"For about as long as democracy has been around, the U.S. was the world’s mightiest economic and technological power, capable of sending game-changing weaponry anywhere in the world. "
Even if we completely ignore the democracies that pre-date the US, the US only surpassed the British Empire economically during WWI, or 110 years ago.
I really appreciated this disclaimer in the beginning, Noah: "I am not a military analyst or expert. Usually I look at the world through the lens of economics, which I actually have some training in. But if you want to get a good holistic picture of the world, you need to understand at least a little bit about war and conflict... And so I do the same, while being careful to remember that I’m not any kind of expert in the field."
But--and I really say this from love and as a true fan of your work--I wish you would also show a little more epistemological humility about political, political economy, and culture topics from European and other Western, developed countries. Because even if you are absolutely a credible expert and astute voice on American (and East Asian) economics and political economy, I do think you can fall for the groupthink and a Thomas Friedman-esque generalizer mode when you're giving commentary about events on the other side of the Atlantic, in ways that neglect the crucial nuance and on-the-ground empiricism that you otherwise give in domains you're more directly exposed to on a regular basis (like Japan). It's far from just you who does this, but I think you're better than this and rare among popularizing commentators for having rigor and humility as well as verve, style, and a clear POV.
The conclusion of that (not-totally-bad) essay is so hand-wave-y it drove me crazy, this statement in particular: "If the issue doesn’t get solved, it’s not inconceivable that Ireland could follow Britain into genteel decline." Umm...
Firstly, we're comparing apples to oranges here. The UK's problems are not the Republic of Ireland's problems and they don't even really overlap cleanly. Am I nitpicking? Yes! Because when you make such bold statements, you need to have rigor behind them. It leaves so many questions: Is every country that struggles with housing affordability in "genteel decline?" Is housing the primary reason for such decline?
The entire essay has that "I attended a conference for a few days and now I can muse about the destiny of nations" tone that I find so irritating in Thomas Friedman's columns. At least Noah did more research afterward and wrote it in long-form, but I think his other essays avoid this lack of nuance.
I can muse about the destiny of nations when I drink beer with my friends and I didn't even go to a conference. I guess I just think this is a pretty odd criticism of a blog called noah-OPINION.
He needs more epistemic humility when talking about China. Noah has admitted that he doesn't know any Chinese nor has he ever visited China.
He's said some pretty inaccurate things about China, like indulging in the reddit nonsense that communism destroyed Chinese culture and to get "real" Chinese culture you need to visit Taiwan.
That's insane. The Cultural Revolution did tragically and criminally destroy a priceless amount of Chinese artifacts and *some* aspects of traditional Chinese culture (especially Chinese religion) were destroyed but there's a lot still remaining. You can't destroy a 5000+ year old culture in 10 years, no matter how radical.
Pretty much all my Chinese-American friends, regardless of opinion on the CCP agree that there's plenty of "real" Chinese culture in China.
He's also claimed that Chinese in America seem less "foreign" to him than even Canadians. This is just nonsense. It may be true for him but I can't think of any American (white or black) without a personal connection to Chinese people who thinks Chinese immigrants are less foreign than Canadian immigrants. Even if we ignore the racial aspect, one glance at the World Cultural Values Survey shows that Chinese culture is much more distant from American culture than Canadian (or even British) culture is.
Unrelated: I don't like that he ignores the Soviet contribution in World War 2. It strikes me as a remarkably dishonest exclusion just because the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship.
Noah, you missed that the F-35 basically allowed Israel to have its way with Iran’s airspace the way a Russian soldier commits war crimes.
Not a good look for the “tRiLLiOn DoLLaR bOoNdOgGLe!!11” crowd. And no offense, but I kinda half remember you casually shitting on the F-35 on various occasions… so as Scott Alexander would say, maybe it’s time to update?
Do tell. Does the F-35 even have the range to get to Iran or where they fueled by the US in flight? Isreal got a huge assist by the USAF, definitely with us shooting down a bunch of Iranian missiles and probably much more. Iran was beaten by Isreal and the US, acting in concert, not by Isreal alone.
If you have some good info on the F-35 performance in Iran please do share it. I don’t see much unclassified info available.
Why in the world would they be fueled by the *US*?!? Israel has 14 tankers of its own, according to the IAF’s wiki page. You’re jumping to conclusions.
Why does it matter? One does not need extensive, detailed documentation of the entire operation in order to see that Israel has established complete air superiority. It’s right there in the headlines.
achieving air superiority while having F-35s does not prove the F-35s were instrumental in achieving air superiority. By Wikipedia's count, only about 16% of their combat aircraft are F-35s
What else would they be using to take down Iran’s air defenses with zero losses?
To the extent that they AREN’T using F-35’s, the most we can conclude from that would be that the other (American-made) systems are so absurdly capable that they could handle Iran’s (near-state-of-Russian-art) defenses without breaking a sweat. No other conclusions could be drawn about the F-35 itself, since it’s equally plausible that they were being kept in reserve vs the Boondogglers’ assertion that they suck.
