pressug.com News 24 7
Related Articles
Plumes of smoke from two simultaneous strikes rise over Tehran, Iran
The “American Way of War” has failed repeatedly in conflicts, most recently in Iran, because it follows a predictable pattern: American leaders achieve tactical or operational gains but then produce strategic outcomes that strengthen the enemy or leave conflict unresolved.
The Iran campaign is not an aberration caused by one president’s incompetence or a temporary policy mistake. It reflects a deeper structural problem in how the US plans and fights wars since World War II.
America’s latest confrontation with Iran is likely nearing an end, though not in a way that would look like a true victory. Limited U.S. strikes have resumed in the Persian Gulf even as negotiations remain uncertain: a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran reportedly awaits approval from both President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Trump may claim success, but key Iranian objectives are unlikely to be abandoned. Specifically, there is little chance Iran will stop pursuing nuclear weapons or supporting anti-Israel proxy groups throughout the region.
Similarly, Iranian normalization with Israel and participation in the Abraham Accords is highly improbable. Therefore, the most likely result is not a definitive settlement but a prolonged period of low-intensity conflict, compared to the Iraq experience after the 1991 Gulf War, when the 2003 invasion later followed.
In other words, the outcome is characterized as an inconclusive failure. The more important question is why any major American war would be expected to succeed at all under the prevailing approach.
Over decades, the United States has repeatedly launched military campaigns that stretch on for years, then backfire, empowering U.S. adversaries, producing instability, or leaving hostile regimes in place.
This pattern can be traced back from the Korean War to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran. In each case, the argument is that tactical achievements were followed by strategic defeat. The explanation is that U.S. leaders make “bad decisions” because of personal qualities, ideology, or incompetence.
However, this cannot fully explain the historical record. The claim is that strategic failure is not primarily a function of individual presidents; it instead stems from a recurring logic of warfare, what “experts describe as the American Way of War.”
This approach, as presented, produces short-term gains with long-term strategic costs. The “tragedy” of American strategy is a recurring sequence: fast tactical success, followed by strategic failure.
Trump is portrayed as an example rather than an exception. Like President Barack Obama, Trump was elected partly as an alternative to hawkish “forever war” policies associated with the Afghanistan and Iraq eras. But Trump’s second-term actions again contradicted those reformist expectations.
Obama expanded U.S. military operations into Libya and Syria, while Trump’s second-term decisions included initiating a war in Iran. The Iran conflict has consequences for the global economy, particularly through rising oil prices, suggesting that the broader costs may be more severe than those of earlier conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan at the time.
To demonstrate that Iran fits a bigger story, look at earlier wars as case studies of recurring miscalculation. The Korean War is described as beginning with an American “mistake”: the decision by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a speech dated January 12, 1950, that excluded South Korea from America’s defense perimeter in Asia.
The North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, was made possible by this signaling and by the strategic opportunities created by Soviet and Chinese alignment. Russia’s Josef Stalin responded by encouraging Mao’s China to join the war.
Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 did negotiations lead to partition arrangements in 1954. The enduring Korean truce was only a partial outcome: although the division remained, North Korea later developed nuclear capability and continued to constrain U.S. forces in Asia.
Vietnam is portrayed as another instance of tactical or strategic mismatch. The North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese communist allies, backed by the Soviet Union and Maoist China, ultimately achieved unification in 1975.
This was a failed “Americanization” of the conflict that produced substantial American casualties and massive losses for Vietnamese people as well as casualties in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The broader “winner” in geopolitical terms was the Soviet Union, which gained Vietnam as a major Cold War military base outside Eastern Europe.
The Iraq War is framed as a clear “own goal.” It contrasts the limited Gulf War of 1991 with the full- scale U.S. invasion of 2003. Iraq disintegrated along ethnic and sectarian lines after the invasion.
In the account provided, this disorder enabled Islamist extremist organizations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS to flourish. Instead of producing a pro-American democracy or stable arrangements for U.S. basing, the war replaced Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime with a Shiite-dominated political order closely aligned with Iran.
Iraq completed the withdrawal of U.S. forces from its territory, reinforcing the idea that the intervention did not yield lasting American advantage. The Obama-era policy in Libya and Syria illustrates the strategic backfire.
In Libya, a U.S.-led NATO intervention reportedly deposed Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, but the result was the ongoing fragmentation and anarchy. In Syria, a “perverse” approach described as waging a low-level war against both sides of the civil conflict, Islamist militants on one side and Assad’s government on the other, led to another strategic failure.
By late 2024, Assad and his family fled, and Syria’s current leadership came from an al- Qaeda-associated figure. The intervention ultimately empowered the very forces the U.S. did not want. Afghanistan is depicted as the longest and perhaps most emblematic American failure.
The stated purpose of the war was to topple the Taliban, which had sheltered Osama bin Laden and his allies after the 9/11 attacks. After years of fighting under multiple administrations: Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, the conflict ended in a chaotic retreat in August 2021.
The result was Taliban victory and the establishment of a repressive Islamist regime, including restrictions on women and minorities and public punishments. Such results are not accidental but consistent across major campaigns: in several cases, the enemy or enemy-aligned forces either take power or remain strong.
North Korea still rules and uses nuclear threats. Vietnamese communists rule a unified Vietnam. Syria and Afghanistan are governed by former anti-American jihadists. The Ukraine war may be added to this list of humiliating strategic defeats, given Biden’s 2022 claim that Putin could not remain in power and noting that Putin still rules.
The implication is that even when the U.S. or its allies provide military and economic support, strategic outcomes may diverge sharply from American expectations. The US is averse to suffering major combat losses.
Because American leaders and public opinion resist casualties, the U.S. relies on technology, air power, and conventional large-unit warfare, believing that these methods can break enemy will without heavy American ground sacrifice. This mismatch is more political than merely technological.
The internal political incentives make ending wars difficult: presidents fear being accused of weakness by hawks from both parties, so they often avoid withdrawing and instead pass the problem to successors, turning leaders into scapegoats for defeat.
Thus, U.S. domestic politics is presented as making wars easy to begin but hard to end. If the problem is the structure of the American Way of War, both means and goals, then preventing repeated strategic failures requires greater political obstacles to initiating such wars in the first place.
The Congress lost control of war-making earlier in U.S. history (the Truman era), leaving the executive branch with easier access to launching conflicts. Since there have been no formal declarations of war since 1942, presidents can drag the country into war.
Overall, the Iran conflict is best understood as another instance of the same strategic pattern. The outcome may include limited tactical successes, negotiations that do not change core Iranian incentives, and an “inconclusive failure” consistent with a long-running failure mode of American war-making since 1945.
The author writes for Unherd; www.unherd.com
Related
, https://observer.ug/viewpoint/why-the-iran-war-is-a-clear-american-own-goal/
