"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.
Thanks! I'm always willing to listen with humility and attention to people who point out the limitations of my thinking and analysis. If you have any specific criticisms, or references for specific sources I could read to improve my understanding, I am all ears! :-)
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.
Note that this is actually a post about economics, not military affairs. But if you have a specific criticism of the points in that post, I'd be glad to hear it!
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.
Professional Opinion isn’t just musing. You don’t pay for the average lad’s opinions over beers. You do pay for Noah’s, as I do. And why? Because they are generally evidence-backed, rigorously-quantified, and carefully parsed. And that’s the major value-add in Substack format, which is much better than newspaper Opinion pages, constrained by word count and publication deadlines. So, yes, you can and should expect better. And I raised the point because I know that he’s capable of excellent commentary.
Thanks! I looked through the literature on war and democracy, and I selected the papers I thought were the most well-cited and thoughtful. The whole literature is not incredibly rigorous, as you might imagine.
I can speak more rigorously on the Irish side of that equation, which is an interesting dark (or light?) mirror to the British side. Both have a housing problem. Both have population and economic concentration in the one, big capital city. But they also diverge in important ways. The most obvious being that Ireland’s economy has been hot and the UK’s cold.
The UK has, for over a decade, had a major productivity stagnation and a lack of economic growth. Arguably driven by the one-two punches of Tory austerity and underinvestment and then Brexit.
Ireland has quite the opposite: massive amounts of economic/productivity growth. Some years it registered double-digit GDP growth, which is an artifact of its status as the tax shelter and entry-point for American companies in the EU. But even excluding that, Ireland has been doing very well, and has high labor productivity and “genuine” growth.
Even on housing, there are nuanced and really material differences: The UK is literally running out of space because it is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. Ireland is the opposite: its population when I lived there was actually lower than immediately prior to the Potato Famine! But, ironically, you can more easily find a park or wilderness in England than in Ireland, which points to a really strange and historically-contingent aspect to their development patterns (an adjacent subject that was really fascinating to me and ultimately reduced my subjective quality of life in Ireland where there is almost no such thing as land that isn’t private and accessible to hiking, camping, etc., even on such an under-populated island).
Ireland also has a huge amount of vacant units even in the center of Dublin with the most acute housing shortages, which is because there is no regulatory or tax mechanism to punish absentee landlords who leave units vacant. (In my native DC, by contrast, the city imposes a ramping scale of taxation for unused units, making it unattractive to leave them derelict). Oftentimes, the ownership is even too opaque to track down due to widespread expatriation, shady REIT ownership, and inheritance conflicts: I rented a unit in a lovely Georgian mansion run by a company in the Isle of Mann, and it was quite a struggle to even get in contact with them. Previously, I rented from an Irish man in California who had inherited the townhouse from his deceased father and had never actually seen it in person. In my row in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Dublin, there were totally vacant and dilapidated Victorians which would be worth millions if they were kept up or renovated, but instead they were a blight. Who even owned them? That is unheard of in London! The vacancy rate in Dublin is 3x that of London—largely due to dereliction—even though residents struggle to find housing.
London, unlike Dublin, also has greenbelt zoning/housing restrictions which hem in development. Dublin, unlike London, is built on the Sea and ringed by the Dublin and Wicklow “Mountains” box in the city and are environmentally protected because they provide for Dublin’s water catchment.
London, unlike Dublin, has robust public transit, allowing for suburban development and a conurbation far into the rest of Southern England. Dublin doesn’t even have a proper metro system, and its handful of light rail lines were, until recently, not even connected to itself: You still can’t take the train to the airport in a city of 2+ million, which is almost unique in all of Europe.
So Dublin and London’s—and by extension the UK’s and Irelands—housing/development problem rhymes, but it’s quite a distinct set of conditions. As is the larger set of risks for economic malaise.
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. (edit: he's been to Hong Kong at least once)
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.
Please show me where you mention the Soviet contribution in this article?
Because all I see is "how the Anglo-American side won both World Wars" which pretty clearly excludes the Soviets in WW2 who suffered more than any population (except the Jews) from Nazi cruelty.
Now that you mention it, I do remember you saying you visited Hong Kong. I stand corrected. And now I'm wondering if you visited anywhere on the mainland.
While a lot of what you said seems reasonable, you have not offered any meaningful critiques on the essay as written. Until then: all should assume Noah knows way more than you
That’s because it wasn’t a criticism of *this* essay, as written (the opposite), except insofar as I celebrated a best practice he used in the intro of the essay including a disclaimer/qualifier that this is a domain that is not in the author’s core expertise. My critique in the second paragraph is that he should do that more often in order to be less-wrong about areas that he still wants to (and should!) write about, but where he may not have as much background or direct experience with.
I gave a specific example in the thread of an essay on Ireland (where I lived) that I don’t think met the mark. But there are others, and that’s why, as a longtime enjoyer of Noah’s work, I wanted to raise the concern.
