America’s way of war isn’t working

Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column.

The U.S. has the most powerful military in human history. It also hasn’t won a war in more than 30 years.

Since 1945, the U.S. has fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran. Among them, only the 1991 Gulf War counts as a genuine success — and even that planted the seeds of future disaster. Meanwhile, the outcomes of the rest range from stalemate and defeat to strategic catastrophe, with Iran perhaps being the worst strategic blunder the U.S. has made post-World War II.

So, why does the strongest military on earth keep losing the wars it starts? The answer is not firepower — it’s America’s thinking.

The great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means. The military is a servant of political ends — one tool among many, and always in service of a clearly defined objective.

The U.S. has inverted this theory. Washington treats war not as a continuation of policy but as the failure of policy — a last resort that is reached when diplomacy collapses, often with no set political outcome in mind. The results are always the same: force deployed with no clear ends, and no answer to a question that should precede every decision to fight — what does winning actually look like?

U.S. President Donald Trump is the most extreme expression of this problem. In Iran, performative diplomacy was conducted by envoys who understood neither diplomacy nor nuclear physics. Then came a massive bombing campaign, premised on the magical belief that destruction produces capitulation — or, as the president put it this past weekend: We will either get a “good” deal or else we’ll “blow them to kingdom come.” But the end result will be neither.

We know this because while Trump may be the most radical manifestation of America’s faulty approach, he is hardly alone.

The U.S. way of war is built on three structural flaws. First, the ends and means are inverted: Rather than define a political objective and then select the appropriate instrument, Washington does the reverse. It reaches for the military tool and hopes the politics will follow. “Rolling Thunder” in Vietnam, “Shock and Awe” in Iraq, “Epic Fury” in Iran — each time the U.S. deployed overwhelming force in the belief that wholesale destruction will produce the desired outcome.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine speak during a press conference on U.S. military action in Iran. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

It never does.

The second flaw is overreach. U.S. wars are framed around the most expansive goals possible: regime change, civilizational transformation, establishing democracy, ending terrorism. But these aren’t objectives, they are fantasies; and military force is a poor instrument for achieving them.

The Gulf War succeeded precisely because then-President George H.W. Bush rejected this logic. His objective was narrow and defined: Reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and restore the status quo ante — nothing more. He resisted enormous pressure to march on Baghdad, and that restraint was not a weakness. It produced a genuine coalition, legitimacy and victory.

Years later in the Middle East, President George W. Bush — influenced by the very advisers who had pushed his father to go further — chose differently. The result? A decade of war, a strengthened Iran, and a far less stable region than before.

Finally, the third and most fundamental flaw is that those making the plans in Washington believe overwhelming force can compensate for asymmetric motivation. It cannot. America may have the force, but the other side has the will. The Vietcong, the Taliban, the Baathists, the Islamic Revolutionaries — they don’t budge. They have nowhere to go and nothing to lose.

When the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive in 1968, striking more than 100 cities simultaneously, the U.S. military called it a defeat for the enemy. And while that was tactically correct, strategically it was the other way around. The Tet Offensive broke U.S. public support and turned the course of the war. The Vietcong knew what they were fighting for, whereas Washington had long since lost that thread.

Decades later in Afghanistan, U.S. officials marveled at their own ingenuity — special forces on horseback, precision bombs and a regime toppled in mere weeks. Yet it was only days before the bombing started that Bush asked “who will run the country” once the Taliban was toppled — a fair question no one thought to ask before fueling the B-52s. The men on horseback were brilliant, but there was no theory as to what came next. Moreover, al Qaeda’s longtime leader Osama bin Laden remained at large.

Then came Iraq, with the war’s architects predicting a cakewalk in which U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. But the occupation disbanded the Iraqi army, sending hundreds of thousands of armed, humiliated men into the streets with no jobs or prospects. The insurgency that followed should have surprised no one, and yet it surprised everyone.

The logic collapsed even faster in Iran. The strategy, such as it was, amounted to this: Kill the country’s supreme leader and hope for a more moderate successor. According to the New York Times, the U.S. and Israel pinned their hopes on former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — no moderate himself — filling the vacuum. But they had no plan for how to install him, no plan for what to do in case of failure, and no plan to prevent Tehran from doing what everyone knew it would: close the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping other than its own.

The U.S. Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebrations. | Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images

At this point, America’s repeated failures are too numerous, committed across too many decades by too many different leaders — Republican and Democrat alike — to be dismissed as coincidences. They reflect a deeper flaw in the American way of war.

So, what does a better way look like?

The starting point must be more humility and less hubris. Yes, the U.S. military is extraordinary — as the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January underscored. No other intelligence service could have found bin Laden, and no other military could have snatched him from deep inside Pakistan without anyone noticing. But these astounding capabilities are not a substitute for clear thinking and sound strategy.

Tactical superiority no more guarantees strategic success than tactical weakness guarantees failure.

U.S. military leaders understood this long before Washington forgot it. In 1984, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — scarred by Vietnam and Lebanon — laid it out clearly in his framework for determining when and how the U.S. should use military force: clear vital interests, defined and achievable objectives, domestic and international support, overwhelming force applied to limited ends, a clear exit strategy, and war only as a last resort.

Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who served as a young officer in Vietnam and later as Weinberger’s military assistant, refined and sharpened these tenets a decade later. Both men had seen what happens when the U.S. fights without a strategy and were keen to avoid a repeat.

The Weinberger/Powell doctrine is still the right framework today. It isn’t pacifism, it’s strategic logic — logic that was successfully applied in the Gulf War. It’s also precisely what has been absent from every conflict since. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may have invoked Weinberger as the guide for America’s use of force in Iran, but he proceeded to ignore every one of its principles.

The U.S. keeps losing not because its military is weak but because it keeps choosing its instruments before defining its objectives. Given that, it’s no surprise the most powerful army in human history can’t win the wars it starts.