Military Superiority?

 

Military Superiority?

The US has lost the war against Iran. The loss is one more step, an important step, in the progressive weakening of America’s ranking in world power. It could have been predicted.

There is no doubt about the military loss.  The US unleashed terror upon Iranian cities and killed many people, including children. It failed, however, to achieve any of its war aims, even though President Trump kept shifting those aims. It did not confiscate Iran’s enriched uranium or stop the development of nuclear weapons. While it killed the top Iranian leaders, they were replaced by a set who are more intransigent. It did not inspire an anti-regime revolution. While it destroyed a great deal of military hardware, it hardly dented Iran’s ability to attack nearby targets. Iran is if anything stronger now than before the war. It will receive an infusion of funds from its unfrozen overseas assets. The blockade against its ports is lifted, permitting an increase in exports, including oil. It is not yet clear if it will charge tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The US is weaker than before the war. The war was costly to it financially, and it lost considerable weaponry. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz caused price inflation in the US and elsewhere, inflation which may gradually abate but will not reverse when oil from the region flows more reliably. The US lost respect and trust from both foes and ostensible allies, because of its unplanned and reckless adventurism. Of course, its stock of respect and trust was already low, but now it is approaching zero.

The loss of the war should come as no surprise.

The period since the end of the Second World War has been filled with wars in which the country with apparent military superiority lost—or at least was forced into a stalemate. The latest war is just one more.

 We can start a short review with the American wars. In Korea, the UN side was comprised mostly of American troops. They pushed the North Korean army almost to the northern border of the country in 1950, but then had to retreat back to the center of the Korean peninsula when Chinese forces entered the war. The US eventually agreed to a truce in which the Communists controlled the northern half. The US neither won nor lost the Korean War. In Vietnam, the US had been supporting the French for years, and became the main foreign military force in the country in 1954 as the French withdrew. The US gradually increased its commitment and stayed for 21 years, eventually leaving in ignominious defeat in 1975. In both the Korean and the Vietnamese conflicts, the US had by far the world’s largest economy, and the most powerful military force.

The US attacked Afghanistan in 2001, after the World Trade Center was destroyed and the Pentagon was attacked. The Americans maintained their military presence in the country for 20 years; when they finally left in 2021, the Taliban took power. The US attacked Iraq in 2003, and succeeded in deposing the regime. It never found weapons of mass destruction, however (the ostensible reason for the invasion). Nor did it succeed in resolving the civil conflicts that wracked the country, or in installing a democratic government. It withdrew its troops in 2011, none of its aims except the killing of Saddam Hussein attained.

Turn to other apparently strong military powers. Some fought anti-decolonization wars, and they all lost. In retrospect this may seem to have been inevitable—the post-war years were the era of decolonization—but at the time it did not appear foreordained.

France in particular fought to the bitter end. In the Second World War, Japan replaced France as the colonial power in South-East Asia, and when it was defeated, France intended to resume what it saw as its rightful control. It was not to be. After a violent decade, France suffered a devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in north-western Vietnam in 1954, and shortly thereafter withdrew from its Asian empire. (Of course, the war was not over for the Vietnamese; they endured 21 more years of the American war, before victory finally came). The French then tried to retain their North African empire—in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco—and failed. The fighting was most brutal in Algeria, but after eight years, the colonial power gave in, in 1962. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that France, which was defeated early in the Second World War by Germany, did not have the strength to maintain a world-wide empire. That little piece of wisdom was hidden from the French, however, who believed they were still a dominant power.

The huge British Empire was almost completely lost, although not only by military defeats. While weakened by the Second World War, Britain still had more military strength than any of its colonies, even than all of them together. No matter. India declared independence in 1949, and within a few years most of the other British holdings were gone. Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said, “I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." But he did just that. Other colonizers, including Portugal and the Netherlands, lost military conflicts with their possessions.

The Soviet Union and then Russia have had a series of similar experiences. The Soviets spent ten years trying to subdue Afghanistan, and had to withdraw, greatly weakened, in 1989. That war is likely one of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet state. In Ukraine, Russia easily took over Crimea in 2014, but then followed with an attack on the whole country in 2022, an attack which has been stymied for four years. In spite of the fact that President Trump has pretty much withdrawn American support for Ukraine, Russia with its vastly larger military has not been able to triumph.

This is not an exhaustive list. Each of the stories has its own complexities, its own histories.

When you put them all together, however, you would be blind not to see a common theme. By itself, military superiority does not win wars in the modern world.

Military superiority may even be a handicap, since it lulls leaders into thinking they can easily overcome a weaker opponent. Certainly the French did in Vietnam and North Africa. Today, Iran has far less military power than the US. Trump surely thought his forces would dominate the enemy. They didn’t.

Why not? A big part of the answer must be morale. In most of these conflicts, the apparently weaker side was fighting for its homeland, its people willing to make sacrifices.

US leaders should not be surprised to have lost the war with Iran. That war is just one more in a long list.

In all these conflicts, the danger to the apparently stronger country goes beyond merely losing the immediate war. History is filled with instances in which a great power exhausted itself in war, and thereby lost its dominance. After many centuries of warfare, Rome fell victim to invasions from the north. Britain came out of the Second World War heroically victorious but grievously weakened, and suffered the same post-war fate as France, sinking into a second-rate global status.

The US emerged from the Second World War victorious, powerful and dominant. In the next 81 years, it lost its hegemony in a series of five major wars, all against apparently weaker foes. The first, Korea, resulted in a stalemate, while the next four—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran—ended in losses. This is not the way to maintain global domination.

You would think that countries with significant military power would learn from this history. Perhaps some have, but so far there is no sign of Russia or the US having learned.

What lesson should we learn? What should democratic, reasonably decent countries do in response to regimes that have little regard for basic human rights, like the leaders in Iran, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq? War is not an effective strategy today, but that does not mean we should be passive. We have a good model in the response to apartheid-era South Africa. The West did not go to war against South Africa, but it isolated the country diplomatically, politically, culturally and economically. Eventually that isolation—imposed not by one dominant country but by a broad coalition of allies—worked. It might not always work, but we have one example where it did. Our experience since 1945 is that war doesn’t.

 

John Isbister

June 23, 2026