Does America Usually Win the War but Lose the Peace?

“Americans love to fight—traditionally!” said General George S. Patton. Over the course of its history, the United States has been remarkably successful at winning wars. In part that success stems from the fact that at first Americans are almost always united in their enthusiasm to go to war—confident that their causes in fighting wars has been right and just. But American history, in the successive wars since the Civil War, has also seen an erosion in the strength and duration of that confidence, in no small part because the country has so often done poorly in winning the peace. Patton might be right that Americans love to fight, but they are less and less sure they should.

It did not begin that way. The founding generation faced a great deal of dissension and confusion during and after the Revolution, but an unswerving belief in the rightness of their cause gave them the confidence to fashion a successful peace. That self-assurance carried America through its first wars. Internal rancor and military blunders beset the War of 1812, but Andrew Jackson’s battle at New Orleans gave the country a victory and hero to hold onto after the conflict, and a lasting peace with Britain on reasonably good terms helped to prevent a fundamental postwar questioning by Americans of the causes and course of the war. Likewise, the Mexican-American War gave the United States new lands and new heroes. Whatever else could be said about the contested origins of that war, America earned a satisfactory peace.

Then came the devastation of the Civil War. It took the unique genius and persistence of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant to win the fight, but not before hundreds of thousands died in that awful bloodletting. Maybe their combined efforts could have forged a lasting and just peace, but it was not to be. Lincoln fell, and those who followed could barely draw enough strength from a tired North, and enough compromise from a proud South, to reunite the country. The country lived on as one, but only at the cost of ignoring why it had split in the first place. Lincoln put it best just weeks before his death:

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Southern concern over what would become of their way of life if forced to live among freed black slaves proved to be too great to compromise, and as Lincoln noted, “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

The South fought to perpetuate slavery and a slave system built on race. The North fought for the survival of a whole nation built on rule of law, not to be destroyed if some of the laws became disagreeable. If the will of the nation as expressed in its laws was that slavery no longer expand and eventually disappear, then so be it, no matter what white people, North and South, thought of the idea of free blacks living among them. That was the will of the nation in 1860; Abraham Lincoln’s views were no secret in that presidential election.

The Civil War and Reconstruction ended with a lasting but not satisfactory peace. The reunited country sacrificed race for reunion—in politics, in law, and in history and memory. The South returned to the country, and without real opposition began to question the intent of the side that fought for good and right—to make them the corrupt villains and butchers both during and after the war. Those with a living memory of the war mostly stayed confident that they knew the truth, but they stayed quiet lest the horrible fight start again. As memory faded and that generation passed, their silence had allowed the history and memory of the Civil War to be forged in the Lost Cause. By losing the peace, they had lost the justness of their cause to history.

The eroding cycle began. It became easier and easier to question whether the United States truly was right in its causes, and with great consequences. Amidst all the great enthusiasm for the war with Spain in 1898, so many vocally questioned American motives that the declaration of war actually included an amendment that denied any colonial ambitions in Cuba. The United States would end Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and the Philippines and elsewhere, but then what? Grant them freedom? With how much of an American role? On what timeframe? It was becoming clear already that lacking confidence in the justness of their cause, Americans began to lose clarity in defining objectives. Spain’s rule ended in Cuba and the Philippines and elsewhere, and America struggled to deal with those former colonies until, well, now. Certainly the Spanish American War did not end with the most successful peace . The postwar struggles in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and especially the Philippines led to further questioning of the justness of the cause in the first place.

Repeat. The Great War broke out in Europe. By fits and starts the United States finally entered the fight. To garner support for a war he had once so vehemently and popularly promised to avoid, President Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States would fight to make the world safe for democracy, an idealistic but muddled objective. When the peace imposed by the angry victors created a world of reparations, debts, and seething hostility, the United States took a pass on international affairs. By the 1930s a committee in the United States Senate blamed munitions makers and bankers, “merchants of death,” for dragging the country into the war to make a buck.

