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Since 1945, how often have the democracies won a war? I don’t mean a metaphorical one like the Cold War, whose outcome was, obviously, a triumph for the West. I mean a kinetic, boots-on-the-ground, shooting war.
There have been a couple of occasions: the Falklands War in 1982 and the first Gulf War in 1991. The Falklands was about Britain showing the world it could still project power across the globe, and had the spine to stand up for even a mere handful of its remotest citizens. It had no wider strategic significance. The American-led defeat of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait succeeded because of its narrow objectives and its clear path to withdrawal after its military aims had been accomplished.
But the history of our bigger conflicts has largely been one of failure. The Korean War resulted in stalemate, Vietnam ended in abject defeat, Afghanistan in humiliating withdrawal. Judgments on the second Gulf War are more complicated. Although it did accomplish regime change by the removal of Saddam Hussein, history deems it to have been a failure,too: its justification (weapons of mass destruction) exposed as either an intelligence failure or an outright deception, its military success overshadowed by the failure to win the peace.
The term “asymmetric warfare” is commonly used to describe wars in which conventional military techniques are confounded by irregular forces and non-state actors such as guerillas or terrorists. Wars between democracies and authoritarian states are asymmetric too, in a different way. Democratic leaders require popular consent. Dictators do not. They have the luxury of waiting for a democracy’s initial public consensus in support of a war to fray and ultimately turn hostile. When Western leaders make bold commitments to defend freedom, the promise of the rhetoric seldom outlasts the reality of the fighting.
In his celebrated inaugural address, John F Kennedy famously declared that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty”. Kennedy’s soaring cadences are now seen as the zenith of mid-century American hubris. His pledge did not survive the swamps of Vietnam. So bitter had domestic opposition to that war become that Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson was effectively driven from office by his own party in the New Hampshire primary of 1968. The unlovely but skilful Richard Nixon secured a peace agreement that the North Vietnamese, swift to take advantage of America’s distraction over Watergate, shamelessly violated. By 1975, South Vietnam was no more.
After 9/11, George W Bush received cascading standing ovations, from both sides of the aisle, when he promised Congress a multi-generational war against Islamist terrorism. Yet it was not long before public opinion soured of Middle Eastern deployments as surely as, a generation earlier, it had against wars in South-East Asia. Today, the Taliban in Afghanistan have never been stronger, the government of Iraq is much weaker. Meanwhile, Iran and its surrogates are ever more belligerent.
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The dictators know this. Be in no doubt that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the ayatollahs of the Iranian theocracy, are close students of history. They can confidently factor into their strategic calculations the fickleness of Western public opinion, its unwillingness to persevere through a long struggle, and the variability of the electoral cycle. For the United States, we must add isolationism, more dangerously resurgent now than at any time since the 1920s.
We can be sure that such considerations are emboldening Putin as he contemplates the future course of his war against Ukraine. He will, in particular, be mindful of four things.
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