The US has the most powerful army in human history. And yet it has not won a war in more than 30 years. This is what Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, wrote for "Politico".
"Since 1945, the US has fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran. Of all of them, only the Gulf War in 1991 can be considered a real success — and even it sowed the seeds of future catastrophes. Meanwhile, the results of the others range from stagnation and defeat to strategic disaster, with Iran perhaps the worst strategic mistake the United States has made since World War II.
So why does the most powerful military on the planet keep losing the wars it starts? The answer is not in firepower — but in America’s mindset.
The great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means. The army is an instrument in the service of political ends — one of many instruments, and always subordinate to a clearly defined end.
The United States has turned this theory on its head. Washington sees war not as a continuation but as a failure of politics — a last resort, resorted to when diplomacy fails, often with no clear political outcome at all. And the result is always the same: the use of force without a clear end goal and without an answer to the question that should precede any decision to go to war - what does victory actually look like?
US President Donald Trump is the most extreme manifestation of this problem. In Iran, there was a show of diplomacy by envoys who understood neither diplomacy nor nuclear physics. Then came a massive bombing campaign based on the magical belief that destruction leads to surrender - or as the president himself said last weekend: either we get a "good" deal or we"return them to the Stone Age". But the end result will be neither.
We know this because, while Trump is the most radical manifestation of the flawed American approach, he is far from the only one.
The American way of waging war is built on three structural flaws.
First, the ends and means are reversed: instead of first defining the political goal and then choosing the appropriate instrument, Washington does the opposite. First it reaches for the military and then it hopes that the politics will somehow sort themselves out. "Thunderclap" in Vietnam, "Shock and Awe" in Iraq, "Epic Fury" in Iran - each time the US uses crushing force in the belief that total destruction will bring the desired result.
It never works.
The second flaw is excessive scope. American wars are presented with the most ambitious goals possible: regime change, civilizational transformation, the establishment of democracy, the eradication of terrorism. But these are not goals, they are fantasies; and military force is a poor instrument for achieving them.
The Gulf War succeeded precisely because then-President George H. W. Bush rejected this logic. His goal was narrow and clearly defined: to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and restore the status quo—nothing more. He resisted the enormous pressure to advance on Baghdad, and that restraint was not weakness. It brought real coalition, legitimacy, and victory.
Years later in the Middle East, President George W. Bush—influenced by the same advisors who had urged his father to go further—chose a different path. The result? A decade of war, a strengthened Iran, and a region far more unstable than before.
Finally, there is the third and most fundamental flaw: the planners in Washington believe that overwhelming military force can compensate for asymmetric motivation. It cannot. America may have the power, but the other side has the will. The Viet Cong, the Taliban, the Baathists, the Islamic revolutionaries—they are unyielding. They have nowhere to retreat and nothing to lose.
When the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive in 1968, attacking over 100 cities simultaneously, the U.S. military saw it as a defeat for the enemy. And while this was tactically true, strategically the opposite was true. The Tet Offensive broke public support in the United States and turned the tide of the war. The Viet Cong knew what they were fighting for, while Washington had long since lost the thread.
Decades later, in Afghanistan, American officials were still marveling at their own ingenuity — special forces on horseback, precision bombs, and a regime overthrown in just weeks. Yet just days before the bombing began, Bush was asking the question: “Who will run the country” after the Taliban were overthrown — a perfectly logical question that no one had thought to ask before refueling the B-52 bombers. The men on horseback were brilliant, but there was no idea what would come next. And longtime al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden remained at large.
Then came Iraq, where the architects of the war had predicted a walk in the park, in which American troops would be greeted as liberators. But the occupation disbanded the Iraqi army and left hundreds of thousands of armed and humiliated men on the streets — jobless and without prospects. The ensuing uprising should have surprised no one, and yet it did.
The logic collapsed even more quickly in Iran. The strategy, if there was one, was this: kill the country’s supreme leader and hope for a more moderate successor. According to the "New York Times", the US and Israel had been counting on former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—no moderate himself—to fill the vacuum. But they had no plan for how to put him in power, no plan for what to do if he failed, no plan for how to prevent Tehran from doing what everyone knew it would do: close the Strait of Hormuz to all but its own ships.
At this point, America’s repeated failures have been too many, over too many decades and under too many different leaders—both Republican and Democratic—to be worthless. to be explained away as bad luck. They reveal a deeper flaw in the American way of waging war.
So what does a better approach look like?
The start should be more humility and less arrogance. Yes, the American military is exceptional — as the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January showed. No other intelligence agency could have found bin Laden, and no other military could have pulled him out of the depths of Pakistan without anyone knowing. But these astonishing abilities are no substitute for clear thinking and sound strategy.
Tactical superiority does not guarantee strategic success, just as tactical weakness does not guarantee failure.
American military leaders understood this long before Washington forgot. In 1984, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger — scarred by Vietnam and Lebanon — articulated it clearly in his framework for determining when and how the United States should use military force: clear vital interests, specific and achievable objectives, domestic and international support, the use of overwhelming force for limited purposes, a clear strategy for withdrawal, 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 became Weinberger's military aide, developed and sharpened these principles a decade later. Both men had seen what happened when the United States fought without a strategy, and they were determined not to let it happen again.
The Weinberger-Powell doctrine remains the right framework today. It is not pacifism, but strategic logic—a logic that worked well in the Gulf War. And it is precisely this logic that has been absent from every conflict since. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may have cited Weinberger as a guide to America’s use of force in Iran, but he has since ignored every one of its principles.
The United States continues to lose not because its military is weak, but because it continues to choose its means before it has determined its ends. It is no surprise, then, that the most powerful military in human history cannot win the wars it starts.