Empire of Defeat: Growing Old in a World Growing Even Older

Honestly, it’s hard to believe that, once upon a distant time, I was born into an America still fighting a world war. No, it wasn’t World War I! I’m not quite that old! My actual birthdate was July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing. And though it ended in August 1945, in some strange sense, American-style war has never truly ended. Stranger yet, despite my country’s endless warmaking since then, the global war that concluded more than 80 years ago was the last truly victorious one this country has fought.

In the decades since 1945, the U.S. did indeed emerge as the world’s greatest power (along with the Soviet Union, which, of course, collapsed in 1991). And like all great powers, it did indeed fight endless wars. Remember, there was Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (to mention only the most obvious of the conflicts my country hasn’t been able to keep out of since 1945). And even now, the U.S. is still fighting (typically ineffectively) in Somalia (of all places!) and — with more to come after the U.S. midterm elections — Iran. (And I’m not even mentioning past, more minor conflicts in places like Panama or Libya.)

But here’s the strange thing and something I believe to be unique for a great power over the course of its rise and — as the very existence of Donald Trump as president of the United States (twice!) suggests — decline (not to say fall): in not a single one of those wars did my country even come close to winning. They were all functionally defeats (though the Korean War has always been seen, in sports terms, as a kind of a tie, since that peninsula ended up divided between North and South Korea).

And consider that ongoing reality (think: Iran today) all too historically strange, if not simply inexplicable, for a great imperial power. In short, the single most powerful country on the planet couldn’t win a single war — not one! — against distinctly lesser powers!

And then, of course, a near-majority of the American people elected Donald Trump who promised, at least the first time around, to keep us out of such wars (which he did then, except for some unsuccessful combat in Syria), only to launch a significant war against Iran the second time around that — shock! shock! — has turned out just as well as all the other wars I’ve mentioned. In short, you explain it (I can’t), but the greatest power on this planet, which for endless decades has poured literally trillions of dollars into its military and, in just the next fiscal year, is planning to add at least another $1.5 trillion to the Pentagon’s wildly out-of-control budget (and that figure may, in the end, prove a gross underestimate), unbelievably — or do I mean all too believably? — simply hasn’t won a war since the one I was born into in 1944 (and that’s not even to mention some of its other unsuccessful skirmishes in those years). Phew! No sentence can truly hold the full militarized mess this country has created over and over again in those decades.

Worse yet, as Trump’s Iran War suggests, its leadership seems to learn absolutely nothing from that reality — or do I mean surreality?

Peace (of a Sort) as the Imperial Project of the Postmodern Moment

In a way, when you think about it (which we Americans seldom do), it simply couldn’t be stranger, could it?

I doubt there has ever been a great imperial power that, since its full-scale rise, despite possessing almost unparalleled military might, has simply never won a war it’s launched or become engaged in. Not a single one! And I have yet to see a reasonable explanation for that. On the other hand, the competitive great power that rose with the United States, the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991, a victory of sorts, just not on the battlefield. And the successor power to it, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, seems to be repeating the all-American war-making experience in a striking fashion with his disastrous and, almost five years later, still unending (not to say distinctly unsuccessful) war in Ukraine.

You might then wonder whether the leadership of the rising imperial power of this moment, China, might be the very first power to actually learn a lesson from all this. After all, to give credit where it’s due, its leaders seem to have grasped the American and Russian warring experiences and so, except for a border war with Vietnam in 1979 in the earliest moments of its rise and skirmishes with India along the borderlands of those two countries in 2020-2021, it has distinctly avoided war-making (and so war-losing or war-tying) in what has become the usual modern imperial fashion on this planet.

In a sense, you could say that, by taking global control of much of the production and sale of green energy (and the equipment to produce it) on this warming planet of ours, it has turned war on its head and made peace (of a sort) the imperial project of the postmodern moment. And that should be particularly striking, since it seems, historically speaking, as if we humans have always had an urge to make war and there has probably never been a moment in modern times (except perhaps right after World War II) when this planet was genuinely warless (which certainly tells you something about us as a species).

Even now, after all, in addition to the Russian war in Ukraine and the U.S. one against Iran, there is also the on-again-off-again Israeli war in Gaza, the civil war in Somalia, and the struggle between the Houthis in Yemen and the Saudis, among other seemingly endless conflicts.

And don’t forget that war itself has become a distinctly more dangerous phenomenon in our time. After all, on a planet that, at least in terms of livability, is now going down, down, down in a climate-change version of reality that creates its own war-wounded, war-making (whether a winning or losing proposition for the powers that be), whether in Gaza (Israel), Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Iran (the U.S.), Ukraine (Russia), or Somalia (the U.S. again), also pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion. As a result, in helping to overheat this planet, war is distinctly proving a losing matter in a new fashion for the rest of us on this ever more embattled world of ours.

And keep in mind, of course, that, in the age of Donald Trump, the U.S. military is “the largest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases worldwide,” only adding immeasurably to what losing now means in wartime.

Don’t you think it’s odd that the victorious history of the United States — of the country that, in some sense, ruled (or at least oversaw) much of the world for so long — is never also imagined as a distinctive history of defeat? In fact, at this very moment, it might be all too reasonable to consider my country, the one that has elected Donald Trump president (twice!), as the classic empire of defeat.