The U.S. Has Fought Wars for 20 of the Last 25 Years and Won Basically None of Them

We Break Things Great. The Day After? Total Mystery.

Here's the pattern, and it is embarrassingly consistent. The U.S. military goes in, and the opening act is genuinely impressive. The Taliban was ousted in weeks in 2001. Saddam Hussein was done in a matter of weeks in 2003. According to NPR, when Trump launched the current war against Iran, U.S. and Israeli strikes killed many of Iran's leaders on day one and hammered the country essentially at will.

Then comes the part nobody planned for. Peter Bergen, author of the new book All The Presidents' Wars and a national security analyst at CNN, told NPR that the U.S. keeps tripping over the same exact curb. "We generally do a pretty good job of the breaking things and killing people at the inception of the wars," Bergen said. "We, the United States, tend to not plan for the day after — the peace that follows the war."

This is not a new insight. This is not a hot take. Military scholars, historians, and retired generals have been saying this for literally decades. The fact that we are still here, still doing this, still acting shocked when a country we bombed into rubble does not immediately transform into a stable Western-aligned democracy, is its own kind of national pathology.

Imperial Appetite, Tourist Itinerary

Paul Salem, a Middle East analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, offered NPR perhaps the most precise summary of American foreign policy in recent memory: "The U.S. has an imperial appetite, but a tourist's approach to it."

Read that sentence again. Frame it. Put it above your desk. It explains Iraq. It explains Afghanistan. It explains why Iran's theocratic regime is still in place right now even as the bombs fall.

Salem's point is that empires, when they actually functioned as empires, committed. They learned languages. They stayed. They built institutions, even brutal ones, because the alternative was chaos that consumed their investment. Bergen makes the same argument, telling NPR that the U.S. "has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire." Short tours. No language requirements. No generational commitment. Just firepower and a return flight.

Trump's Forever War Promise Lasted About as Long as You'd Expect

Trump pledged, loudly and repeatedly, to keep the United States out of forever wars. That was a central pitch. That was the thing. And then he launched a war against Iran, which NPR describes as "the largest and most powerful U.S. rival in the region," without deploying ground troops.

The no-ground-troops decision has kept U.S. casualties lower than in prior conflicts, which is genuinely good. But retired Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, who served as the so-called "war czar" coordinating efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told NPR that bombing without boots creates a fundamental contradiction when you still want maximalist outcomes. "When we launch only a bombing campaign but we retain maximalist goals, like regime change, you don't have any prospect for success unless you're just lucky. And being lucky is not the place to start a military campaign," Lute said.

At various points Trump has called for eliminating Iran's nuclear program, toppling its government, and destroying its air force, navy, and missile program. That is an enormous list. That is a wish list you bring to a ground invasion backed by decades of occupying force. That is not a list you check off with airstrikes alone, no matter how precise.

Drones, Hormuz, and the Limits of the F-35

Meanwhile, Iran is doing what weaker military powers have always done when facing a stronger one: it is making the war expensive in ways that don't require a conventional military. NPR reports that Iran has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz using low-cost drones, even after the U.S. decimated its traditional navy. Oil tankers are sitting anchored off Oman. The global economy is watching a critical shipping chokepoint go dark.

Harvard professor Stephen Walt recently wrote in Foreign Policy that people "dazzled by the technological wizardry of an F-35" have missed a slow but significant shift in how wars are actually decided. Local defenders, even outgunned ones, have found enough asymmetric tools to bleed and exhaust larger forces until the political will back home collapses. That is precisely what happened in Afghanistan. It is what happened in Iraq. The technology keeps getting more impressive, and the strategic results keep being the same.

In Afghanistan, it was roadside bombs and suicide attackers. In Iran, it is cheap drones and a blocked strait that is quietly strangling global oil markets. The weapons change. The fundamental dynamic does not.

The Scoreboard After 25 Years

Let's just state it plainly. The U.S. fought in Afghanistan for 20 years. The Taliban run Afghanistan. The U.S. fought in Iraq for years in a brutal, grinding war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Iraq has, as NPR puts it, "achieved a measure of stability" but still struggles enormously. The U.S. is now bombing Iran, the war is unresolved, the Iranian government remains in power, and a major global shipping lane is shut down.

Lute told NPR this fits an ugly pattern he watched up close. "We've had repeated disconnects between ends, ways, and means. We've had a lack of sufficient understanding of what we were getting into." This man was the war czar for two presidents. He watched it happen twice in real time. Nobody adjusted. Nobody stopped. And here we are, starting the clock on round three.