Has the US won a war since 1945?
To your question it depends on how you count “win”. The Gulf War was a win. Same with Panama, Grenada, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Was Korea a win? It wasn’t a loss as South Korea still exists. Afghanistan was a loss. China hasn’t taken over Taiwan largely due to the U.S. military’s deterrence. Is that a win? Wars in former Yugoslavia ended as a result of U.S. military intervention.
EDIT: The real “win” of the U.S. military comes from the deterrent effect it has on dissuading nations from attacking our allies and the accompanying amount of political power that comes from that fact. Early in the 2000s the South Korean President made a remark about the U.S. military. Rumsfeld announced that U.S. was considering withdrawing from the Korean peninsula. As a result there was panic selling in the Korean stock market. The Korean President backtracked on the remarks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/07/international/asia/south-...
Every potential opponent knows that the main US weakness is the unwillingness of the civilian population to commit to winning a prolonged war. If the opponent can just survive long enough, there is a high likelihood that Americans will grow tired of the casualties and the wasted billions and give up.
Subsequently, most potential enemies will be operating in the grey line between doing some damage to American interests while not so much that it pisses them off to really invade. Conversely, the US military does serve as a deterrent that heavily limits the actions of opponents from actualizing their own goals. Instead they need to engage in decades long asymmetric warfare while their population suffers without a end goal in sight. And even while USA might be unwilling to engage, it dosent stop other opponents like Israel with more political will from performing more direct actions.
What people don’t realize is that the US hasn’t actually fought under LSCO conditions since early Vietnam, as regardless of the scale of the deployment the ROI and thus the tactics that can be employed were mostly limited to LIC/PKO.
From Wikipedia:
India's loss to China in a brief Himalayan border war in October 1962, provided the New Delhi government impetus for developing nuclear weapons as a means of deterring potential Chinese aggression.
And of course Pakistan pursued nuclear weapons because India had them. This is how nuclear proliferation works.
Your thinking is dangerously naive. China hasn’t pursued India because of India’s nuclear deterrent.
US guarantees of security for Japan and Taiwan are partially due to an attempt to reduce nuclear proliferation.
US involvement has been critical to Taiwanese independence going all the way back to the 1950’s when China invaded ROC held islands.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis
The US deployed nuclear weapons to Taiwan during a crisis caused by China in the Taiwan Straights in the 1970’s.
* During the Cold War, the United States deployed nuclear weapons on Taiwan as part of the United States Taiwan Defense Command. In 1972, United States president Richard Nixon ordered nuclear weapons to be removed from Taiwan and this was implemented by 1974. Nuclear weapons are known to have been stored at Tainan Air Force Base.*
Forcing a regime change, society modernization (E.G. value women, everyone can vote, have a not-shit quality of life so there's something to stay at home and value), general reforms like that weren't something that was a clear goal for everyone involved. There was far too much corruption, in war profiteering among contractors, political institutions and figures, etc.
There was a great set of unfulfilled needs (IMO, offhand): a combination of engineers being free to do what _they_ think is necessary to build a stable and sustainable society, educators and a system of perpetuating that society in place once 'we' pull out, and politicians/diplomats to tackle and fix the social structure issues that aren't clearly objective and correctable with obvious actions, but more that require consensus and emotional support.
Oh, and a lot of funding in public, audited, bookkeeping that has verifiable results.
I'd really like to see the same domestically. The US GAO should produce reports for the average citizen, so they can understand where the funds going into the government come from (both per person, and broadly), and what value is derived from those funds.
It's really easy to say 'blow X up', 'end entitlement Y', 'shutdown Z'; but it's much more difficult to articulate preventative care, investment in the future, and improvement of the commons. Much like misinformation is easy and it's hard to spread the truth.
The last declared war the USA participated in was WWII.
I'll count most of the many conflicts the US military has engaged in since 1945 as wars in keeping with common usage.
