Amin describes the past few decades as the period of capitalist offensive. From among the causes of the Gulf War, he stresses the interests in oil and notes about the monarchies in the Gulf region, that they are more like oil concessions than nation-states. Amin emphasises that in the present conflict, the North is unified, while the South is divided. In his opinion, the North-South difference can no longer be described by the differences between their levels of industrial developments, but rather by the differences in their financial systems, technologies and communication systems. When discussing the possibilities of opposition to the capitalist offensive, he raises the need for a United Nations Organisation which would take charge of the interests of the Third World, stating that the present UN is rather far from that.

Frank interprets the Gulf war mainly as a reaction to the recession in America. He loo, stresses the role of oil Going through the history of American interventions, he proves that starting the war in the Gulf was based on a pretext and that the American superpower has not intervened in defence of "democracy" but it has done so at different spots of the world only there and then when ft served its own interests. He quotes as another cause the need to create a new enemy image after the downfall of communism.

Bonzio questions those standpoints which consider the Gulf War as simply a North-South conflict. He argues that behind the North-South conflicts, there are North-North ones (that is those between the big powers in the centre). He differentiates between the horizontal and vertical conflicts within the capitalist world. Similarly to the regulation school, he thinks the engine of development are the changes of age of technology and organisation which also determine the conflicts. He links the vertical conflicts to the period of relative stability, while the horizontal ones to the changes of epoch proving that ultimately, it is always the North-North conflicts that are decisive. He thinks the capitalist world economy is the entity of centripetal and centrifugal movements, this first of the two being overweight While underlining the two-directional nature of the movements, he criticises the oversimplifying theory of exploitation of periphery. He stresses that it is the totality of centre-semi-periphery-periphery relations that ensures the reproduction of the capitalist world economy.