Note that your follow-on point that this is some expertise/credibility contest between me (the reader) and him (the author) is a false binary. I’m not pretending to be the expert. You are not reading and paying for my Substack, but, like me, you are reading and paying for Noah’s. I am qualified to deliver critiques on his work on domains that I am more familiar with, since I live in Europe and have more on-the-ground experience and therefore more access to the nuance I’m talking about. I offer up some of that perspective in the comments here regularly (for free), and other commenters thoughtfully (and less so) critique my POV, which is good! Hopefully they do so in good faith and with some verifiable evidence. But I can be (and often am) wrong, of course, just like he and any of the other best essayists can be—especially if they don’t account for good-faith criticism and challenge.
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?
I actually looked this up, and it's probably true, but I don't think we know enough yet about Israel's actual operational success to say this for certain!!
I think given the general success thus far, it can’t be understated how much that success owes to an “ecosystemic” competency — an entire military complex that is competently run by a relatively competent democratic culture, as was your thesis.
However, that is what it takes to properly operate something like the F-35. You only get astounding results with a weapon like that — like the zero fighter jet losses for a total decimation of air defenses — because you have a military that can get astounding results in the first place.
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.
The Israelis also have a history of sometimes heavily modifying the weapon systems--like F-35, A-18, etc. we sell them.
This presumably especially extends to ECM/ECCM, which would be especially relevant to taking out Iranian SAM batteries. But we'll likely never know to what extent Mossad stole Iranian IFF frequencies and other data.
> 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).
Was listening to a podcast by that Klotkin (sp) guy writing biographies of Stalin and he mentioned that Stalin tried to resign from the politburo multiple times and had to be persuaded multiple times by the people he ended up killing like 10 years later.
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.
What I know is that the Bush administration set up an alternative intelligence pipeline within the Pentagon, because the results they were getting out of the traditional intelligence channels did not support the WMD narrative. (The intelligence agencies were getting accurate results, obviously.) This is not something you do when you're being fully honest.
Additionally there were weapons inspectors in Iraq who were also claiming that they couldn't find weapons. And Saddam seemed to be cooperating with them. But the US was already making expensive military preparations for invasion before any of this began, most of which were unlikely to be rolled back.
There was also a lot of extremely unpleasant political stuff going on: remember "Freedom Fries"? This stuff felt much more politically-motivated and jingoistic than you'd expect if the motivation was honest concern about a military attack.
"What people believe" is hard, because people can delude themselves. But I personally think George W. Bush was motivated by Saddam's assassination attempt on his father in the 1990s and came into office determined to kill Saddam Hussein. Cheney and others believed they could realign the middle east (and I guess they did, though maybe not in the way they wanted.) Still others thought it was the ticket to a second term (which it arguably was.) What's clear here is that *reasonable* people should not have gone to war based on the WMD evidence.
Good assessment, I think … but it falls considerably short of justifying the accusation of lying. I thought Saddam had WMDs because why else would he put up so much resistance to letting in the weapons inspectors. And yes, they did at the last minute let in weapons inspectors in a limited way, but not enough to really verify. The epistemology is very nuanced, and that's sufficient refutation of “Bush lied, people died,” which is not nuanced at all. I could say it was a lie… but, as you say, belief is difficult to judge.
My view is that when you're contemplating a war with maybe 500,000 civilian deaths on the line, plus tens of thousands of US soldiers lives' ruined, then the burden is on you to be certain. And the responsibility for being wrong also falls on you. And I mean responsibility in the old-fashioned sense, where people actually curse your name and do not seek to rehabilitate you.
If the best defense of Iraq is "well, they didn't due their due diligence, were wrong, overrode intelligence estimates, manufactured evidence, but we can't PROVE they didn't believe in all the wrong information they manufactured" then you're operating at a moral deficit that makes mere "lying" look saintly.
Oh, if the only reason for the war were WMDs, I would totally oppose it no matter how certain we were that he had them. That doesn't come close to being a good enough reason for war in my book.
I supported the war to liberate Iraqis from totalitarianism, along with other geostrategic goals. Whether he actually had WMDs is irrelevant anyway: his treaty obligation was to comply with the inspection regime. The actual presence of WMDs in Iraq doesn't impact the real case for war at all. If anything, the case for war is stronger when he didn't have them. Better to attack before he has them than after he gets them. But that's all kind of beside the point.
They knew the evidence for WMD were lies because they were ones manufacturing the lies and selling them. Many were fairly quickly debunked, but the debunking got a tiny fraction of press compared to volume of the lie and new one was always being put out to grab attention. They were determined to invade Iraq well before 9/11 and were really only focused on how to sell an invasion to a skeptical public.
To be determined to invade Iraq before 9/11 was reasonable, if that's true, which I don't know. From 1998 on, Iraq had violated treaty agreements to let weapons inspectors verify their disarmament. I still don't see evidence of any LIES, as opposed to sincere mistakes, regarding WMDs.
But I don't doubt that there was room to explain the case for war more effectively than they did, even when constrained by trying to appease the UN. It was a bit clumsy in some ways.
$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.
"Would the credible threat of American power be stronger if we lose all wars or if we win some?"
