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New Delhi: Over the past several decades, the US has cultivated a mythology of military competence and moral clarity in its innumerable involvements in global conflicts. Yet, even a cursory examination of these engagements reveals a pattern less of strategic brilliance than of inconsistency, overreach, and recurring failure to translate battlefield successes into lasting political outcomes.   

This reflects a persistent tendency in which the US underestimates its adversaries – like in Iran today – misreads complex local contexts, and, above all, grossly overestimates the universal appeal of American ideals abroad. Such a pattern is not merely a recurring miscalculation, but a structural blindness in which military superiority substitutes for political understanding, spawning predictable cycles of intervention, disruption, and unresolved conflict.

 Taken together, these patterns suggest that from its earliest internal four-year upheaval in the Civil War (1861-1865) to its current entanglements in the Middle East, the US’s record of military interventions reflects a nation repeatedly stumbling into conflicts it poorly understands and exiting them with outcomes far murkier than its rhetoric is ever willing to admit.

The Civil War itself – often framed as a defining moral victory for the ‘good side’ – exposed profound weaknesses in military leadership, planning, and national cohesion. The Union, under Abraham Lincoln, ultimately prevailed, but only after staggering casualties and years of tactical blundering. 

Online research has revealed that in its initial years, Union generals were notoriously ineffective and frequently replaced as the fighting persisted. Victory did not come decisively, but was ground out over time through sustained pressure, relentless attrition that gradually wore the Confederate Army down. It was a brutal lesson that even in a war fought on home soil, the US required years to align its political goals with effective military execution. 

Fast forward to the 20th century, and the narrative of US competence often rests heavily on the two World Wars; though even here the story is as much reactive and performative as it is heroic, bolstered by exaggerated myth making and Hollywood movie splendour. It’s often overlooked that in the case of World War I, the US did not so much rush into the conflict as drift into it – after 983 days of watching from the sidelines.

It entered the war in April 1917, triggered primarily by Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which threatened American commercial and passenger shipping in the Atlantic. This was further compounded by the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917, in which Germany proposed a military alliance with Mexico against the US and together, these developments shifted American public and political opinion decisively against Berlin.

Thereafter, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on the grounds of “making the world safe for democracy,” framing US entry as a high-sounding moral and strategic necessity and one not driven by territorial ambition. The US thus entered the global conflict in its final phase, when exhaustion on both sides had already set in, and the war’s outcome was increasingly being shaped by attrition rather than manoeuvre, much akin to the American Civil War in the previous century.

The American Expeditionary Forces under General John J. Pershing arrived in Europe in mid-1917 as a largely untested mass army, still improvising doctrine, logistics, and combined-arms coordination in real time, even as the fighting was entering its most intense phase of attritional warfare. American manpower, industrial capacity, and materiel supply provided crucial reinforcement to an exhausted Allied war machine, contributing significantly to the final outcome of European victory.

 However, the limits of the US in translating its late military entry into durable strategic outcomes became more apparent in the post-war political settlement. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, presented in January 1918 as a blueprint for a settlement based on self-determination and collective security, were significantly diluted at the subsequent Peace Conference in Versailles, where European interests and balance-of-power politics reasserted themselves. Ultimately, the US failed in securing its vision for the post-war order, and the resulting punitive and patently unfair settlement did not stabilise Europe, but ended up contributing to circumstances that eventually culminated in World War II. 

In the inter-war period that followed, even as tensions escalated through the 1930s with the rise of revisionist powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – seeking to overturn the post-war order, the US retreated into a posture of strategic detachment, guided by domestic priorities and a reluctance to re-engage in European power politics. This tendency has re-emerged in contemporary US debates, including under President Donald Trump, over burden-sharing and alliance commitments.

When World War II erupted in 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland and the subsequent collapse of European stability, the US remained outside the conflict, despite repeated entreaties from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others, and growing alarm over the Axis powers’ untrammelled occupation of large parts of Europe.

This is the first flag raising on the top of Mt. Suribachi. The famous flag-raising photo was taken when the second flag was put up later that day. This photo was taken by Leatherneck’s Lou Lowery. Photo: Public domain.

It was only the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 that forced the US entry into the war, nearly 828 days after its outbreak in September 1939. However, once engaged, the US rapidly transformed the scale of the conflict, with its vast military-industrial base and exceptional capacity to mobilise resources, thereby enabling the projection of overwhelming force across multiple theatres of war in Europe and Asia. But this success should in no way be mistaken for strategic foresight, for – as in World War I – US entry was reactive rather than pre-emptive, driven less by anticipation than by necessity imposed by events.

This recurring pattern of delayed entry into conflict theatres, followed by overwhelming military mobilisation, is increasingly reflected in strains within the transatlantic security order itself. In the post–World War II era, the US was central to constructing a durable alliance framework through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), designed to anchor European security and ensure strategic cohesion across the Atlantic. Yet today, that architecture is under visible strain, as diverging threat perceptions, uneven burden-sharing, and periodic political friction – particularly under President Donald Trump – have eroded NATO’s internal coherence and raised questions about its long-term strategic unity.

These tensions are not confined to Europe. They are mirrored in contemporary West Asian dynamics, particularly the evolving US-Israel-Iran confrontation. As escalation pressures mount around Iran and the wider Gulf theatre, including blockading of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, demands from Washington for broader allied alignment have repeatedly run afoul of European willingness to be drawn into a conflict framework it neither initiated nor strategically shaped. European governments, in turn, have displayed caution, resisting entanglement in an escalation cycle driven primarily by US-Israel threat perceptions.