The wiki on the war indicates heavy use of the F-35, however, so the baseline stipulation for this discussion here HAS to be that its involvement has NOT been negligible enough to indicate anything short of having at least EQUAL performance to previous generation jets.
> But the lower probability of an autocrat being tossed out of power comes with a much greater severity. [...] So honestly, I’d be more cautious if I were a dictator.
But you wouldn't be a dictator, would you? Dictators are not drawn randomly; they're outliers along axes like ambition, cruelty, and (no doubt) risk-tolerance. To become a dictator means risking a violent end every step of the way. I'm certainly not a military analyst or expert either, but my hunch is that dictators, as a group, are indeed less sensitive to the risks of starting wars, because they're less sensitive to risks in general.
Afterthought: When I think of actual dictators, what comes to mind as a defining personality trait is often not risk-tolerance so much as hubris—but maybe that amounts to the same thing behaviorally. (Like Walter White, they all have to *somehow* convince themselves that they're always the one who knocks, or they would have chosen a different career path.)
Another afterthought: My argument doesn't work as well for those who more-or-less just find themselves dictator due to heredity (e.g. Kim Jong Un, and his father).
But of course, we didn't. We overthrew Saddam, did a lot of damage to Al-Qaeda, and established a different and better Constitution in place of what we removed. ISIS then took over part of the country, but we beat them too.
The myth that we lost the Iraq War is a weird victory for the sheer propaganda of the anti-war movement against the obvious facts on the ground. The anti-Iraq war movement was desperate to describe the Iraq War, because if we admit that we can liberate nations bring better lives for their peoples, we might have a moral obligation to do it more often. We don't want to be that generous, so we pretend that the liberation of Iraq was a disaster.
We went into Iraq on the basis of a batch of lies, which was a disaster. Estimates of the number of civilians killed range from around 200,000 fully documented, to 400-500k. We spent an estimated $2tn on the project, with an estimated additional $1tn still to come in medical care. Thousands of US soldiers were killed, and tens of thousands were wounded or given permanent life-long disabilities like PTSD. And there is essentially no chance the US voters will (deliberately) do anything like it again, because (whether you agree with it or not) the *political* consensus is that it was a terrible disaster, and that's what determines voter preferences.
By the way, concerning the "batch of lies," do you think the Bush administration didn't believe that Saddam had WMDs? I thought he did. I think they did too.
But it's true they couldn't be fully open about their motives when they were trying to get you UN legitimation for the war. There were a whole lot of global bad actors who did not want to set a precedent for wars of liberation.
$2 trillion is a small fraction of total US defense spending in recent decades. Is our military better equipped to fight if they have important recent combat experience, or if they don't?
And we won the war in Iraq, more or less, but lost the war in Afghanistan, unambiguously and rather predictably. Would the credible threat of American power be stronger if we lose all wars or if we win some?
Civilian deaths in Iraq probably compared favorably to civilian deaths seem similar civil war in Syria, and ended with Syria under the same tyranny as before.
For the moment, an intervention on the order of the 2003 liberation of Iraq does seem politically impossible. And if that persists, we neither deserve nor are likely to continue to enjoy global hegemony. But the scale of global involvement that the United States engaged in during the Cold War would have seemed impossible in the 1930s, too. Revolutions in public opinion happen.
Very interesting piece. On the major point — democracies aren’t bad at war on the whole — I agree completely. As a retired Marine with plenty of experience in the 1990-2016 batch of America’s wars, I appreciate the thought. I think in your application of the argument to the United States, however, there are some weaknesses. For one, whatever the Wikipedia mind-meld might come up with, most of the events on the list of America’s “victories” are not what any military planner would call “wars.” Most of them were what today’s doctrine would call “crisis response” — very limited deployments of US forces to resolve very local and limited problems normally involving threats to US citizens in foreign countries. Others that might meet the definition of “war” — your Panamas and your Grenadas — were such gross mismatches in power that a candid mind might weight them very lightly as “victories.” The larger problem with the argument is that the contention that “we haven’t won a war since [pick your date, 1945 or whatever] is not usually applied in my experience to Western democracies in general, it’s applied to the United States in particular. So most of your undisputed evidence drawn from good work on the competence of democracies in war doesn’t really apply. My personal date for “last win” is 1991, though you can quibble on the narrowness of the aims and the downstream strategic consequences. After that, there are no wins, if you apply a sensible definition of “victory” as achieving the declared ends for which your polity decided to employ military ways and means. Without rehashing the entire debate on the Iraq intervention, eventually installing a shaky sectarian government (very far from the liberal democracy of Bush’s aspiration) beholden to Iran came nowhere near meeting the ends articulated for the venture in 2003. Still less so when you consider that we and our partners and allies had to go BACK in and fight further to defeat the resurgence of Islamist jihadism that resulted from the sectarian weakness of the Iraqi government we had installed. The loss in Afghanistan you don’t contest so I won’t spend time on that. The point is that for the United States — not the West or democracy in general — there is in fact when considering actual wars involving consequential strategic ends a long record of at best partial victories and some very considerable defeats. The reasons for this are not to be found in poli-sci generalities about the strengths and weaknesses of forms of government generally defined, but in the specific nature of US governance during and especially after the Cold War. That’s another whole discussion but I suggest it has a lot to do with the increasing disengagement (encouraged deliberately by the institution of the all-volunteer force) of the American people and their representatives in the legislative branch and the progressive relative empowerment of the executive in decision-making not just on making war but on going to war. This, arguably, saddles the US at the present moment with some of the disadvantages of the “authoritarian” model in terms of groupthink and lack of popular legitimacy, even though we are in other ways (for now) unquestionably a liberal democracy. Meanwhile the rest of the liberal democratic West has with very few exceptions (Israel among them of course) sensibly not gone to war with anything like the frequency that we in the US have. Things to think about — thanks for provoking thought.
