My prediction is that in the future, compunctions about using nukes tactically will probably disappear. Let’s say the Taliban hosts Al Qaida or something like it today and they launch a devastating attack on US soil. Maybe we don’t nuke them, but rampant bombing, relentless air sorties, and missile attacks becomes more likely, especially if we have a right wing illiberal government. The last 20 years was the Taliban’s and Afghanistan’s chance to cooperate with the US to eliminate extremism. Another 9/11 and a lot of Afghans are going to be exterminated because much of the US population will demand it.
I want to be clear: this is not what I want or endorse. But I think that’s what happens.
If international law, geopolitical consequences, or basic morality weren’t concerns the US could’ve reduced most of Afghanistan to glass without putting a single soldier on the ground.
The US helped create the system of international law, geopolitical consequences, and basic morality precisely because it had an adversary that could inflict massive damage on us if we ever for a single moment thought we could run roughshod over them. Beyond that, if you were born in 1900 and alive in 1945, you had just likely fought in one brutal war and perhaps been either a commander in the second one or had a son who had been in one of those theaters. In 1945, people knew what hell on earth was, which is why they/we created a system to avoid catastrophic breakdown in diplomacy. And yet even as sophisticated as this system was, it damn nearly failed and had it failed would have resulted in the mother of all wars in 1962. There’s a reason these academics in stiff suits created this complex world order, and it saved our asses.
I think it’s more of a recognition that the big boys (US, Russia, China, UK, France) all have nuclear weapons, so they’re not fighting with each other lest a conflict spiral out of control.
On the part of the smaller countries, I think the system of international alliances with one or more of the big boys has tended to put dampers on many smaller nations’ dreams of conquest. I mean, look at what happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait? That was a huge lesson to other potential aggressors that aren’t in the big 5 above. And it also means that they’re very unlikely to try and take the US on in a force-on-force battle.
Where it breaks down is when international shitheads like Russia and China have realized that they can do a whole lot of provocative behaviors and actions just shy of causing outright war with the US or other nations, because nobody is willing to risk nuclear war for say… the Crimea, or Fiery Cross Reef. We don’t end up with wars, but we end up with asshole nations building military bases on tiny islets trying to extend their territorial waters to some arbitrary and absurd “9 dash line” or invading the Crimea because they can.
I’m not so sure that nuclear weapons play a key role here though. If nuclear weapons didn’t exist, would it generally be worth it for the one major power to go to war with another over relatively minor territorial encroachments or provocations these days? I don’t think so - the calculus would be the same.
It’s only worth it where the major power is looking for a reason to start a war or throw its weight around.
I suspect another issue is that the “traditional” pushback in such a situation is for a powerful nation to fight a proxy war, by arming and advising and supporting the locals in the invaded territory. But the US in particular has had a bruising time with that strategy in recent years - it tends to end up in a never ending war that destroys that which it is intended to protect.
I’ve always been impressed (not sure what word to use) how irregulars like Taliban/ISIS/anti-American insurgents in Iraq never seem to get…psychologically tired. While the U.S. public complains about “war fatigue” despite the fact that over 99 percent of Americans are sitting at home on their couches not actually doing any fighting, and that much American warfare is waged from 20,000 feet…it’s the irregular guys on the ground getting droned who seem utterly indefatigable and always come back again, and again, and again, to fight…almost like Amazon army ants.
They’re fighting for their homes and culture. There are many things about Afghan culture that are not admirable. It’s hard to picture someone fighting for the “right” to keep girls uneducated, for instance, but unfortunately that’s a popular view among power brokers and elders in Afghanistan.
War fatigue doesn’t necessarily mean being directly exposed to war. Americans don’t like it when American soldiers die for no good reason (eg dying to win a war, because the war is unwinnable). They don’t like the spending, the (obvious and publicized) immoral actions needed to secure the loyalty of the not-so-bad guys, they don’t like the “enhanced interrogations” and Gitmo, and so forth.
Well but it’s not the same people. The backbone of forces like Taliban and ISIS are always the disaffected youth of those cultures, who for a number of reasons feel they have nothing to lose in life, which makes them easy targets to extremists. Certainly a few of the top commanders in these groups have insurgent careers going back decades, but a lot of the foot soldiers aren’t actually the same people who were fighting in the 90s or even 2000s. A lot of those people are actually dead. The casualty rate for both the Taliban and ISIS was fairly insane, particularly if you view ISIS as kind of a re-emergence of some of the post-2003 invasion insurgency groups. Most of these people have nothing to be fatigued from, they’re eager young people. Plus they grew up in abject poverty in terrible conditions, so there is a pervasive sense of what do they have to lose, and the guys recruiting them promise them a purpose in life, reward in the afterlife etc.
As others have said, “winning” has got to have a metric for each situation.
In WW2 the metric was unconditional surrender of the 2 key opponents. Clear and unambiguous.
In Vietnam, ISTM the practical “win” was to have been a Korea-style result. NVPA stays within its borders and on the other side of the DMZ, actual battle ends, US keeps a tripwire presence.
But in Korea that was possible because USSR and PRC got as tired as the US of expending resources in a stalemate with no alternative. There was no large active insurgency in ROK and anyway the geography meant there could be no equivalent to the HCM Trail to keep it alive, or neighboring weaker countries to destabilize.
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In Gulf War 1, it was under the aegis of the UN to remove Iraq from Kuwait and make the Saddam regime no longer a threat to its neighbors. Bush 41 had the coalition do that and stopped at it. Mission, in fact, accomplished.
But then people in the chattering classes began complaining that we “did not finish the job” and left Saddam there to continue terrorizing Kurds, Shi’ites and opponents in general. Which set things up for Bush 43.
But the thing is, ending the Baath was never “the job” to “finish” in Desert Shield/Storm. This was a case in which we got the win, by the officially sanctioned parameters of 1991, and influential people felt that was not enough. (Quite a few of them not out of care for the opressed but because they wanted a conquest that would put the oil in our hands.)
In Afghanistan… let’s say that in late 2001 the Taliban folded, and handed over ObL and kicked AlQ out as originally demanded, and on top of that invited the Northern Alliance to a power-sharing deal. How many Americans would have still demanded W43 NOT let the Taliban stay there doing their thing and instead go in and “export freedom”?
How do we know? These organizations are hardly transparent, neither to the U.S. or to their own people. How do we know what the desertion rate was in the Taliban or ISIS - or in the Viet Cong, for that matter?
That’s what I was trying to say; we’ve won, where there’s been a clear metric to measure win/loss. And every time there’s been a clear metric or way to tell who won, the US has won in the last century. It’s been the insurgencies (Vietnam, Iraq (post Iraq invasion), and Afghanistan where we’ve struggled.
I think the issue in Vietnam was that we were basically fighting an insurgency, and nobody’s ever come up with a good metric for identifying how you “win” an insurgency. I mean, EVERY nation that’s engaged in fighting insurgents has struggled with it- the British, the Soviets, the US, France, etc… I tend to think the lesson is not to engage in counter-insurgencies if at all possible.