Ivo Daalder, Politico / Translation by iPress
Former US ambassador to NATO and senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, Ivo Daalder, argues in his column that despite having the most powerful army in human history, the United States has not achieved a military victory in over thirty years. The author claims that the reason lies not in a lack of firepower but in a flawed way of thinking: Washington resorts to arms before defining political goals and relies on destruction where strategy is needed. Examining wars from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and the current situation with Iran, the author highlights three structural flaws in the American approach to war – the inverted logic of means and ends, excessive ambitions, and the belief that overwhelming force can replace an opponent’s resolve. In his opinion, the solution is to return to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine: clear objectives, restraint, and the understanding that tactical advantage alone does not guarantee strategic success.
The United States may have the strongest army in the world, but a series of defeats indicates a deeper flaw in their approach to military conflicts. Meanwhile, they have not won a war in over thirty years.
Since 1945, the US has fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran. Among them, only the 1991 Gulf War can be considered a genuine success – and even it sowed the seeds of future disaster. The outcomes of the others range from stalemate and defeat to strategic catastrophe, with Iran possibly being the worst strategic blunder the US has made since World War II.
So why does the world’s strongest army repeatedly lose the wars it starts? The answer lies not in firepower but in American thinking itself.
The eminent Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as a continuation of politics by other means. The army serves political goals – it is one of many instruments that must always be subordinated to a clearly defined objective.
The US has turned this theory on its head. Washington perceives war not as a continuation of politics but as its failure – an extreme measure resorted to when diplomacy collapses, often without any clearly defined political outcome. The results are always the same: force is applied without a clear purpose and without answering the question that should precede every decision to go to war: what does victory actually look like?
US President Donald Trump is the most striking manifestation of this issue. In Iran, diplomacy was conducted by envoys unversed in diplomacy or nuclear physics. Then began a large-scale bombing campaign, based on the magical belief that destruction leads to capitulation – or, as the president put it last weekend, we will either make a “good” deal or “blow them apart.” But the end result will be neither.
We know this because although Trump is the most radical expression of America’s flawed approach, he is by no means alone in this.
The American way of waging war is built on three structural flaws. The first: goals and means are reversed. Instead of defining a political objective and then choosing the appropriate tool, Washington does the opposite. It grabs the military tool and hopes that politics will adjust on its own. “Rolling Thunder” in Vietnam, “Shock and Awe” in Iraq, “Epic Fury” in Iran – each time the US applied overwhelming force, believing that total destruction would bring the desired result.
But this never happens.
The second flaw is excessive ambition. American wars are built around the broadest possible goals: regime change, civilizational transformations, the establishment of democracy, the eradication of terrorism. But these are not goals, they are fantasies; and military force is a poor tool for achieving such objectives.
The Gulf War was successful precisely because then-President George H. W. Bush rejected this logic. His objective was narrow and clearly defined: to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and restore the status quo – no more. He resisted enormous pressure that pushed him to move on Baghdad, and this restraint was not a weakness. It provided a true coalition, legitimacy, and victory.
Many years later, in the Middle East, President George W. Bush – under the influence of the same advisors who once pushed his father to go further – chose differently. The result? A decade of war, the strengthening of Iran, and a much less stable region than before.
Finally, the third and most fundamental flaw is that planners in Washington believe that overwhelming force can compensate for asymmetric motivation. It cannot. America may have power, but the other side has will. The Viet Cong, the Taliban, Baathists, Islamic revolutionaries – they do not back down. They have nowhere to retreat and nothing to lose.
When in 1968 the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, delivering simultaneous strikes on over a hundred cities, American military called it an enemy defeat. And while this was tactically correct, strategically it was the opposite. The Tet Offensive undermined support for the war in the American public and changed its course. The Viet Cong knew what they were fighting for, whereas Washington had long lost that thread.
Decades later in Afghanistan, American officials were captivated by their own ingenuity – special forces on horseback, precision bombs, and a regime toppled in a matter of weeks. Yet only days before the bombing began, Bush asked, “who will run the country” once the Taliban is overthrown – a valid question that no one thought to ask before fueling the B-52s. The horsemen acted brilliantly, but there was no conception of what would follow. Moreover, the longtime leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, remained at large.
Then came Iraq, where the architects of the war predicted an easy walkover, during which American soldiers would be greeted as liberators. Instead, the occupying administration disbanded the Iraqi army, pushing hundreds of thousands of armed and humiliated men into the streets – jobless and without prospects. The insurgency that flared up afterwards should have surprised no one, yet it surprised everyone.
In Iran, this logic collapsed even faster. The entire strategy, if it can be called that, boiled down to this: kill the supreme leader of the country and hope for a more moderate successor. According to the New York Times, the U.S. and Israel hoped that the vacuum would be filled by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is by no means moderate himself. But they had no plan to bring him to power, no plan in case of failure, and no plan to prevent Tehran from doing what everyone expected: blocking the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping except its own.
At this stage, America’s recurring failures are too numerous, spanning too many decades and under too many different leaders—both Republicans and Democrats—to be dismissed as coincidence. They reflect a deeper flaw in the American way of waging war.
So, what should a better path look like?
The starting point must be more humility and less arrogance. Yes, the American military is unmatched—as evidenced by the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. No other intelligence could have found bin Laden, and no other army could have snatched him from the depths of Pakistan without anyone noticing. But these astounding capabilities do not replace clear thinking and a balanced strategy.
Tactical advantage guarantees strategic success no more than tactical weakness guarantees defeat.
American military leaders understood this long before Washington forgot about it. In 1984, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger—traumatized by experiences in Vietnam and Lebanon—clearly laid this out in his concept of when and how the U.S. should use military force: clear vital interests, defined and achievable goals, domestic and international support, overwhelming force applied for limited aims, a clear exit strategy, and war only as a last resort.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who served as a young officer in Vietnam and later as a military assistant to Weinberger, refined these principles a decade later. Both saw what happens when the U.S. fights without a strategy and sought to avoid repetition.
The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine remains a correct concept today. It is not pacifism but strategic logic, successfully applied in the Gulf War. And it has been lacking in every conflict since. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might have referenced Weinberger as a guide for the use of American force in Iran, but then ignored each of his principles.
The U.S. repeatedly loses not because its army is weak, but because it chooses tools before determining its goals. In light of this, it is not surprising that the most powerful army in human history cannot win the wars it initiates.
Photo: U.S. Army