Interesting muse. War is a series of battles; winning battles has nothing to do with politics. So, we shouldn’t confuse the Macro (War) with the Micro (Battles). Whether you think of China’s blockade of Taiwan as a war or a battle matters.
Battles are won or lost on exact things: the number of men and material, the amount of armor and ammunition. Then there is the intangible: will. The will to fight and die. The ARVN in South Vietnam had poor leadership, and its soldiers did not have the same will to fight as the North Vietnamese. During the Civil War, the North lost a slew of battles to the South due to the South having better Generals and more will at the start of the War.
We rarely lost a battle in Vietnam; we won most of them but lost the will to stay and fight. Afghanistan was very similar. The Afghan Army did most of the fighting and dying in the last few years. They lost very few battles due to having air cover. When they got in trouble, they had the US backing them up with air cover.
Where politics comes into play is in the goals. We won the battles in Iraq, and we even had a regime change. We won the battles and eventually pacified the country. The problem was that pacifying the country was not the political goal. Same in Vietnam. The political goal of containing communism didn’t match up to the goals on the ground.
America is where it is because we have no idea who we are as a nation anymore. Many don’t seem to care that America’s preeminence is threatened. This is because neither pundits, journalists, nor our political class has outlined what a diminished America will look like.
The American public has lost its will, lost that can-do attitude. As we see in Trump, for example, he believes our enemies are internal. At one point, we had the goal of exporting democracy. It is no longer available due to the failure to export it to Afghanistan. Iraq? I’m not ready to pronounce it a failure. There is no dictator in Iraq; they have managed to avoid a civil war between the Sunni, Shia and Kurds.
It is generally thought that democracies do not go to war. Democracies tend not to covet their neighbors' wives or minerals. So, yes, a nation's political system can matter, but it depends on what the goal is. More often, however, it is who is winning the battles and destroying the enemy's will. America is more susceptible to having its will destroyed due to our toxic politics and lack of national mission.
There's also another hypothesis that you didn't mention: democracies spend more on weaponry on a per personnel basis, because the organic bits of their fighting machines get to vote. (Although this might become a moot point in the future when weapon systems become purely inorganic)
For a book that addresses the third point on autocratic mismanagement, and other issues about force employment in modern militaries, I'd suggest Stephen Biddle's Military Power. It's and interesting and excellent book that gets at a number of the issues you discuss here.
Has the media read the official military document titled Unfit to Serve: Obesity is a Threat to our National Security? Retired General Mattis knows the full extent. Guess it doesn’t matter now that war is mostly technology. But we still need soldiers—and fat ones won’t do.
The Afghanistan War was not a loss for the US. Permanently driving the Taliban from power was not part of the American casus belli. the AUMF on which Bush relied permitted him to use force "in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by [al-Qaeda]"; the war successfully prevented the Taliban from rendering any further effective aid to al-Qaeda, which is now essentially a non-entity.
Bush's five-point ultimatum to the Taliban demanded that they
1. Deliver to the US all al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan
2. Release all imprisoned foreign nationals
3. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers
4. Close immediately every terrorist training camp, and hand over every terrorist and their supporters
5. Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps for inspection
On all points except #3 the Americans were able to enforce their will in a fairly permanent manner; the Taliban reconquest after the Americans declared victory did not raise bin Laden from the dead, give ISIS safe harbor, or re-kidnap Heather Mercer. And, point 3, which was not an authorized casus belli under the AUMF, and which I hardly imagine anyone thinks was a primary motivator for the war, is open-ended enough that I'm not sure how one would decide whether or not it was achieved.
