How The USA Aided Ukraine Explains A Great Deal

Why The US Is The Greatest Battle-Winning, War-Losing Force in History

Hi All,

Ok, I’ve been preparing this piece on the very detailed and fascinating New York Times article on US aid to Ukraine, and its become rather wordy. As such, I’m dividing it up into two parts. This first part provides an intellectual introduction to the subject and the first engagement with the NY Times piece. Part 2 will come in a few days.

Sometimes historical developments are too shocking to fully comprehend while they are happening. Things occur that make little sense and as such they are often not faced directly and dissected in the way that they deserve. That is certainly the situation with the period of US-dominance globally and how America approached war. The United States since 1945 has arguably been the greatest hegemon in the history of the world. It possessed between one half (at the end of World War II) to a quarter of the world’s economic output. It was the globe’s technology leader—with by far the best equipped and most capable military, and was able to project force around the world in a way that no power before could even dream. It even had enormous soft power—as its culture and language became ubiquitous.

And the USA proceeded to lose almost every war that it chose to fight during this period of dominance. With the one exception of the First Gulf War (1991-1992), when the US has deployed its military power it has almost always failed to achieve anything like its strategic/political objectives. Its wars have ended either ignominiously with scenes of total failure (See Saigon and Kabul), or at best partial success (Korea). Indeed the greater the US application of force, the more likely the war would be a disaster—such as in Vietnam and the War on Terror.

US war-winning strategies in action—Saigon 1975 (right) and Kabul 2022 (left)

The fact that the US has so disastrously misused and frittered away its period of dominance deserves deep interrogation. It also calls into question the whole way the US government, from the Pentagon to the Presidents, have intellectually approached the concept of war. One thing that seems clear, is that the US has very little idea how to win wars, and has been consistently capable of losing them.

I have been working on a book over the last year and a half, with looks at the larger concepts of War and Power, and tries to analyse why they are so regularly misunderstood and misanalyzed. Here is the provisional cover and title (though it could all still be changed). The book will be released in late August. Its coming out with Penguin in UK and Basic Books in the USA.

One of its arguments is that war is often approached as a battle-winning exercise, whereas winning battles is one of the poorest ways to understand the process of winning wars.

The USA is the poster child of this problem.

What the US has done since 1945, while its regularly been losing wars, is to construct arguably the most awesome battle-winning machine in world history.