Can the US win wars anymore?
Michael Rubin
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It has now been 50 years since the last American military unit left Vietnam, ending what, at the time, was America’s longest war.
Two years later, Hubert van Es snapped the iconic photo of dozens of South Vietnamese scrambling to board an American helicopter as Communist forces closed in on the city. That snapshot became iconic of America’s defeat in the Vietnam War. For 46 years, it would symbolize American humiliation until images of the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul’s international airport superseded it.
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The irony of both wars was that the United States was winning when the White House and Congress pulled the carpet out from underneath American forces. North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive failed. What American politicians did not understand at the time was that Americans and their South Vietnamese allies had the Viet Cong on the ropes. When national security adviser Henry Kissinger agreed to withdraw U.S. forces, North Vietnam was on the verge of collapse. Kissinger and Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In a war of attrition, the Viet Cong demonstrated that Americans no longer had stamina.
The same was true in Afghanistan. Initial U.S. efforts at nation-building were ill-advised, but once the Pentagon scaled back its mission, it found its sweet spot. In the years prior to the American withdrawal, fewer Americans died each year in combat than those killed in Washington, D.C., automobile accidents. The small U.S. deployment to Afghanistan cost little more than the U.S. presence in Korea and Japan but managed to keep the Taliban out of every provincial capital and Kabul.
But Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden had no will to win. When George W. Bush announced the surge in Iraq, he spoke of victory but set no timeline. Obama did the opposite at his December 2009 West Point address. The message to the Taliban was clear: American strategic patience was limited. Trump and Biden repeated that message, promising a withdrawal regardless of victory. The Taliban were never able to defeat the United States in Afghanistan on their own; they simply waited until American public opinion turned and the White House gave up.
Nor was Iraq any different. Bush’s willingness to defy public opinion and fight sent shock waves through the insurgency. Faced with American resolve, many terror groups and Iranian-backed militias simply stood down until, for reasons of both ideology and politics, Obama reversed course and withdrew U.S. forces.
Today, the debate about Ukraine will shape efforts to select a new House speaker. There may be no American troops in the country, but America’s public conversation about aiding the beleaguered democracy matters. Wavering public support, especially among Republicans, encourages the Kremlin to believe that no matter how bad its battlefield losses, it can outlast Ukraine.
Much of the disagreement about U.S. support for Ukraine is honest. Some fear that if Ukraine expels Russia from its territory, Russian President Vladimir Putin might resort to nuclear weapons. That is a legitimate concern, but to stand down and signal that nuclear-armed states can act with impunity against their neighbors would invite more aggression.
Others, such as the Marathon Initiative’s Elbridge Colby, argue that support for Ukraine distracts from the greater imperative of countering China. As my colleague Marc Thiessen notes, this is a false choice. Not only can the U.S. counter both Russia and China, but it is also naive to believe that the same voices who counsel abandoning Ukraine to Russia would not likewise argue that Taiwan’s fate is not an American interest.
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The lack of strategic patience has a real cost, not only upon allies increasingly reticent about America’s loyalty and resolve but upon U.S. security itself. Many traditional Republicans might still lionize President Ronald Reagan, but it was his decision to withdraw from Lebanon under fire that inspired al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden to believe that terrorism could defeat America. As revisionists, reactionaries, and rogues challenge the rules-based order, a sense that Americans do not value freedom enough to fight for it risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.