If I interpret what you're saying correctly, the purported benefit of winning this kind of war is to inform other potential adversaries that we're capable of winning and hence they should be intimidated by us. And while I'm certain that adversaries *were* impressed by the success of the initial invasion, I also think the lesson they drew from the subsequent occupation was "the US is not good at this, the people of the US are not patient about this, and they will be much less likely to support future occupations."
The second lesson they probably drew was that an insurgency can be highly successful in the long term, provided there isn't an alternative ethnic-majority government available that is also receiving loads of support from neighboring powers. I would imagine these lessons are very relevant to Iran right now.
"This is clearly false. The U.S. didn’t just overthrow Saddam with ease; it also defeated Sunni and Shia militias alike, and then defeated ISIS. The regime that the U.S. set up in Saddam’s wake is still in control in Iraq, and is still friendly to the U.S. By every conceivable past and present definition of what it means to “win” a war, the U.S. won the Iraq War. However, the victory didn’t benefit the U.S. strategically — it diminished America’s geopolitical standing and broke the global norm of non-aggression that the U.S. had championed since World War 2, paving the way for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So the Iraq War is a demonstration of the fact that victory in war isn’t always worth fighting the war in the first place. In contrast, the Afghanistan War was a loss for the U.S., but Al Qaeda was effectively destroyed, Osama bin Laden and all other 9/11 planners were captured or killed, and the Taliban were neutralized as a strategic threat."
Good!!! Sorry for not noticing that before. Guess you've got to read to the footnotes.
I'm not convinced, but this argument takes it to a higher level. As for "breaking the global norm of non-aggression," that norm is already in crisis, and for good reason. The norm was broken in Kosovo. We wanted to prevent a genocide, and therefore violated Serbia's sovereignty, and thereby set a precedent for Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine, and for who knows what remains to come. But should we have let the Serbs massacre the Kosovars?
The two principles that we wanted most to preserve as the bedrock of the liberal world order were "no aggression" and "no genocide." But those turn out to be contradictory, because sometimes you can't prevent genocide except by violating the sovereignty of a nation whose government wants to kill some of its people. And after 9/11, "no terrorism" was also a high priority, but that's also in tension with both the other principles, since preventing terrorism might sometimes be best served by massacring groups with a propensity for terrorism, and or by intervening in foreign states where you think terrorists are sheltering, against those states' will.
So no aggression, was the wrong principle. The forward strategy of freedom was a way out of this gordian knot, and it accomplished a good deal, before it was abandoned for very inadequate reasons. No doctrine took its place. We simply fell into a reactionary muddle.
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.
I agree that the size and power of the U.S. means that we're not a good yardstick to judge the military competence of Western democracies. The typical pattern is that we win almost trivially on the battlefield, and then our media and political class sets for us the goal of turning a foreign society into another Germany or Japan; when that doesn't happen, people declare it a "loss", even though that's not the kind of thing that any military on Earth will ever be able to do.
That's why Ukraine and Israel are more illuminating cases; in both cases, it's a country that really had to fight hard in order to overcome an adversary on the battlefield, rather than winning easily and then trying to "win the peace" by transforming another society.
>The typical pattern is that we win almost trivially on the battlefield, and then our media and political class sets for us the goal of turning a foreign society into another Germany or Japan; when that doesn't happen, people declare it a "loss", even though that's not the kind of thing that any military on Earth will ever be able to do.<
The media/political class didn't "set for us" the problem of nation-building; nation-building is a necessary (albeit chronologically-distant) component of invasion and occupation. War is an inherently political project, and like all political projects, you need to have a plan beyond beating the other guy. You need to be ready to occupy their homeland if need be, identify sympathetic indigenous elites (ideally with a social base) to staff a caretaker regime, avoid falling into local/regional pitfalls, among other things. In other words, nation-building is a necessary component of invasion if you don't want people to treat you like a modern-day Genghis Khan, pillaging and looting lands with little end in sight. Or if you don't want your war gains to disappear once you've packed up your forces and withdrawn.
I agree on the point about the political class and their sometimes absurd objectives. But isn’t it the political class that gets to set the political objectives when a democracy goes to war (especially when The People at large can’t be bothered to pay attention)? And don’t we have to judge questions of victory by reference to the objectives as set? Obviously those often shift in war, but it strikes me as a little questionable to take a look at the end result of a war, no matter how distantly related to the original objectives, and label it a win so long as it’s not an obvious comprehensive embarrassment. You seem to suggest that the ends-means disconnects in US war-making stems largely from in-stride mission creep toward statebuilding. You can make a case for that in Afghanistan, though my reading on that makes me doubt that many in the Bush admin in 2001 would have been willing to sign on to the punitive raid approach that so many subsequently touted. For Iraq, and VN before it, state transformation WAS the mission from the get-go, however questionable the underlying assumptions. I know you are not, BTW, making the “we won the tactical fights” argument as many in my world do (we did not in all cases, as it happens, any more than we did in Vietnam), but for those who might be so inclined it bears repeating that that question is irrelevant when judging strategic effectiveness. I think that’s what you have to do in calling wins and losses at this level. With respect to Israel and Ukraine, I completely agree - related idea that springs to mind (or maybe the same one differently stated) is that the wars of such countries are by no means wars of choice as are most of those the US has waged of late. The stakes are either immediately existential (Ukraine) or very directly linked to such stakes (Israel), which seems to offer far less room for the kinds of ends-means disconnects the US has so often experienced.