Meanwhile, beyond NATO, in the early Cold War period, the US increasingly assumed the role of a self-appointed global policeman – intervening far beyond its immediate sphere, mostly without a clear or achievable political end state.

This dynamic was first clearly visible in the Korean War (1950-53), where intervention under the banner of the United Nations, framed as a defence of freedom, ended not in victory but in stalemate. The result was a permanently divided peninsula and the emergence of North Korea as a militarised, nuclear-armed state that remains a persistent and unpredictable challenge today. In effect, US military force produced not resolution but enduring division on the Korean peninsula, setting a pattern in which wars were concluded without stable political outcomes.

 This pattern became even more pronounced in Vietnam, where US involvement stretched across nearly two decades, culminating in large-scale combat operations from 1965 and ending with withdrawal in 1973 following the Paris Peace Accords. Driven by Cold War anti-communist ideology and the logic of containment – particularly the domino theory, which held that the fall of one state would trigger a cascading regional collapse – Washington entered a conflict it neither fully understood, nor could realistically control.

The US’s superior firepower and technological advantage in this war proved largely ineffective against a determined adversary fighting a protracted asymmetric war on its own terms, much like Iran presently. The US measured success in body counts and territory temporarily held while its opponents measured it in endurance, time, and political will.

But the US’s eventual withdrawal marked not only a military setback, but also a strategic and political failure, exposing the gap between official narratives and battlefield realities. Vietnam, essentially, underscored a central lesson for the US: overwhelming force cannot compensate for strategic incoherence, and intervention without a clear, achievable end state invites failure, once again, akin to the situation in Iran in recent weeks.

Amazingly, similar logic resurfaced in the ‘shock and awe’ Iraq War in 2003, with the invasion justified by claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction – assertions that later proved unfounded, exposing a deeply flawed intelligence and decision-making process. While the case for war was constructed primarily in Washington and London, it was reinforced by a wider ecosystem of strategic advocacy that favoured regime change in Iraq.

Among these votaries were long-standing Israeli security concerns over Iraq’s military potential and its past hostility towards Tel Aviv. These aligned with broader arguments within sections of the U.S. policy establishment that removing Saddam Hussein would reshape the regional balance, but  translating these assumptions into war revealed a profound failure of planning.

The rapid toppling of Saddam Hussein soon after, created a power vacuum that unleashed sectarian violence, insurgency, and wider regional instability – outcomes that ran counter to naive US expectations of a controlled transition to order. The US formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011 after eight years, although a limited residual presence persisted for years thereafter. But, the broader consequences of its intervention continued to unfold long after the drawdown and far from stabilising the region, the US’s intervention fractured the country internally, altering regional dynamics forever in a myriad ways.

Military intervention in Afghanistan, alongside Iraq, which together spanned two decades until 2021, stands as one of the most damming of all consequential US overseas military campaigns, ending almost exactly where it began: with the Taliban back in power in Kabul. Initial US and NATO successes after 2001, in dismantling al-Qaeda’s base following the 9/11 attacks, soon gave way to mission creep, as Washington attempted to rebuild a nation with a limited understanding of its complex tribal, social, and political fabric.

A Taliban fighter stands guard near the site where Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a U.S. strike over the weekend, in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

For over a decade and a half, the Afghan war lurched uncontrollably forward, sustained more by inertia than by clear purpose, and when the final withdrawal came, it was chaotic and deeply symbolic of failure. In the end, two decades of effort, countless loss of lives and enormous expenditure culminated in Afghanistan returning to Taliban rule, sending shockwaves across the world and raising fundamental questions about what the US had actually achieved.

The outcome in Afghanistan is not an isolated case for the US, but part of a longer historical pattern, reinforced by a trail of smaller or “limited” interventions. Beginning with the US role in the 1900-01 Boxer Rebellion – a multinational expedition that suppressed anti-foreign unrest in China but deepened resentment toward external interference – the template was set early: temporary tactical successes followed by strategic shallowness.

The 1990-91 Gulf War, for instance, expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait with overwhelming force, yet stopped short of resolving the underlying political problem, leaving Saddam Hussein in power and requiring years of containment followed by eventual re-intervention.

In Somalia (1992-94), a humanitarian mission quickly descended into urban combat, ending in a hasty withdrawal after the Battle of Mogadishu and exposing the limits of force without  political clarity, but providing grist to Hollywood film makers. The Kosovo intervention in 1999, driven primarily by airpower to halt ethnic violence, too succeeded in ending immediate atrocities, but brought about only a fragile and contested settlement. And, in Libya (2011), the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi was followed not by consolidation but by state collapse and prolonged civil war that spluttered along.

Undoubtedly, the US possesses unmatched military capabilities, but such power alone is not a measure of strategic success. In the end, it has too often failed to translate battlefield success into durable political outcomes, even when not defeated outright or militarily humbled.

Each of its major conflicts – including that with Iran – echoes a familiar arc: initial overconfidence, flawed assumptions in execution, and a delayed reckoning with constraints that were visible to most others from the outset. And, until this pattern is meaningfully broken, the US mythology of competence will remain just that – a powerful military narrative masking repeated strategic failure beneath cinematic displays of overwhelming force.

© The Wire