The Gulf war turned out to be a disaster, it set the US up for 30 years of moral humiliation and strategic degradation in the middle east. They're still fighting the same people, to this day! And slowly going bankrupt Soviet-style because of it. They'd be far better off in a counterfactual universe where they didn't get involved fighting people in the middle east; the Chinese strategy of simply investing the money in domestic industry has been far more effective.