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)
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 agree that the americans failed to achieve additional, secondary goals that were tacked on after the fact but i think its strange to call something a "failure" overall when all of its original aims were fulfilled because later people decided on additional, secondary goals which were not successfully achieved
i also dont understand why you think my argument, that the war essentially succeeded at all of its objectives about 20 years before it ended, fails to engage with your criticism that it lasted too long. you seem to be conflating "the war was a success" (which it was) with "the war was a good thing" (a more complicated question). but in the footnote to which i was responding noah draws this exact distinction vis a vis iraq, so i felt Afghanistan ought to receive the same treatment
lastly im not sure its reasonable to describe the american failure to establish a functional afghan state as a failure of the war; to me this seems like primarily a diplomatic objective which the military did an adequate job of supporting. but i concede that this is generally conceived of as part of the war
One of the things we spent a lot of time discussing during the 2000s was the "Pottery Barn rule", which translates to "If you break it, you buy it." (Note that Pottery Barn didn't actually enforce this rule at the time, but it's such a good phrase.)
I don't think this was some new rule that we invented after the Afghanistan invasion, I think it was a fairly long-standing principle with some exceptions, i.e., that if you completely destroy a government and replace it, you are then responsible for stabilizing the political situation and operating the country until that point. The obvious problem with Afghanistan is that the minute you accept that framing, you end up stuck there for many, many years.
But on a more practical note: we certainly did not destroy Al Queda during the early phases of the war. Most of the leadership made their way over the mountains and hid in Pakistan. Even Bin Laden survived for another 10 years unscathed! So (1) I don't think that anyone can say the war aims were achieved during the early phase of the war at all, if Bin Laden was just hiding out in Abbottabad for so many years. And (2) in some counterfactual where the US invades and then leaves quickly, does the US actually achieve their war aims? Or does Al Queda just come back into Afghanistan over the same mountains they exited by, necessitating a second invasion?
So I don't think you can say "the US tacked on new war goals," because those later goals were baked in as early as the plans to invade were made, or at least as early as Tora Bora.
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.
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.
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.
(1) => Unclear. How do you justify preventing China from re-establishing control over a territory to which we recognize their sovereign right? What's the international law case for that?
um the fact that only about 10~ of Taiwanese people support reunification from China? Just because China thinks it's their "right" to control Taiwan, doesn't mean they get to do so. Just like Guatemala doesn't just get re-establish control Belize, or DJT doesn't get to take over Greenland, or Putin doesn't get to take over Ukraine.
Sovereignty is the most important for of governance. Without we inevitably get violence (see Why Nations Fail).
But the point is that Taiwan is not recognized as a sovereign state in international law. I wish they were, but they're not, so the formalization of their de facto Independence would legally be secession. And recognizing a right of secession creates a LOT of problems.
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 in a conventional war, the danger of out-of-control escalation to nuclear war is considered too great.
We need to stop pretending about Taiwan. Everyone was petrified of upsetting Putin, the US is not directly fighting the Chinese, in their backyard, over Taiwan.
Yes, that would have meant Western Europe was going up. The US was also a little more committed during the Cold War. If China heads on to Japan and South Korea, we might do something then.
The Biden administration waffled about on Ukraine because of fears of what the Russians would do. And we're going to come to blows with the Chinese in their backyard, about an island we don't say is independent? Seems like a farcical belief.
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.
Western democracies are pretty good at war! The US is great at war! I am not sure I agree that Leftists think we're bad at war though, I've met plenty that think we're TOO GOOD at war and spend too much. The 'West is bad at war' critique feels far more Rightist than Leftist from my vantage point.
As to why, my banal opinion is simply that the West has been richer than their opponents for a very long time. This explains most of it.
As for China: while I think the US is far weaker compared to China than it was against Japan or Germany, that does not mean we cannot confront China. Our goals relative to China are lesser: we just want them to stay away from Taiwan and not dominate their neighbors. That seems easier to achieve (and a more agreeable goal) than China's goals. Despite China's desire to take Taiwan, I also think that China's conservatism plays to our favor. Xi, and his successors, will prefer to survive over conquering a small island.
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.
"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.
Thanks! I'm always willing to listen with humility and attention to people who point out the limitations of my thinking and analysis. If you have any specific criticisms, or references for specific sources I could read to improve my understanding, I am all ears! :-)
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.
Note that this is actually a post about economics, not military affairs. But if you have a specific criticism of the points in that post, I'd be glad to hear it!
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.
