Ronald Reagan’s succinct description of how he wished the Cold War to end embodied the old common sense of American foreign policy. Long before he became president, “we win, and they lose” had ceased to be the animating goal of American strategy as understood in the university, the media, and even the government itself, which is why his 1977 comment to his advisor Richard Allen, when it became publicly known, was reported as a gaffe, a blunder revealing the speaker’s lack of sophistication.
Nevertheless, Reagan assembled an administration that, though never without internal dissent and high-level turmoil, set out to pursue a Cold War victory. Partly as a result of that strategy, no doubt, the United States emerged intact and powerful from the conflict, without having to fight a hot war with the Soviet Union. As Harry V. Jaffa used to say, we won the Cold War somewhat as a heavyweight fighter wins the match when his opponent, upon entering the ring, drops dead of a heart attack.
Hence the end of the Cold War led not to strategic clarity but to greater confusion about war and peace. Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama sent American forces abroad to fight for a “new world order,” “democratic enlargement,” “democratic transformation,” and the end of tyranny on earth. Our soldiers, sailors, and airmen returned, if they were fortunate enough to return, empty-handed.
In 2016, to his credit, Donald Trump campaigned against the “forever wars,” spawned similarly by the preceding Republican and Democratic administrations. Prolonged, indecisive conflicts were a familiar, deplorable part of the Cold War already—think Korea (three years, ending in an armistice and division of the country), and especially Vietnam (eight to 19 years or more, depending on how you count, ending in defeat).
The post-Cold War examples are comparable; even the U.S. war in Iraq, fought in two parts, Operation Desert Storm in 1991 (aerial and naval bombardment of about a month, followed by a ground war of four days), and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, a quick victory followed by a shambolic occupation, civil war, and “insurgencies” leading to the withdrawal of U.S. troops, which commenced in 2008 but did not conclude until 2011 under President Obama.
The Iraq nightmare thus consumed six to eight years, again depending on how and what you count. In Afghanistan the U.S. war lasted far longer. It began, after 9/11, in 2001 and ended with the Biden Administration’s disastrous withdrawal of remaining American and allied forces in 2021—20 years in all, slightly longer than the Vietnam war.
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The “forever” wars are somewhat misnamed. If they lasted forever, it sure was a short forever. The Peloponnesian War, by contrast, lasted almost 30 years. The Hundred Years’ War took 116, according to most historians. But Sparta’s victory was clear and decisive, as was Athens’s defeat. It was the lack of victory, the drift and futility of so many recent American wars, that earned the MAGA movement’s dismay and disillusionment.
In his new war against Iran, Trump applies the lessons he’s learned from these unhappy recent wars. He has his eye on the prize—victory—which he orders to be pursued relentlessly until it is secured. With his Israeli allies, he compassed the death of Ayatollah Khamenei and his senior advisors and commanders in the first minutes of the war.
Yet he was careful to suggest that the hostilities would come to an end soon—four or five weeks, max. In fact, to the American public and the hapless British prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump was soon boasting that the war would soon, and inevitably, be won; that, come to think of it, it was already won; that in fact it had been won in the first day of combat. At least he avoided the word “endgame.”
It’s hard not to sympathize with his salesmanship and spiritedness. So many of the media and political commentators hope history repeats itself because their own limited stock of historical wisdom soon exhausts itself. They assume Americans will recycle the mistakes of Vietnam and Iraq, as if we cannot think of new mistakes to make. “Regime change” failed there and elsewhere, but commentators don’t reflect that it succeeded in postwar Germany and Japan. Different men and different measures, under different circumstances, may yield very different results. The clamor to hear Trump’s vision of how and when the war will end is to be expected, though still regretted, in a world so little acquainted with military history, and with the inscrutabilities of fortune. “General Washington, when will the Revolutionary War finally be over?” (It dragged on for eight years, you know.)
Still, President Trump must himself be careful not to oversell the war or to downplay its risks. The United States is in the enviable position of starting almost all of its modern wars with early, overwhelming triumphs mostly due to our systemic advantages in technology, wealth, and military coordination. Remember shock and awe? Such dazzling beginnings do not guarantee victories, or even honorable endings, to our wars, as Trump and his political movement know all too well.
