The saying goes in football that a prevent defense invariably prevents your side from winning. This is true likewise when it comes to war. The limitations Democratic administrations have self-imposed on waging war loom as the greatest obstacle to the U.S winning them. Granted, the sometimes, but not always legitimate fear of nuclear escalation and tendentious media coverage have contributed to the reluctance of Democratic Party presidents since Lyndon Johnson even to define victory as an aim of war, much less achieve it. The United States lost the Vietnam War, however, owing largely to its feckless strategy of graduated escalation and bargaining aimed at convincing an implacable North Vietnamese regime that it could not win rather than striving to defeat it. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ exaggerated fear of Soviet and Chinese intervention accounted largely for their self-defeating restraint.
Consider too, how the Biden administration squandered Ukraine’s heroism and its initially much greater chance of victory, because of its neuralgic fear of Putin’s serial ultimatums. President Biden thus slow-walked military assistance to Ukraine, taking too long to provide too little, with too many restrictions. This lack of fortitude and foresight transformed a winnable conflict into a war of attrition heavily favoring Russia, with its exponentially larger resource base and a relentless Putin impervious to the domestic constraints that operate in open societies. That does not mean, of course, that Biden or any other commander-in-chief should slight the costs and risks of escalation, especially to the nuclear level, which Putin has repeatedly threated. It does mean more soberly balancing the plausibility of the threat of escalation versus the costs and risks of not escalating. Putin, the Iranian mullahs, and Xi Jinping have exploited the United States’ one-dimensional obsession with the perils of escalation to our strategic disadvantage. Take heed that virtually all Putin’s threats—including nuclear escalation—have proved hollow while having their intended effect of eroding the resolve of the Biden administration and most of the Western European members of NATO.
The unbridled fear of escalation has not exerted the same chilling effect on either the ends or means of the Axis of Tyranny—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—committed to achieving victory in war and prevented from it only by dint of the capability and credibility of the free world’s military deterrent. Nor has the inordinate fear of escalation always unhinged more resolute leadership in other open societies, including our own. For all the controversies over the two Iraq wars and the legitimate doubts about their prudence, the Republican administration of George H.W. Bush did win the first decisively on the battlefield. So too did the administration of George W. Bush provisionally win the second, until the Obama administration snatched defeat from jaws of victory by withdrawing American forces much too soon.
Contrast, too, the Biden administration’s serial timidity towards the multiple, massive provocations by Iran and its proxies—especially its relentless pressure on Israel to restrain its response to the atrocities of October 7, 2023 that would have spelled defeat—with Israel’s brilliantly waged and successful wars against Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, placing the Netanyahu government on the threshold of achieving smashing victories over all three. The IDF’s devastation of Iranian air defenses has rendered even the Iranian nuclear program vulnerable to a decisive blow. Israel accomplished this by defying every step of the way the Biden administration averse to the risk of a decisiveness, and skeptical about the legitimacy of Israel winning in the first place. The magnitude of Iran’s and its proxies’ defeat at the hands of Israel and the catastrophic losses Russia has suffered in their war against Ukraine also paved the way for the sudden collapse of the Assad regime that Iranians and Russians no longer could spare the capabilities to rescue. So victory in war remains desirable and possible for open societies even in the nuclear age and media environment, with the requisite preparation, determination, and inspired leadership.
The greatest and most dangerous constraints to the United States winning wars arise instead from the priorities and outlook of the progressive left regnant in the Democratic Party. Contrary to the gloom and doom of not only the liberal-left but the isolationist wing of the Republican party, the United States has ample resources to fight and win wars in vital geopolitical regions so long as we stop doing what we have been doing for too long: underfunding defense; overregulating the economy; vastly overspending on domestic programs wasteful at best and harmful at worst; neglecting our withering defense industrial base; tolerating a dysfunctional Pentagon’s sclerotic procurement process, which yields too few weapons, costing too much, and taking too long to produce, while stifling the innovation necessary to develop and deploy with a generous margin to spare, the weapons platforms essential for retaining American military pre-eminence.
The United States can easily afford to spend five percent of the GDP that is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve the type of defense posture that can deter wars and win them at the lowest possible cost and risk, when even the best deterrent inevitably fails. We also can successfully—albeit with greater difficulty—rethink our spending priorities; rebuild our military industrial complex; reform the Pentagon; and revitalize the private sector. The United States must banish once and for all every vestige of woke ideology so corrosive in many precincts, doubting not only our capacity to fight and win wars, but the moral legitimacy of winning itself.
Clausewitz reminds us that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Technology, the dynamics of domestic politics, the ebb and flow of moral sensibilities, all affect but do not determine whether the United States can continue to deter major wars, or fight and win wars when even the most robust deterrent sometimes fails. We have nothing and no one to blame but ourselves if we continue to ignore that there is indeed no substitute for victory and having the capability and political will to achieve it.