Professional Opinion isn’t just musing. You don’t pay for the average lad’s opinions over beers. You do pay for Noah’s, as I do. And why? Because they are generally evidence-backed, rigorously-quantified, and carefully parsed. And that’s the major value-add in Substack format, which is much better than newspaper Opinion pages, constrained by word count and publication deadlines. So, yes, you can and should expect better. And I raised the point because I know that he’s capable of excellent commentary.
Thanks! I looked through the literature on war and democracy, and I selected the papers I thought were the most well-cited and thoughtful. The whole literature is not incredibly rigorous, as you might imagine.
Can you explain the problems in Ireland vs the UK? Genuinely interested.
I can speak more rigorously on the Irish side of that equation, which is an interesting dark (or light?) mirror to the British side. Both have a housing problem. Both have population and economic concentration in the one, big capital city. But they also diverge in important ways. The most obvious being that Ireland’s economy has been hot and the UK’s cold.
The UK has, for over a decade, had a major productivity stagnation and a lack of economic growth. Arguably driven by the one-two punches of Tory austerity and underinvestment and then Brexit.
Ireland has quite the opposite: massive amounts of economic/productivity growth. Some years it registered double-digit GDP growth, which is an artifact of its status as the tax shelter and entry-point for American companies in the EU. But even excluding that, Ireland has been doing very well, and has high labor productivity and “genuine” growth.
Even on housing, there are nuanced and really material differences: The UK is literally running out of space because it is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. Ireland is the opposite: its population when I lived there was actually lower than immediately prior to the Potato Famine! But, ironically, you can more easily find a park or wilderness in England than in Ireland, which points to a really strange and historically-contingent aspect to their development patterns (an adjacent subject that was really fascinating to me and ultimately reduced my subjective quality of life in Ireland where there is almost no such thing as land that isn’t private and accessible to hiking, camping, etc., even on such an under-populated island).
Ireland also has a huge amount of vacant units even in the center of Dublin with the most acute housing shortages, which is because there is no regulatory or tax mechanism to punish absentee landlords who leave units vacant. (In my native DC, by contrast, the city imposes a ramping scale of taxation for unused units, making it unattractive to leave them derelict). Oftentimes, the ownership is even too opaque to track down due to widespread expatriation, shady REIT ownership, and inheritance conflicts: I rented a unit in a lovely Georgian mansion run by a company in the Isle of Mann, and it was quite a struggle to even get in contact with them. Previously, I rented from an Irish man in California who had inherited the townhouse from his deceased father and had never actually seen it in person. In my row in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Dublin, there were totally vacant and dilapidated Victorians which would be worth millions if they were kept up or renovated, but instead they were a blight. Who even owned them? That is unheard of in London! The vacancy rate in Dublin is 3x that of London—largely due to dereliction—even though residents struggle to find housing.
London, unlike Dublin, also has greenbelt zoning/housing restrictions which hem in development. Dublin, unlike London, is built on the Sea and ringed by the Dublin and Wicklow “Mountains” box in the city and are environmentally protected because they provide for Dublin’s water catchment.
London, unlike Dublin, has robust public transit, allowing for suburban development and a conurbation far into the rest of Southern England. Dublin doesn’t even have a proper metro system, and its handful of light rail lines were, until recently, not even connected to itself: You still can’t take the train to the airport in a city of 2+ million, which is almost unique in all of Europe.
So Dublin and London’s—and by extension the UK’s and Irelands—housing/development problem rhymes, but it’s quite a distinct set of conditions. As is the larger set of risks for economic malaise.
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. (edit: he's been to Hong Kong at least once)
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.
Note: I have visited China multiple times, so I don't know where you're getting these claims.
Nor do I ignore the Soviet contribution to WW2.
This reads like a comment written by someone who hasn't actually read much of what I've written.
Please show me where you mention the Soviet contribution in this article?
Because all I see is "how the Anglo-American side won both World Wars" which pretty clearly excludes the Soviets in WW2 who suffered more than any population (except the Jews) from Nazi cruelty.
Now that you mention it, I do remember you saying you visited Hong Kong. I stand corrected. And now I'm wondering if you visited anywhere on the mainland.
Yes, I visited the mainland twice. Shanghai area and Beijing area.
While a lot of what you said seems reasonable, you have not offered any meaningful critiques on the essay as written. Until then: all should assume Noah knows way more than you
That’s because it wasn’t a criticism of *this* essay, as written (the opposite), except insofar as I celebrated a best practice he used in the intro of the essay including a disclaimer/qualifier that this is a domain that is not in the author’s core expertise. My critique in the second paragraph is that he should do that more often in order to be less-wrong about areas that he still wants to (and should!) write about, but where he may not have as much background or direct experience with.
I gave a specific example in the thread of an essay on Ireland (where I lived) that I don’t think met the mark. But there are others, and that’s why, as a longtime enjoyer of Noah’s work, I wanted to raise the concern.