Bush's speech at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/481921texts.html) links the invasion to the Taliban's refusal of his ultimatum and the broader War on Terror; it never once suggests a goal of spreading democracy or even permanent regime change. His only articulated expectation for the fate of the Taliban is that they "will pay the price" for their actions. So far as i can tell Bush did not begin to publicly suggest the US goal in Afghanistan included democratization until 2002.
The perception of the war as a failure for America is pure scope creep. It is true that it would have been great if the Taliban had been eradicated and replaced with a liberal democracy. But if the standard for victory is "success beyond one's wildest dreams" then one is doomed to perpetual defeat
I mean, if you have to go back 22 years to find a justification for the occupation, that's a sign that you're not really engaging with the criticism of the war. The problem with the war is that we stayed there for *twenty years*, and felt that we could not easily leave the country before that, presumably because there were additional military goals you're writing out of existence.
I think if you are going to discuss how effective democracies are at waging war, you need to account for how obligatory or optional that war is (or is perceived to be by the public).
You also need to distinguish clearly the difference between victory in formal military engagements and achieving war goals against determined long term irregular resistance.
A big part of the way democracies win wars is by choosing just causes for which to fight. That makes it easier to mobilize people, to win allies, and to to draw clear lines in negotiations.
What the West's cause be just in a war with China?
I see no prospect of China invading the West, some kind of Chinese Pearl Harbor attack would be very out of character. But China certainly might move to occupy Taiwan. The West might come to its defense.
In a war like that, the West's cause would be very questionable. We don't recognize Taiwan's Independence. The whole whole global system declines to recognize Taiwan's independence, de jure. On what grounds should Taiwan permanently enjoy de facto Independence from a nation whose territorial claim to Taiwan we recognize?
If taiwan's de facto independence were the expression of a principle that we believed in and consistently applied, that would be one thing. It's plausible that a people aspiring to and manifestly capable of practicing democratic self-government as an independent polity should be recognized as having the right to be free and govern themselves. But if that principle were established, there might be a lot of regents in the world which would want to secede mploy and create independent, self-governing polities. Would we offend them all?
Certainly not under the doctrine of America First. But then, that doctrine is really incompatible with the defense of any kind of international law. If the democracies are narrowly selfish like that, it becomes rather easy to divide and conquer them.
That's the lesson we learned after the disastrous fate of the post-World War I international order that was supposed to establish universal peace. After World War II, we presided over decades of peace and prosperity by not being America First. Now we've forgotten the lesson and we're walking into the same sorts of traps as in the 1930s.
There's also a pretty good chance that any war between the US and China will go nuclear; the US essentially relied completely on nuclear deterrence to protect West Germany from the Soviet Union because that was basically the only way the US *could* stop an invasion. If nuclear deterrence is the only thing that can save Taiwan, it's really no different than the situation that West Germany was in during the 1950s through the 1980s.
The war over Taiwan absolutely will not go nuclear. The US is not willing to use nukes over Taiwan. It won't even go so far as to recognize its independence. China is not willing to use nukes over Taiwan because if they were, they would have taken it already.
There's a big difference between "nuke Taiwan in order to occupy it", which is ridiculous and counterproductive, and "a hot war with Taiwan spins out of control," which is the scenario people are worried about.
It's also pretty much why NATO nations don't dare directly confront Russia in Ukraine: while it is extremely unlikely that Russia could actually defeat NATO militaries, the danger of out-of-control escalation to nuclear war is considered too great.
In repeating that old saw about Athens losing to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, one loses sight of the fact that Athens at the time of their final defeat at Goat’s Creek were acting far more as imperialists after their takeover of the Delian League for their own aggrandizement, suffered their most crippling losses through plague, had further weakened themselves with their disastrous Syracusian expedition, and through their excesses of ‘democracy’ in choosing many of their military leaders by lots rather then competence.
In the process one forgets that the Athenian’s most stunning victories had come half a century earlier at Marathon and Salamis where they turned back the greatest empire of the time, the Medes and in the process saved the nascent Western Tradition.
The Athenians essentially beat themselves in the Peloponnesian War, but their victories against the Medes are those which ought to be recognized as the true (and first) great democratic vins over autocracies.
IIRC the Achilles heel of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was its dependence on Crimean grain, which allowed the Spartan-led alliance to starve Athens into submission by blockading the Bosphorus.
You write "witness America’s inability to extract significant value from the oil fields of Iraq." Can you provide details on the effort to extract value from the oil fields of Iraq? I ask because there are claims that the war was an attempt to get Iraqi oil but I don't buy this. If you want oil you can always buy it which will be cheaper and avoid loss of lives. Did the US send oil tankers to Iraq and ask please fill them up? What am I missing?
"For about as long as democracy has been around, the U.S. was the world’s mightiest economic and technological power, capable of sending game-changing weaponry anywhere in the world. "
Even if we completely ignore the democracies that pre-date the US, the US only surpassed the British Empire economically during WWI, or 110 years ago.
