HISTORY may be written by the victors, while victory itself is variously defined and claimed by winners and losers.
However when the outcome of conflict is obvious, there is no argument. Nazi Germany was decimated, broken and annihilated, as was Imperial Japan in Asia’s WWII experience.
Self-determination and formal independence in former colonies sealed the transformation. The Global South community and its emerging economies are vital factors in globalisation today.
The Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decades-long period was the watershed between 20th-century Western dominance and its historic decline thereafter.
Signs of the limits to Western power grew evident from the mid-20th century. WWII was the last major war in which the West clearly prevailed.
The Korean War of the early 1950s did not end in clear victory or defeat. It did not officially end at all, as active hostilities on the peninsula ceased only with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
The Vietnam War soon followed, spanning two whole decades as a US “forever war.” It stopped with the US withdrawal from Vietnam in the mid-1970s, again in the absence of a formal treaty.
Some US nationalists still insist they did not lose the war but only chose to end it. However, nobody believes the US could have won if it had continued the war.
The fact that it withdrew was already an admission of defeat. But US officialdom would never admit to losing to a Third World country like Vietnam.
Victory and defeat are not determined only by the relative military strengths of the contending sides. Combat capability is only one of the factors deciding a war’s likely trajectory.
The formal tally of firepower is never sufficient to indicate the result and can even be misleading. Much also depends on the political will of the government and the psychological preparedness of the society to engage in war.
US leaders were buoyed by the Soviet collapse, with President Reagan claiming to have won the Cold War. But that did not result from any conflict, as the Soviet Union had collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions and a massively failing economy.
Nonetheless, US triumphalism and hubris rose to peak levels. The Pentagon set forth the Wolfowitz Doctrine in its 1992 Defense Policy Guidance, declaring that the US would never allow any country to approach its levels of wealth, power or influence.
In an unequal world, Washington would pursue and maintain global inequality in its own interests. However, that outlook and ambition would soon be blunted by the larger realities of a rapidly changing world.
Technology is supposed to assist in making decisions, but it cannot work if politics overrides it. The Pentagon and Rand Corporation ran multiple sophisticated war games and simulations of invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and each time the results were pessimistic about the outcomes.
Still, the politicians bent on war would disregard the technical advice and plunge headlong into more wars. George W Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, making the Afghan misadventure another two-decade forever war.
Not only would a generation of US taxpayers and war veterans witness the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan at great cost to American blood and treasure. That return was gifted with millions of dollars worth of US military equipment and weaponry in a panicked pullout.
The war mindset would continue under Republican and Democratic administrations, keenly backed by a bipartisan Military-Industrial Complex. The Obama presidency heightened conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, fighting every day of its two terms over eight whole years.
War fatigue among the US public and Donald Trump’s personal aversion to Obama then saw growing criticism of war. But like the early Obama, Trump initially pledged opposition to wars only to get embroiled in unprovoked attacks against Iran.
Teheran clearly won this war with its key demands intact along with control of the Hormuz Straits, while the US backtracked, scaled down or abandoned its own initial demands.
Will US leaders ever learn from their mistakes? Even after more than seven decades of consistent defeats abroad, learning valuable lessons seems unlikely.
Besides its own war gaming and simulation exercises advising against war, there are essential realities that policymakers routinely ignore at enormous cost.
These foreign wars threatened other countries, arose from no threat to the US, were existential to the countries targeted, so they had to fight for their lives with the benefit of home ground advantage.
Any thought that even the sole global superpower can beat
these countries is already a confirmation of defeat, however victory is defined.
Bunn Nagara is director and senior fellow of the Renaissance Strategic Research Institute, and honorary fellow at the Perak Academy. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
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