Note that your follow-on point that this is some expertise/credibility contest between me (the reader) and him (the author) is a false binary. I’m not pretending to be the expert. You are not reading and paying for my Substack, but, like me, you are reading and paying for Noah’s. I am qualified to deliver critiques on his work on domains that I am more familiar with, since I live in Europe and have more on-the-ground experience and therefore more access to the nuance I’m talking about. I offer up some of that perspective in the comments here regularly (for free), and other commenters thoughtfully (and less so) critique my POV, which is good! Hopefully they do so in good faith and with some verifiable evidence. But I can be (and often am) wrong, of course, just like he and any of the other best essayists can be—especially if they don’t account for good-faith criticism and challenge.
it's just a very, very, weird practice
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?
I actually looked this up, and it's probably true, but I don't think we know enough yet about Israel's actual operational success to say this for certain!!
I think given the general success thus far, it can’t be understated how much that success owes to an “ecosystemic” competency — an entire military complex that is competently run by a relatively competent democratic culture, as was your thesis.
However, that is what it takes to properly operate something like the F-35. You only get astounding results with a weapon like that — like the zero fighter jet losses for a total decimation of air defenses — because you have a military that can get astounding results in the first place.
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.
The Israelis also have a history of sometimes heavily modifying the weapon systems--like F-35, A-18, etc. we sell them.
This presumably especially extends to ECM/ECCM, which would be especially relevant to taking out Iranian SAM batteries. But we'll likely never know to what extent Mossad stole Iranian IFF frequencies and other data.
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).
Was listening to a podcast by that Klotkin (sp) guy writing biographies of Stalin and he mentioned that Stalin tried to resign from the politburo multiple times and had to be persuaded multiple times by the people he ended up killing like 10 years later.
"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.
Yep! See the 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.
What I know is that the Bush administration set up an alternative intelligence pipeline within the Pentagon, because the results they were getting out of the traditional intelligence channels did not support the WMD narrative. (The intelligence agencies were getting accurate results, obviously.) This is not something you do when you're being fully honest.
Additionally there were weapons inspectors in Iraq who were also claiming that they couldn't find weapons. And Saddam seemed to be cooperating with them. But the US was already making expensive military preparations for invasion before any of this began, most of which were unlikely to be rolled back.
There was also a lot of extremely unpleasant political stuff going on: remember "Freedom Fries"? This stuff felt much more politically-motivated and jingoistic than you'd expect if the motivation was honest concern about a military attack.
"What people believe" is hard, because people can delude themselves. But I personally think George W. Bush was motivated by Saddam's assassination attempt on his father in the 1990s and came into office determined to kill Saddam Hussein. Cheney and others believed they could realign the middle east (and I guess they did, though maybe not in the way they wanted.) Still others thought it was the ticket to a second term (which it arguably was.) What's clear here is that *reasonable* people should not have gone to war based on the WMD evidence.
Good assessment, I think … but it falls considerably short of justifying the accusation of lying. I thought Saddam had WMDs because why else would he put up so much resistance to letting in the weapons inspectors. And yes, they did at the last minute let in weapons inspectors in a limited way, but not enough to really verify. The epistemology is very nuanced, and that's sufficient refutation of “Bush lied, people died,” which is not nuanced at all. I could say it was a lie… but, as you say, belief is difficult to judge.
My view is that when you're contemplating a war with maybe 500,000 civilian deaths on the line, plus tens of thousands of US soldiers lives' ruined, then the burden is on you to be certain. And the responsibility for being wrong also falls on you. And I mean responsibility in the old-fashioned sense, where people actually curse your name and do not seek to rehabilitate you.
If the best defense of Iraq is "well, they didn't due their due diligence, were wrong, overrode intelligence estimates, manufactured evidence, but we can't PROVE they didn't believe in all the wrong information they manufactured" then you're operating at a moral deficit that makes mere "lying" look saintly.
Oh, if the only reason for the war were WMDs, I would totally oppose it no matter how certain we were that he had them. That doesn't come close to being a good enough reason for war in my book.
I supported the war to liberate Iraqis from totalitarianism, along with other geostrategic goals. Whether he actually had WMDs is irrelevant anyway: his treaty obligation was to comply with the inspection regime. The actual presence of WMDs in Iraq doesn't impact the real case for war at all. If anything, the case for war is stronger when he didn't have them. Better to attack before he has them than after he gets them. But that's all kind of beside the point.
They knew the evidence for WMD were lies because they were ones manufacturing the lies and selling them. Many were fairly quickly debunked, but the debunking got a tiny fraction of press compared to volume of the lie and new one was always being put out to grab attention. They were determined to invade Iraq well before 9/11 and were really only focused on how to sell an invasion to a skeptical public.
To be determined to invade Iraq before 9/11 was reasonable, if that's true, which I don't know. From 1998 on, Iraq had violated treaty agreements to let weapons inspectors verify their disarmament. I still don't see evidence of any LIES, as opposed to sincere mistakes, regarding WMDs.
But I don't doubt that there was room to explain the case for war more effectively than they did, even when constrained by trying to appease the UN. It was a bit clumsy in some ways.
$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.
"Would the credible threat of American power be stronger if we lose all wars or if we win some?"