I really appreciated this disclaimer in the beginning, Noah: "I am not a military analyst or expert. Usually I look at the world through the lens of economics, which I actually have some training in. But if you want to get a good holistic picture of the world, you need to understand at least a little bit about war and conflict... And so I do the same, while being careful to remember that I’m not any kind of expert in the field."
But--and I really say this from love and as a true fan of your work--I wish you would also show a little more epistemological humility about political, political economy, and culture topics from European and other Western, developed countries. Because even if you are absolutely a credible expert and astute voice on American (and East Asian) economics and political economy, I do think you can fall for the groupthink and a Thomas Friedman-esque generalizer mode when you're giving commentary about events on the other side of the Atlantic, in ways that neglect the crucial nuance and on-the-ground empiricism that you otherwise give in domains you're more directly exposed to on a regular basis (like Japan). It's far from just you who does this, but I think you're better than this and rare among popularizing commentators for having rigor and humility as well as verve, style, and a clear POV.
Would be nice if you actually pointed out something you think he got wrong instead of this non falsifiable call for "epistemological humility"
I almost never agree with this commenter, but I second this request.
Just one of many recent examples: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-ireland-got-so-rich
The conclusion of that (not-totally-bad) essay is so hand-wave-y it drove me crazy, this statement in particular: "If the issue doesn’t get solved, it’s not inconceivable that Ireland could follow Britain into genteel decline." Umm...
Firstly, we're comparing apples to oranges here. The UK's problems are not the Republic of Ireland's problems and they don't even really overlap cleanly. Am I nitpicking? Yes! Because when you make such bold statements, you need to have rigor behind them. It leaves so many questions: Is every country that struggles with housing affordability in "genteel decline?" Is housing the primary reason for such decline?
The entire essay has that "I attended a conference for a few days and now I can muse about the destiny of nations" tone that I find so irritating in Thomas Friedman's columns. At least Noah did more research afterward and wrote it in long-form, but I think his other essays avoid this lack of nuance.
I can muse about the destiny of nations when I drink beer with my friends and I didn't even go to a conference. I guess I just think this is a pretty odd criticism of a blog called noah-OPINION.
Can you explain the problems in Ireland vs the UK? Genuinely interested.
He needs more epistemic humility when talking about China. Noah has admitted that he doesn't know any Chinese nor has he ever visited China.
He's said some pretty inaccurate things about China, like indulging in the reddit nonsense that communism destroyed Chinese culture and to get "real" Chinese culture you need to visit Taiwan.
That's insane. The Cultural Revolution did tragically and criminally destroy a priceless amount of Chinese artifacts and *some* aspects of traditional Chinese culture (especially Chinese religion) were destroyed but there's a lot still remaining. You can't destroy a 5000+ year old culture in 10 years, no matter how radical.
Pretty much all my Chinese-American friends, regardless of opinion on the CCP agree that there's plenty of "real" Chinese culture in China.
He's also claimed that Chinese in America seem less "foreign" to him than even Canadians. This is just nonsense. It may be true for him but I can't think of any American (white or black) without a personal connection to Chinese people who thinks Chinese immigrants are less foreign than Canadian immigrants. Even if we ignore the racial aspect, one glance at the World Cultural Values Survey shows that Chinese culture is much more distant from American culture than Canadian (or even British) culture is.
Unrelated: I don't like that he ignores the Soviet contribution in World War 2. It strikes me as a remarkably dishonest exclusion just because the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship.
Noah, you missed that the F-35 basically allowed Israel to have its way with Iran’s airspace the way a Russian soldier commits war crimes.
Not a good look for the “tRiLLiOn DoLLaR bOoNdOgGLe!!11” crowd. And no offense, but I kinda half remember you casually shitting on the F-35 on various occasions… so as Scott Alexander would say, maybe it’s time to update?
Do tell. Does the F-35 even have the range to get to Iran or where they fueled by the US in flight? Isreal got a huge assist by the USAF, definitely with us shooting down a bunch of Iranian missiles and probably much more. Iran was beaten by Isreal and the US, acting in concert, not by Isreal alone.
If you have some good info on the F-35 performance in Iran please do share it. I don’t see much unclassified info available.
Why in the world would they be fueled by the *US*?!? Israel has 14 tankers of its own, according to the IAF’s wiki page. You’re jumping to conclusions.
So you have no evidence of how the F-35 performed or participated in the missions over Iran? That’s unfortunate.
https://theaviationist.com/2025/06/15/israeli-f-35-modifications/
Why does it matter? One does not need extensive, detailed documentation of the entire operation in order to see that Israel has established complete air superiority. It’s right there in the headlines.
achieving air superiority while having F-35s does not prove the F-35s were instrumental in achieving air superiority. By Wikipedia's count, only about 16% of their combat aircraft are F-35s
What else would they be using to take down Iran’s air defenses with zero losses?
