This Article is a study of the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91, the first post-Cold War international crisis, as a constitutive moment for international law and a watershed in the history of modern international order. It examines the contests over the meaning of the crisis in the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, which it argues were also contests over the meaning of cooperation under international law in the "new world order." The story is, in significant part, about the fate of anticolonial legalism, against whose ideas the Bush administration's embrace of international law must be understood. The Article argues that the Gulf Crisis was itself a moment of "worldmaking," one in which the United States refashioned foundational concepts like interdependence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and humanity in warfare and deployed them to suit a distinctive vision of international cooperation under hierarchy.