If I interpret what you're saying correctly, the purported benefit of winning this kind of war is to inform other potential adversaries that we're capable of winning and hence they should be intimidated by us. And while I'm certain that adversaries *were* impressed by the success of the initial invasion, I also think the lesson they drew from the subsequent occupation was "the US is not good at this, the people of the US are not patient about this, and they will be much less likely to support future occupations."
The second lesson they probably drew was that an insurgency can be highly successful in the long term, provided there isn't an alternative ethnic-majority government available that is also receiving loads of support from neighboring powers. I would imagine these lessons are very relevant to Iran right now.
It can be a disaster even if you win.
He addresses this in a footnote
Somehow I missed this:
"This is clearly false. The U.S. didn’t just overthrow Saddam with ease; it also defeated Sunni and Shia militias alike, and then defeated ISIS. The regime that the U.S. set up in Saddam’s wake is still in control in Iraq, and is still friendly to the U.S. By every conceivable past and present definition of what it means to “win” a war, the U.S. won the Iraq War. However, the victory didn’t benefit the U.S. strategically — it diminished America’s geopolitical standing and broke the global norm of non-aggression that the U.S. had championed since World War 2, paving the way for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So the Iraq War is a demonstration of the fact that victory in war isn’t always worth fighting the war in the first place. In contrast, the Afghanistan War was a loss for the U.S., but Al Qaeda was effectively destroyed, Osama bin Laden and all other 9/11 planners were captured or killed, and the Taliban were neutralized as a strategic threat."
Good!!! Sorry for not noticing that before. Guess you've got to read to the footnotes.
I'm not convinced, but this argument takes it to a higher level. As for "breaking the global norm of non-aggression," that norm is already in crisis, and for good reason. The norm was broken in Kosovo. We wanted to prevent a genocide, and therefore violated Serbia's sovereignty, and thereby set a precedent for Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine, and for who knows what remains to come. But should we have let the Serbs massacre the Kosovars?
The two principles that we wanted most to preserve as the bedrock of the liberal world order were "no aggression" and "no genocide." But those turn out to be contradictory, because sometimes you can't prevent genocide except by violating the sovereignty of a nation whose government wants to kill some of its people. And after 9/11, "no terrorism" was also a high priority, but that's also in tension with both the other principles, since preventing terrorism might sometimes be best served by massacring groups with a propensity for terrorism, and or by intervening in foreign states where you think terrorists are sheltering, against those states' will.
So no aggression, was the wrong principle. The forward strategy of freedom was a way out of this gordian knot, and it accomplished a good deal, before it was abandoned for very inadequate reasons. No doctrine took its place. We simply fell into a reactionary muddle.
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.
I agree that the size and power of the U.S. means that we're not a good yardstick to judge the military competence of Western democracies. The typical pattern is that we win almost trivially on the battlefield, and then our media and political class sets for us the goal of turning a foreign society into another Germany or Japan; when that doesn't happen, people declare it a "loss", even though that's not the kind of thing that any military on Earth will ever be able to do.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the
That's why Ukraine and Israel are more illuminating cases; in both cases, it's a country that really had to fight hard in order to overcome an adversary on the battlefield, rather than winning easily and then trying to "win the peace" by transforming another society.
>The typical pattern is that we win almost trivially on the battlefield, and then our media and political class sets for us the goal of turning a foreign society into another Germany or Japan; when that doesn't happen, people declare it a "loss", even though that's not the kind of thing that any military on Earth will ever be able to do.<
The media/political class didn't "set for us" the problem of nation-building; nation-building is a necessary (albeit chronologically-distant) component of invasion and occupation. War is an inherently political project, and like all political projects, you need to have a plan beyond beating the other guy. You need to be ready to occupy their homeland if need be, identify sympathetic indigenous elites (ideally with a social base) to staff a caretaker regime, avoid falling into local/regional pitfalls, among other things. In other words, nation-building is a necessary component of invasion if you don't want people to treat you like a modern-day Genghis Khan, pillaging and looting lands with little end in sight. Or if you don't want your war gains to disappear once you've packed up your forces and withdrawn.
I agree on the point about the political class and their sometimes absurd objectives. But isn’t it the political class that gets to set the political objectives when a democracy goes to war (especially when The People at large can’t be bothered to pay attention)? And don’t we have to judge questions of victory by reference to the objectives as set? Obviously those often shift in war, but it strikes me as a little questionable to take a look at the end result of a war, no matter how distantly related to the original objectives, and label it a win so long as it’s not an obvious comprehensive embarrassment. You seem to suggest that the ends-means disconnects in US war-making stems largely from in-stride mission creep toward statebuilding. You can make a case for that in Afghanistan, though my reading on that makes me doubt that many in the Bush admin in 2001 would have been willing to sign on to the punitive raid approach that so many subsequently touted. For Iraq, and VN before it, state transformation WAS the mission from the get-go, however questionable the underlying assumptions. I know you are not, BTW, making the “we won the tactical fights” argument as many in my world do (we did not in all cases, as it happens, any more than we did in Vietnam), but for those who might be so inclined it bears repeating that that question is irrelevant when judging strategic effectiveness. I think that’s what you have to do in calling wins and losses at this level. With respect to Israel and Ukraine, I completely agree - related idea that springs to mind (or maybe the same one differently stated) is that the wars of such countries are by no means wars of choice as are most of those the US has waged of late. The stakes are either immediately existential (Ukraine) or very directly linked to such stakes (Israel), which seems to offer far less room for the kinds of ends-means disconnects the US has so often experienced.