To the extent that they AREN’T using F-35’s, the most we can conclude from that would be that the other (American-made) systems are so absurdly capable that they could handle Iran’s (near-state-of-Russian-art) defenses without breaking a sweat. No other conclusions could be drawn about the F-35 itself, since it’s equally plausible that they were being kept in reserve vs the Boondogglers’ assertion that they suck.
The wiki on the war indicates heavy use of the F-35, however, so the baseline stipulation for this discussion here HAS to be that its involvement has NOT been negligible enough to indicate anything short of having at least EQUAL performance to previous generation jets.
Isreal has other planes in its arsenal.
This all made sense to me, except for one thing:
> But the lower probability of an autocrat being tossed out of power comes with a much greater severity. [...] So honestly, I’d be more cautious if I were a dictator.
But you wouldn't be a dictator, would you? Dictators are not drawn randomly; they're outliers along axes like ambition, cruelty, and (no doubt) risk-tolerance. To become a dictator means risking a violent end every step of the way. I'm certainly not a military analyst or expert either, but my hunch is that dictators, as a group, are indeed less sensitive to the risks of starting wars, because they're less sensitive to risks in general.
Afterthought: When I think of actual dictators, what comes to mind as a defining personality trait is often not risk-tolerance so much as hubris—but maybe that amounts to the same thing behaviorally. (Like Walter White, they all have to *somehow* convince themselves that they're always the one who knocks, or they would have chosen a different career path.)
Another afterthought: My argument doesn't work as well for those who more-or-less just find themselves dictator due to heredity (e.g. Kim Jong Un, and his father).
"Most people also say the US lost the Iraq War."
But of course, we didn't. We overthrew Saddam, did a lot of damage to Al-Qaeda, and established a different and better Constitution in place of what we removed. ISIS then took over part of the country, but we beat them too.
The myth that we lost the Iraq War is a weird victory for the sheer propaganda of the anti-war movement against the obvious facts on the ground. The anti-Iraq war movement was desperate to describe the Iraq War, because if we admit that we can liberate nations bring better lives for their peoples, we might have a moral obligation to do it more often. We don't want to be that generous, so we pretend that the liberation of Iraq was a disaster.
He addresses this in a footnote
We went into Iraq on the basis of a batch of lies, which was a disaster. Estimates of the number of civilians killed range from around 200,000 fully documented, to 400-500k. We spent an estimated $2tn on the project, with an estimated additional $1tn still to come in medical care. Thousands of US soldiers were killed, and tens of thousands were wounded or given permanent life-long disabilities like PTSD. And there is essentially no chance the US voters will (deliberately) do anything like it again, because (whether you agree with it or not) the *political* consensus is that it was a terrible disaster, and that's what determines voter preferences.
By the way, concerning the "batch of lies," do you think the Bush administration didn't believe that Saddam had WMDs? I thought he did. I think they did too.
But it's true they couldn't be fully open about their motives when they were trying to get you UN legitimation for the war. There were a whole lot of global bad actors who did not want to set a precedent for wars of liberation.
$2 trillion is a small fraction of total US defense spending in recent decades. Is our military better equipped to fight if they have important recent combat experience, or if they don't?
And we won the war in Iraq, more or less, but lost the war in Afghanistan, unambiguously and rather predictably. Would the credible threat of American power be stronger if we lose all wars or if we win some?
Civilian deaths in Iraq probably compared favorably to civilian deaths seem similar civil war in Syria, and ended with Syria under the same tyranny as before.
For the moment, an intervention on the order of the 2003 liberation of Iraq does seem politically impossible. And if that persists, we neither deserve nor are likely to continue to enjoy global hegemony. But the scale of global involvement that the United States engaged in during the Cold War would have seemed impossible in the 1930s, too. Revolutions in public opinion happen.
