What prevents Western powers, especially the United States, from winning wars? The answer is obvious, yet we refuse to learn and continue to lose. Our efforts are half-hearted from the beginning. We lack the will to win. We dream of winning wars nicely, neatly, and quickly, all the while cajoling merciless foes to embrace our lifestyle.
What does it take to win wars? Obviously, magnificent weaponry and showers of wealth are insufficient. What do our enemies have that we lack? An inherent grasp of now-neglected German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s encapsulation of what enables human beings to transform their epochs: die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (“The world as will and vision.”). Overcoming humanity’s cunning, cruelty, and turgid inertia requires superior tenacity (Durchhaltevermoegen) and a ruthlessly honest assessment of the situation confronting us.
We fail on both counts.
We enter conflicts as victims of our own blithe propaganda, unwilling to accept that our enemy’s vision may be more clear-sighted—and certainly more robust—than our own. We don’t even make a serious inquiry as to our enemy’s complexity and resourcefulness or our own vulnerabilities, from a “Gotcha!” media conditioned to turn a half-blind eye to a foe’s malevolence while amplifying our least stumbles, to political leaders led by politics alone.
Schopenhauer (or his relevant-right-now predecessor G.W.F. Hegel) may not have won the title of Mr. Congeniality, nor are the great pre-Nietzsche German Idealist philosophers easy to package for our collapsed attention spans, but two centuries on, they remain humanity’s most incisive critics of human activity, individual or collective, since the compilation of the Old Testament.
But aside from prose thick as tar and our fidgety impatience, there’s an even greater impediment to their study, a long-lingering post-World War II conviction that all of those German philosophers paved the way for Adolph Hitler (who had little time for visions other than his own). Well, hammer Nietzsche all you want—his superman nonsense did real damage and still does—and Martin Heidegger was an eager Nazi, but Hitler and his ilk did not pause amid the Holocaust to ask, “What would Immanuel Kant do?” Blaming Hegel for Nazism (or Marxism) is akin to blaming Abraham Lincoln for slavery.
Don’t spurn. Learn.
In the nineteenth century, American intellectual life—in that golden age from Ralph Waldo Emerson to William James—looked to Germany, and it was much to our benefit. The world wars left us willing to buy German automobiles, but unwilling to engage with some of humanity’s most-profound thought because it spoke the wrong language. (And what better excuse for a lazy undergraduate than “Hitler ate my homework?”)
In the late summer of 2004, I was in northern Iraq as a guest of the Kurdish government. During my stay, Marine General James Mattis led a tough, brilliantly capable force into Fallujah, a terrorist city-state. After a gritty week of fighting, Mattis was on the eve—literally—of a vital win.
The global media saved our shattered enemy. Desperate for career-making headlines, U.S. and international journalists reported insurgent propaganda as fact: We were killing innocents, we were attacking hospitals wantonly… In Washington, the blustering draft-dodgers who launched the war panicked, and President Bush the Younger ordered a halt in Fallujah. The Kurds with whom I sat watching developments were mortified: We all knew that our troops would have to go back in a matter of months, and that it would be an even more costly fight when we did.
The administration that sent our troops off to war didn’t really mean it.
Of course, we’d already lost Iraq before First Fallujah. We lost it before we even reached Baghdad, when an American division commander, better suited for politics than warfare, made swooning headlines by refusing to let his troops search a suspect mosque, preferring to have his Soldiers “take a knee.” He “showed respect for Islam.” And in doing so he guaranteed that mosques would become safe houses for insurgents, arms depots, and terrorist command cells. Thousands of our troops would die because we had demonstrated that we weren’t serious. The general, of course, was promoted and went on to grandstand in Afghanistan, too.
There is no prize of worth short of victory—which is always possible, if our will is stronger than the enemy’s and our analysis of the situation we face isn’t corrupted by fantasies of war on the cheap.
The United States should never go to war unless we mean to win, no matter the cost or complaint. But we will go into quagmires of our own concoction again and again, assured that the enemy we came to kill will like us once they have observed our virtues. We just need a couple of years to forget our latest embarrassments and their costs. The greatest superpower in history—measured by wealth and weaponry—is weak of will and blind to human reality.
Schopenhauer’s bones are rattling.
