Why America Keeps Losing the Wars It Chooses to Fight

Stephen Walt argues that the United States has not lost a war for want of power but for want of proportion: it keeps entering conflicts of choice — Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the drawn-out confrontation with Iran — with modest interests and maximalist goals, then discovers that firepower alone cannot close the gap. He traces the pattern to a political culture that treats every crisis as a test of credibility, so retreat becomes unthinkable even after the original rationale has evaporated. Walt contrasts this with wars of necessity, like the response to Pearl Harbor, where the goal was simply to survive and the nation organized accordingly; wars of choice invite scope creep because nothing forces leaders to define what winning actually means. He points to the Iran war as the latest case: Washington has bombed for weeks without a coherent theory of what capitulation would look like, so the campaign drifts toward open-endedness. The deeper problem, he writes, is domestic — an elite that pays no price for strategic failure keeps recommending the same remedy of ever more force. Walt's fix is blunt: tie any future intervention to a testable, limited objective before the first strike, not after the tenth. The essay lands as the Iran war enters its seventh month with no ceasefire and Congress still debating its authorization.