Canada kicking our asses in the War of 1812 keeps the US in check.
There wasn’t a Soviet threat after WWI, but the first criteria was there. Germany after WWI was. exhausted and broken after having fought a grueling war for years. The difference is that at the end of WWI, with the exception of imposing reparations, the allies basically let Germany go on their merry way. The. result was the rise to power of Hitler less than two decades later. IMHO the difference wasn’t just the new Soviet threat post WWII that wasn’t there post WWI. It’s that the goal post WWII was to completely smash Germany and rebuild them in the style of a western democracy, where that hadn’t been the goal post WWI.
The same thing applies to current day Afghanistan. We’re letting them go on their merry way rather than imposing a western form of government by force of arms.
Sure, they’re a close ally, and today our troops are there because the German government want them to be there. But that didn’t happen overnight on May 7th, 1945. We were, for years, a hostile occupying force in Germany.
There were assassinations and bombings by Nazi partisans for years after the end of the war.
I half agree with you.
We had a clear objective in 1991 - liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation - and we achieved that.
But we never had a clear objective in 2003. Put an end to Iraq’s WMD programs? It turned out they didn’t have any active WMD programs. Deny Al Qaeda a base in Iraq? Al Qaeda ended up being stronger in Iraq after we invaded. Keep Iraq contained as a regional power? We had already done that before the invasion. Oust Saddam Hussein from power? Well, we did do that. Turn Iraq into a stable country? We failed there.
We seem to have just had a war for no clear reason and then retroactively proclaimed that whatever we had managed to do was the reason we fought the war.
You raise good points, although I’d argue that “turn Iraq into a stable country,” isn’t a war goal, it’s an occupation goal.
Yes, I mean we clearly won WWII, Germany was not only defeated militarily, but was dissuaded from Fascism and became a law abiding member of the international community.
It was not “easy” for us to do this. Millions of people died.
All that said, though, sometimes I think the definition of “win” is too tough on the US. If, say, hypothetically, the U.S. never manages to get rid of something like the Taliban or ISIS, yet by using drones and high tech consistently racks up high kills totals while suffering nothing in return, it’s hard not to qualify that as a “win” of some sort.
One side would see 10,000 of its guys get droned to death over the course of years. The other side suffers nothing but just some expenditure of fuel and ordnance.
The reason we’re not willing to take such steps is that we typically justify our conflicts on the basis of exporting a better system than the one we’re replacing (i.e. democracy and free markets). Domestically, we make that justification in gaining a consensus (or at least a majority) that grants us permission to take their sons and daughters overseas, and we at least give some mighty good lip service to those we’re aiming to neutralize. Regardless of whether that ends up representing the reality on the ground in the aftermath of our conquest, that’s what we claim. We also live in a more complex geopolitical world post-WWII in which our allies might turn against us were we to just go in and blast a place. And not to mention, our end game is to expand our political and economic influence, not to exterminate our opposition, which would make the whole point of conquest fruitless.
But even if we could crush the natives in the short term, in the longer term, we would run into the Roman problem: maintenance costs of keeping our hegemony. I realize we’re not technically an empire but we behave like one in many regards.
The other similarity that we have in common with Rome is that income and wealth inequality have created a fertile environment for divided politics. People no longer feel like the fruits of America’s global military, economic, and political investments are being shared evenly among the “plebeians.” Also in common with Rome, this elite class makes decisions that disproportionately impact the other 90-95% of people in this country, and in ways that benefit themselves in the short term and go completely against the common interest in the long term: things like environmental destruction, political and economic corruption in plain view, using the financial system as a casino, and using political power to basically take future public funding to help them recover their losses while ordinary people suffer financial ruin. Worst of all - again, like Rome - they are using the political system not to solve common problems but merely to prevent the opposition from having power. That is how you go from having a democratic republic to a broken republic. And that is probably a major reason - maybe the reason - we cannot win wars anymore.
We will fracture. And China will pick up the pieces, and if they can somehow survive global climate catastrophe, they will probably end up inheriting the same damn problems that will ultimately lead to our demise.
Perhaps. But I have a hard time separating war goals from occupation goals in cases like this. Any goals we had for the occupation were based on the premise of fighting a war first in order to effect that occupation. So saying “our war goal was to turn Iraq into a stable country” is just a shorter way of saying “our war goal was to occupy Iraq in order to turn Iraq into a stable country”.
Not really. This was mostly a story put out by the Bush administration to try to wave away concerns about the post-invasion resistance in Iraq.
The Nazis did put forth a major propaganda campaign in the final months of the war about the “werewolves” and how the Germans would keep fighting after the war’s official end. And there instances of partisan attacks in occupied German territory while the war was still going on (and the Nazis were still in power).