Repeat. By the time the Second World War broke out in Asia and Europe, Americans had already started to grow weary of the rhetoric of great causes. President Franklin Roosevelt talked of Four Freedoms, but most Americans dismissed such notions and tried to think of the war in terms of revenge for Pearl Harbor or as an abstract and detached duty to fulfill, a job to do. Their president, at least, showed his greatness by keeping confidence in the cause and making the objectives crystal clear. Unconditional surrender to be followed by long occupations made for a more bloody fight and costly peace, but made winning the peace with Germany and Japan possible. And the United States and its Western allies did win the peace that ended the Second World War, and consequently the specific fight with Germany and Japan lives on in the American imagination as the good war. But a new conflict almost immediately emerged, and as a result the American cynicism toward grand causes in wars survived. In the end, the fact that the country faced a new and dire threat so soon after dispatching the old ones made it seem as though they had lost the peace once again. The cause had been just but not just enough to exclude the Soviets, and the objectives had been broad and specific but not broad and specific enough to deal with the impending communist threat.

Repeat. Was Korea within the American sphere of defense? Should the United States and United Nations have fought for the survival of the Republic of Korea or for the reunification of the Korean peninsula? Was that the right war at the right place at the right time? Although the United Nations forces had fought well, there could hardly be a less satisfying peace than the ceasefire that halted the fight in Korea. Any consideration of the lives saved and enriched by the survival of South Korea became lost in ongoing criticisms that the United States was losing the Cold War, especially in Asia.

Repeat. It hardly needs retelling: the United States entered into Vietnam with great hesitation, unsure of the value of fighting another Korean War. When the American part of the war did escalate, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration offered no clear objectives. A Defense Department and military enamored of the power of new technologies and the ability to quantify victory through body counts badly bungled the fight up to 1968. After Tet, when the military part of the war effort achieved a great deal of success as the American forces worked with the South Vietnamese army toward more realistic and clear objectives, it was too late. The belief that the United States had right on its side had so eroded that the only objective became withdrawal. The country abandoned South Vietnam, and lost that peace, too.

Repeat. Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait. President George H.W. Bush assembled a wide coalition to drive the Iraqis out of the small kingdom. Amidst great cries that it was to be a war for oil, the administration stressed the justness of the cause, that Hussein was a brutal and dangerous dictator who had to be stopped. The objectives drifted back and forth between freeing Kuwait and destroying Hussein. In the end, broad international and domestic popular support only existed for the former, and the Iraqi people suffered for another decade under the tyrant. As has been made so obvious in the last three years, that war ended with a half-peace at best.

Repeat? The September 11 terrorist attacks triggered mass enthusiasm among the American people to go to war. Almost just as quickly, loud voices began to question any potential attempts to fight a war as counterproductive and, more importantly, immoral. The fact that these voices had so much resonance even early on is a testament to how much the historical trend of losing the peace had eroded American confidence. President George W. Bush vacillated on objectives, beginning with the announcement that the United States was fighting a “war on terrorism.” Since he refused to announce more clear objectives from day one, the president has had to use up almost all of his political currency in fighting two separate battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. It remains to be seen if the American people have enough confidence remaining in this war to fight any serious future campaigns.

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This ongoing erosion of American self-assurance in fighting wars is in many ways a good thing. It has led the country to be remarkably self-critical, especially in comparison to great powers of the past. It has encouraged Americans to question seriously both when they go to war and how they behave during those fights. By no means has the United States perfected the process of entering wars or of fighting wars without nasty indiscretions. In the current war, the debate over invading Iraq and the abuses at Abu Ghraib were all too stark proof of those truths. Still, it is due to such self-criticism that no one has seriously entertained the idea of interring all American Muslims as potential enemies, when only sixty-three years ago that was the immediate "solution" to the Japanese American “problem” on the West Coast. It is due to such self-criticism that the American military has sought to be more and more precise in the use of force, instead of resorting to tactics like the area bombing of almost all of the major wars of the last seventy years.

At the same time, a balance must be struck. Americans should recognize that the search for perfect causes and perfect actions in war, while noble, is ultimately futile. To think otherwise is to ignore the nature of humans and the nature of war. Some wars must be fought; all wars get ugly. But for all of the lost peaces and self-criticism, Americans have done a pretty good job of choosing fights and trying to limit the ugliness. More good than bad has come from the wars the United States has fought. Americans have developed a healthy sense of guilt over their love of a fight, but they should always remember that sometimes fight they must.