Very interesting piece. On the major point — democracies aren’t bad at war on the whole — I agree completely. As a retired Marine with plenty of experience in the 1990-2016 batch of America’s wars, I appreciate the thought. I think in your application of the argument to the United States, however, there are some weaknesses. For one, whatever the Wikipedia mind-meld might come up with, most of the events on the list of America’s “victories” are not what any military planner would call “wars.” Most of them were what today’s doctrine would call “crisis response” — very limited deployments of US forces to resolve very local and limited problems normally involving threats to US citizens in foreign countries. Others that might meet the definition of “war” — your Panamas and your Grenadas — were such gross mismatches in power that a candid mind might weight them very lightly as “victories.” The larger problem with the argument is that the contention that “we haven’t won a war since [pick your date, 1945 or whatever] is not usually applied in my experience to Western democracies in general, it’s applied to the United States in particular. So most of your undisputed evidence drawn from good work on the competence of democracies in war doesn’t really apply. My personal date for “last win” is 1991, though you can quibble on the narrowness of the aims and the downstream strategic consequences. After that, there are no wins, if you apply a sensible definition of “victory” as achieving the declared ends for which your polity decided to employ military ways and means. Without rehashing the entire debate on the Iraq intervention, eventually installing a shaky sectarian government (very far from the liberal democracy of Bush’s aspiration) beholden to Iran came nowhere near meeting the ends articulated for the venture in 2003. Still less so when you consider that we and our partners and allies had to go BACK in and fight further to defeat the resurgence of Islamist jihadism that resulted from the sectarian weakness of the Iraqi government we had installed. The loss in Afghanistan you don’t contest so I won’t spend time on that. The point is that for the United States — not the West or democracy in general — there is in fact when considering actual wars involving consequential strategic ends a long record of at best partial victories and some very considerable defeats. The reasons for this are not to be found in poli-sci generalities about the strengths and weaknesses of forms of government generally defined, but in the specific nature of US governance during and especially after the Cold War. That’s another whole discussion but I suggest it has a lot to do with the increasing disengagement (encouraged deliberately by the institution of the all-volunteer force) of the American people and their representatives in the legislative branch and the progressive relative empowerment of the executive in decision-making not just on making war but on going to war. This, arguably, saddles the US at the present moment with some of the disadvantages of the “authoritarian” model in terms of groupthink and lack of popular legitimacy, even though we are in other ways (for now) unquestionably a liberal democracy. Meanwhile the rest of the liberal democratic West has with very few exceptions (Israel among them of course) sensibly not gone to war with anything like the frequency that we in the US have. Things to think about — thanks for provoking thought.
Interesting muse. War is a series of battles; winning battles has nothing to do with politics. So, we shouldn’t confuse the Macro (War) with the Micro (Battles). Whether you think of China’s blockade of Taiwan as a war or a battle matters.
Battles are won or lost on exact things: the number of men and material, the amount of armor and ammunition. Then there is the intangible: will. The will to fight and die. The ARVN in South Vietnam had poor leadership, and its soldiers did not have the same will to fight as the North Vietnamese. During the Civil War, the North lost a slew of battles to the South due to the South having better Generals and more will at the start of the War.
We rarely lost a battle in Vietnam; we won most of them but lost the will to stay and fight. Afghanistan was very similar. The Afghan Army did most of the fighting and dying in the last few years. They lost very few battles due to having air cover. When they got in trouble, they had the US backing them up with air cover.
Where politics comes into play is in the goals. We won the battles in Iraq, and we even had a regime change. We won the battles and eventually pacified the country. The problem was that pacifying the country was not the political goal. Same in Vietnam. The political goal of containing communism didn’t match up to the goals on the ground.
America is where it is because we have no idea who we are as a nation anymore. Many don’t seem to care that America’s preeminence is threatened. This is because neither pundits, journalists, nor our political class has outlined what a diminished America will look like.
The American public has lost its will, lost that can-do attitude. As we see in Trump, for example, he believes our enemies are internal. At one point, we had the goal of exporting democracy. It is no longer available due to the failure to export it to Afghanistan. Iraq? I’m not ready to pronounce it a failure. There is no dictator in Iraq; they have managed to avoid a civil war between the Sunni, Shia and Kurds.
It is generally thought that democracies do not go to war. Democracies tend not to covet their neighbors' wives or minerals. So, yes, a nation's political system can matter, but it depends on what the goal is. More often, however, it is who is winning the battles and destroying the enemy's will. America is more susceptible to having its will destroyed due to our toxic politics and lack of national mission.
There's also another hypothesis that you didn't mention: democracies spend more on weaponry on a per personnel basis, because the organic bits of their fighting machines get to vote. (Although this might become a moot point in the future when weapon systems become purely inorganic)
For a book that addresses the third point on autocratic mismanagement, and other issues about force employment in modern militaries, I'd suggest Stephen Biddle's Military Power. It's and interesting and excellent book that gets at a number of the issues you discuss here.
Has the media read the official military document titled Unfit to Serve: Obesity is a Threat to our National Security? Retired General Mattis knows the full extent. Guess it doesn’t matter now that war is mostly technology. But we still need soldiers—and fat ones won’t do.
The Afghanistan War was not a loss for the US. Permanently driving the Taliban from power was not part of the American casus belli. the AUMF on which Bush relied permitted him to use force "in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by [al-Qaeda]"; the war successfully prevented the Taliban from rendering any further effective aid to al-Qaeda, which is now essentially a non-entity.
Bush's five-point ultimatum to the Taliban demanded that they
1. Deliver to the US all al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan
2. Release all imprisoned foreign nationals
3. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers
4. Close immediately every terrorist training camp, and hand over every terrorist and their supporters
5. Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps for inspection
On all points except #3 the Americans were able to enforce their will in a fairly permanent manner; the Taliban reconquest after the Americans declared victory did not raise bin Laden from the dead, give ISIS safe harbor, or re-kidnap Heather Mercer. And, point 3, which was not an authorized casus belli under the AUMF, and which I hardly imagine anyone thinks was a primary motivator for the war, is open-ended enough that I'm not sure how one would decide whether or not it was achieved.