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)
Yeah, that's really interesting!
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 agree that the americans failed to achieve additional, secondary goals that were tacked on after the fact but i think its strange to call something a "failure" overall when all of its original aims were fulfilled because later people decided on additional, secondary goals which were not successfully achieved
i also dont understand why you think my argument, that the war essentially succeeded at all of its objectives about 20 years before it ended, fails to engage with your criticism that it lasted too long. you seem to be conflating "the war was a success" (which it was) with "the war was a good thing" (a more complicated question). but in the footnote to which i was responding noah draws this exact distinction vis a vis iraq, so i felt Afghanistan ought to receive the same treatment
lastly im not sure its reasonable to describe the american failure to establish a functional afghan state as a failure of the war; to me this seems like primarily a diplomatic objective which the military did an adequate job of supporting. but i concede that this is generally conceived of as part of the war
One of the things we spent a lot of time discussing during the 2000s was the "Pottery Barn rule", which translates to "If you break it, you buy it." (Note that Pottery Barn didn't actually enforce this rule at the time, but it's such a good phrase.)
I don't think this was some new rule that we invented after the Afghanistan invasion, I think it was a fairly long-standing principle with some exceptions, i.e., that if you completely destroy a government and replace it, you are then responsible for stabilizing the political situation and operating the country until that point. The obvious problem with Afghanistan is that the minute you accept that framing, you end up stuck there for many, many years.
But on a more practical note: we certainly did not destroy Al Queda during the early phases of the war. Most of the leadership made their way over the mountains and hid in Pakistan. Even Bin Laden survived for another 10 years unscathed! So (1) I don't think that anyone can say the war aims were achieved during the early phase of the war at all, if Bin Laden was just hiding out in Abbottabad for so many years. And (2) in some counterfactual where the US invades and then leaves quickly, does the US actually achieve their war aims? Or does Al Queda just come back into Afghanistan over the same mountains they exited by, necessitating a second invasion?
So I don't think you can say "the US tacked on new war goals," because those later goals were baked in as early as the plans to invade were made, or at least as early as Tora Bora.
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.
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.
In addition to their constant raiding of Athenian farmland.
Although I take my understanding from history, that period is so well dramatized in Mary Renault’s classic novel Last of the Wine. Do you know it.
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.
"What the West's cause be just in a war with China?" <-- Defense of allies against invasion.
Allies = Taiwan? (1)
Allies = Japan? (2)
Allies= Europe? (3)
(2), (3) => Just cause
(1) => Unclear. How do you justify preventing China from re-establishing control over a territory to which we recognize their sovereign right? What's the international law case for that?
um the fact that only about 10~ of Taiwanese people support reunification from China? Just because China thinks it's their "right" to control Taiwan, doesn't mean they get to do so. Just like Guatemala doesn't just get re-establish control Belize, or DJT doesn't get to take over Greenland, or Putin doesn't get to take over Ukraine.
Sovereignty is the most important for of governance. Without we inevitably get violence (see Why Nations Fail).
But the point is that Taiwan is not recognized as a sovereign state in international law. I wish they were, but they're not, so the formalization of their de facto Independence would legally be secession. And recognizing a right of secession creates a LOT of problems.
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 in a conventional war, the danger of out-of-control escalation to nuclear war is considered too great.
We need to stop pretending about Taiwan. Everyone was petrified of upsetting Putin, the US is not directly fighting the Chinese, in their backyard, over Taiwan.
Were we only pretending about West Germany?
Yes, that would have meant Western Europe was going up. The US was also a little more committed during the Cold War. If China heads on to Japan and South Korea, we might do something then.
The Biden administration waffled about on Ukraine because of fears of what the Russians would do. And we're going to come to blows with the Chinese in their backyard, about an island we don't say is independent? Seems like a farcical belief.
Taiwan is as independent as it says it is...
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.
Western democracies are pretty good at war! The US is great at war! I am not sure I agree that Leftists think we're bad at war though, I've met plenty that think we're TOO GOOD at war and spend too much. The 'West is bad at war' critique feels far more Rightist than Leftist from my vantage point.
As to why, my banal opinion is simply that the West has been richer than their opponents for a very long time. This explains most of it.
As for China: while I think the US is far weaker compared to China than it was against Japan or Germany, that does not mean we cannot confront China. Our goals relative to China are lesser: we just want them to stay away from Taiwan and not dominate their neighbors. That seems easier to achieve (and a more agreeable goal) than China's goals. Despite China's desire to take Taiwan, I also think that China's conservatism plays to our favor. Xi, and his successors, will prefer to survive over conquering a small island.
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.