For the oil-rich and mostly spoiled inhabitants of the Persian Gulf, Iran's strikes were both unexpected and terrifying. Many expatriates are returning home after Iran launched missile and drone strikes, destroying airports, apartment buildings and oil terminals.
For the people of tiny Kuwait - just 50 miles from Iran - the conflict is a wake-up call to a decades-long nightmare as it finds itself at the heart of the first Gulf War.
In Kuwait City, at the northern end of the Gulf, Khalid Al-Ozaina, a cheerful 70-year-old fisherman, squinted into the warming sun as he recalled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invasion of the country on August 2, 1990. "That was the last time we were forbidden to fish," he said.
Around him, hundreds of pleasure boats from the fishing club he runs stand high and dry, abandoned on the pier.
He stares longingly at in the deceptively calm waters of the harbor, longing to take up the rod again. "Are things as bad as they were then?" he asks. "No, they're not," but it's "dangerous," he admits - and Iran's missiles and drones make that clear.
Hussein's war was so brutal that its legacy has become part of Kuwait's modern DNA, entwining its fate with the United States as well as its immediate neighbors, CNN concludes in its analysis.