Winning a war means achieving strategic objectives. It doesn't mean just blowing things up and killing people. Whether the failure comes from lack of military capability or failure of political will makes no difference when a civilian government controls the military, and sets the strategic (and sometimes tactical) objectives.
The four big conflicts since 1945 didn't go well. Korea drew to a stalemate. True, South Korea still exists, but so does North Korea. The American strategic objective -- preventing communist takeover of Korea -- was only partly achieved. After the war South Korea suffered under military rule and dictators until the late 1980s
The same strategic objective got us into Vietnam, a war we clearly lost. That war sapped political and public confidence to such a degree that the US allowed a horrible genocide to happen in Cambodia. Vietnam had to intervene.
The First Gulf War, a police action to protect Kuwait from invasion, went well except the US failed to follow through and disable Saddam Hussein's ability to fight another day, which led to a second war predicated on lies and no clear strategic objective. The USA did topple Hussein, but destroyed the country and its infrastructure in the process, and set the stage for ISIS and other terrorist groups still operating there.
Afghanistan didn't have clear strategic objectives, the justifications changed repeatedly. And the USA lost.
The Kosovo War ended by NATO action. The USA led by President Clinton intervened. Strategic objectives met, we can call that a victory.
Grenada and Panama were minor rescue operations and police actions; I hesitate to call those "wars." Panama was invaded to depose and arrest a single man, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA puppet who (like Saddam Hussein) turned on his former patrons. I think of those as Bay Of Pigs type small-scale actions, except the US succeeded in Grenada and Panama.
You left out Somalia, another UN/USA operation that ended with the US evacuating.
I agree that a lot of potential conflicts -- Taiwan, Iran, North Korea -- have not erupted because the United States does have tremendous military capability, reaching around the world, and that has a real and effective deterrent effect on nation states. It has not deterred Russia, though. It has less value deterring terrorists and non-state actors such as ISIS, the Taliban, Houthi rebels, communist rebels in the Philippines, and Mexican drug cartels.
In my opinion it does make a difference when the discussion started with the article in question. The U.S. military definitely can obliterate any organized state power (possible exception is China) in the world today.
I should note that I was not attempting to give an exhaustive list of “wars” the U.S. has fought since 1945.
I don’t see how Operation Just Cause does not qualify for a war. A country was invaded and its government replaced. That’s a war. I’m from the Canal Zone and at least one former PDF member I spoke with considered it a war.
The US doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest
Its victory over Japan in WW2 was a foregone conclusion due to sheer industrial output. There is literally nothing Japan could have done to avoid being utterly defeated, it was but a matter of time even without the nukes. The US would just keep spamming war materiel and personnel at the enemy until the enemy was destroyed. It's truly mind boggling the scale of it.
Now factor in the fact that America is basically asleep right now. More or less deindustrialized, in world boss mode, it views itself as the highly paid managers of the other shithole nations where the cheap manufacturing actually occurs. And it still projects absurd amounts of power by just sending carrier groups to random places. Imagine what's going to happen once they start reindustrializing.
They don't even need to win anything, they have people like the CIA and NSA making sure that winning is not even necessary to begin with. You don't need to actually get americans killed if you can get your enemies to kill each other by destabilizing their nations.
In at least 70% of the major conflicts since then, US has absolutely failed in almost every respect in terms of reforming the countries they go to war with, and in bringing about any objective benefits for others or for themselves.
But, until now the deterrent effect of the US military just existing has undoubtedly saved many countries from being overrun by a neighboring thug with despotic tendencies. It is trivial to think of several plausible scenarios for the last 80 years that are far darker than what actually transpired. So that deterrent effect is by far the most important one, and an excellent reason for the US military to remain strong as we move into the future.
International law is weird.
Regardless of international law (which is for the most part, not particularly effective at changing the behavior of nations) war has been waged throughout the 20th century and into the 21st
But the bigger question might be, how many wars has NATO prevented since WWII? I believe the answer is: a lot.
has humanity ever won in wars?