But once Germany surrendered and the Nazis were ousted, this resistance pretty much disappeared. There were no allied casualties due to partisans after the surrender. Nor were there any significant acts of sabotage. Once the Nazis were out of power, the Germans seem to have accepted the war was over and stopped fighting.
We do still have troops in Germany and Japan, but they aren’t there to keep the natives in line. Once the new form of government was in place and domestic enemies like the Taliban defeated, I imagine it would be the same anywhere else. US troops would eventually be there to defend the new nation (like we are currently in Germany and Japan), not as an occupying force as we were in Iraq in Afghanistan to the very end. The mistake was in letting them (attempt to) rebuild Iraq style and Afghanistan style rather than forcing them to rebuild USA (admittedly USA pre 1/20/2017) style while providing the monetary assistance necessary for them to do so.
Does anyone win any wars of aggression anymore?
I’m asking because it seems to be a historical trend: start a war, lose (for some values of “lose”). Not just for the U.S. - the last war I can think of won by an aggressor was the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, though the start of that was as much meddling in support of an insurgency on India’s part more than it was an effort to start an all-out war.
So I think that any answer to the OP would have to come to grips with the fact that nobody - not just the U.S. - who starts a war of choice wins their war anymore.
Which leads to the conclusion that the U.S. doesn’t win wars anymore because no one would engage in a war of aggression against the U.S., so any wars the U.S. fights are wars of choice, where the U.S. initiates force against another country. And history is showing us that it’s really hard to win such a war.
The North Vietnamese + China won when they defeated South Vietnam + USA. The UK also had a victory in the Falklands War. I’m not sure if you would consider either one of those a war of aggression from the viewpoint of the North Vietnam + China or the UK.
Depending on how we define war, I’d say Russia has won a few wars in which it has illegally occupied territory that isn’t formally recognized as Russian. Whether that holds up over the long term isn’t clear but I doubt they fold anytime soon.
A civil war, not a war of conquest.
Defeating the Argentinians who were attempting to conquer the islands.
Russia seems to have won taking the Crimea.
Crimea and Donetsk. They would certainly count as “lately”.
And they might both have a chance at holding up over the long term.
As exceptions go, they do have some commonalities - they can be justified as assistance to an active insurrection started by a group with ethnic affinities in favor of the aggressor rather than their nominal sovereign.
So I’d have to soften the thesis somewhat.
One of the reasons it’s successful is that it’s a fairly easy “war” for Russia to win. It’s in a country where they already have significant political, cultural, and economic influence, with a fair chunk of the population sympathetic and supportive of Russian involvement. Logistically easy as well, considering Ukraine’s right on Russia’s doorstep and they can use energy as an economic weapon against their regime.
If we compare that to America’s wars in which we fight opponents that are half-way around the globe, our challenges are much more significant. We compensate for the complexity by having vastly superior technology, and we’ve tried to use our economic and political influence. But we’ve failed miserably in terms of applying soft power, which is ultimately something that you have to have if you want to conquer and then convert the opposition to participate in your economy.
The recent war in the Caucasus would qualify as a war where the aggressor won.
Putting aside events in the nineties, the war started when Azerbaijan invaded Artsakh last September. They occupied a large potion of Artsakh and the eventual ceasefire allowed them to keep the occupied territory.
Some might argue that this was a civil war and doesn’t count. Diplomatically Artsakh was part of Azerbaijan (dating back to the old Soviet borders). But the majority of people in Artsakh are ethnically Armenian, which is why they seceded and formed their own de facto country back in the early nineties.
I think that America’s soft power is largely oriented toward attraction rather than domination, which makes us unsuited to conversion through occupation after military conquest.
Or, to expand a bit more, America’s soft power is powerful because of the values of freedom and self-determination (both political and personal). America’s reputation as a land of opportunity, a place to get a fresh start, is much of the reason why more people want to move here than anywhere else on earth. And America is great at turning the people who move here into Americans, a fact that seems to be lost on many opposed to increasing legal immigration.
These values that America represents are antithetic to a colonialist project, which are typically focused on limiting the freedoms of some or all of the subject peoples, typically through the demonstration of an innate superiority, often economic or moral but at the last extremity military. Considering that America was founded by a revolution against a colonial power, there are innate contradictions with doing those things that a “successful” colonial power need do to exercise authority over a conquered country.
I’ve always been struck by the title of the last section of Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly: America Betrays Herself in Vietnam. In many ways, Vietnam was caused by anticommunism becoming more important for American foreign policy than anticolonialism. The tactics involved in the former fight ended up violating the values of the latter fight.