Bush's speech at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/481921texts.html) links the invasion to the Taliban's refusal of his ultimatum and the broader War on Terror; it never once suggests a goal of spreading democracy or even permanent regime change. His only articulated expectation for the fate of the Taliban is that they "will pay the price" for their actions. So far as i can tell Bush did not begin to publicly suggest the US goal in Afghanistan included democratization until 2002.
The perception of the war as a failure for America is pure scope creep. It is true that it would have been great if the Taliban had been eradicated and replaced with a liberal democracy. But if the standard for victory is "success beyond one's wildest dreams" then one is doomed to perpetual defeat
I mean, if you have to go back 22 years to find a justification for the occupation, that's a sign that you're not really engaging with the criticism of the war. The problem with the war is that we stayed there for *twenty years*, and felt that we could not easily leave the country before that, presumably because there were additional military goals you're writing out of existence.
I think if you are going to discuss how effective democracies are at waging war, you need to account for how obligatory or optional that war is (or is perceived to be by the public).
You also need to distinguish clearly the difference between victory in formal military engagements and achieving war goals against determined long term irregular resistance.
A big part of the way democracies win wars is by choosing just causes for which to fight. That makes it easier to mobilize people, to win allies, and to to draw clear lines in negotiations.
What the West's cause be just in a war with China?
I see no prospect of China invading the West, some kind of Chinese Pearl Harbor attack would be very out of character. But China certainly might move to occupy Taiwan. The West might come to its defense.
In a war like that, the West's cause would be very questionable. We don't recognize Taiwan's Independence. The whole whole global system declines to recognize Taiwan's independence, de jure. On what grounds should Taiwan permanently enjoy de facto Independence from a nation whose territorial claim to Taiwan we recognize?
If taiwan's de facto independence were the expression of a principle that we believed in and consistently applied, that would be one thing. It's plausible that a people aspiring to and manifestly capable of practicing democratic self-government as an independent polity should be recognized as having the right to be free and govern themselves. But if that principle were established, there might be a lot of regents in the world which would want to secede mploy and create independent, self-governing polities. Would we offend them all?
Certainly not under the doctrine of America First. But then, that doctrine is really incompatible with the defense of any kind of international law. If the democracies are narrowly selfish like that, it becomes rather easy to divide and conquer them.
That's the lesson we learned after the disastrous fate of the post-World War I international order that was supposed to establish universal peace. After World War II, we presided over decades of peace and prosperity by not being America First. Now we've forgotten the lesson and we're walking into the same sorts of traps as in the 1930s.
There's also a pretty good chance that any war between the US and China will go nuclear; the US essentially relied completely on nuclear deterrence to protect West Germany from the Soviet Union because that was basically the only way the US *could* stop an invasion. If nuclear deterrence is the only thing that can save Taiwan, it's really no different than the situation that West Germany was in during the 1950s through the 1980s.
The war over Taiwan absolutely will not go nuclear. The US is not willing to use nukes over Taiwan. It won't even go so far as to recognize its independence. China is not willing to use nukes over Taiwan because if they were, they would have taken it already.
There's a big difference between "nuke Taiwan in order to occupy it", which is ridiculous and counterproductive, and "a hot war with Taiwan spins out of control," which is the scenario people are worried about.
It's also pretty much why NATO nations don't dare directly confront Russia in Ukraine: while it is extremely unlikely that Russia could actually defeat NATO militaries, the danger of out-of-control escalation to nuclear war is considered too great.
In repeating that old saw about Athens losing to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, one loses sight of the fact that Athens at the time of their final defeat at Goat’s Creek were acting far more as imperialists after their takeover of the Delian League for their own aggrandizement, suffered their most crippling losses through plague, had further weakened themselves with their disastrous Syracusian expedition, and through their excesses of ‘democracy’ in choosing many of their military leaders by lots rather then competence.
In the process one forgets that the Athenian’s most stunning victories had come half a century earlier at Marathon and Salamis where they turned back the greatest empire of the time, the Medes and in the process saved the nascent Western Tradition.
The Athenians essentially beat themselves in the Peloponnesian War, but their victories against the Medes are those which ought to be recognized as the true (and first) great democratic vins over autocracies.
IIRC the Achilles heel of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was its dependence on Crimean grain, which allowed the Spartan-led alliance to starve Athens into submission by blockading the Bosphorus.
You write "witness America’s inability to extract significant value from the oil fields of Iraq." Can you provide details on the effort to extract value from the oil fields of Iraq? I ask because there are claims that the war was an attempt to get Iraqi oil but I don't buy this. If you want oil you can always buy it which will be cheaper and avoid loss of lives. Did the US send oil tankers to Iraq and ask please fill them up? What am I missing?