invasion or political interference, he requested British military protection.