Winning?

Here’s something Trump said last week: “We won World War II, we won World War I, we won everything before that and in between…”. He went on to say that changing the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense was “woke” and implies that this is why we lost subsequent conflicts.

The idea that we clearly and simply won every war we’d fought before the 1960’s is the propagandized version of our history that has been traditionally taught in our schools. Being brought up with that version of history is why Lyndon Johnson kept throwing more and more resources at a tragic effort to subdue Vietnam.  He couldn’t abide the idea that he’d be the first President to lose a war.  Nixon finessed our loss to try to make it seem like we hadn’t really lost when it was clear that we had.  A similar scenario played out in Afghanistan from Bush to Obama to Biden, who finally got us out.  Biden was willing to say that continuing was not worth it, though, like Nixon, he never stated we had lost. 

The thing about the conceit that we always won before Vietnam is that it’s not quite wrong, but it’s complicated. 

Let’s start with the smallest, simplest ones:

Sure, we won the Spanish-American war and the Mexican American war, but both were fought exactly because they would be such easy wins.  They were both the equivalent of an NFL team challenging a middle-school football team to a game. Both of those wars were designed as easy land-grabs. They are cases where we were the imperialistic bully, seizing territory from weaker nations.  Such imperialistic behaviors were perceived by world powers as more acceptable in their times, but even so, a lot of propaganda was needed to reassure citizens of the U.S. that they were legitimate enterprises, because even in their times, U.S. citizens believed our nation was supposed to behave better than the ‘might-makes-right’ empires of Europe. 

We did not win the War of 1812.  We declared war on England when it was preoccupied with defeating Napoleon.  They had very little concern with us.  To illustrate what they could do, they burned Washington, DC to the ground.  The fleet they sent was stopped short of Baltimore, but they withdrew because they believed they had made their case, not because they could not have reinforced the fleet and proceeded.  The only other battle worth note was New Orleans, which we did indeed win, but again, that was the outcome because Britain was only willing to expend a tiny iota of its resources here – it simply was not worth it to them to do any more.  This war mattered so little to the British that they don’t even teach it as a war.

The other one that was small for us, but huge for Europe, was World War I.  That is what makes our claim for the victory problematic.  We were the key to breaking the stalemate into which Europe had gotten itself mired, so we can claim we won it.  Our demonstrated ability to ship enough troops, equipment, and supplies across the Atlantic to participate convinced Germany to surrender. However, relative to how much Europe had fought and how many people they had lost, we barely participated at all.  We won pretty much just by showing up.

Now let’s get to the more complex, larger conflicts, starting with World War II.  It provides the model for truly, fully winning a war.  In that conflict, not only were we on the winning side, but we were the one ally that assured the victory, and the victory was utter.  We destroyed the governments that had been international aggressors, claimed to have defeated their entire worldview, and helped re-build those countries into strong, prosperous democracies.  We won so thoroughly that we got to decide the new world order.  Part of that order was that we denied the right of any nation to invade other peaceful sovereign nations, thus the decision to alter the title of our own Department of War to the Department of Defense.  In the postwar world, military might was to be an instrument of defense rather than imperialism. 

Yet victory in World War II has not proven to be as much of a win as those who fought in it believed it was.  We never obtained the ideal of military for defense only, though we have felt the need to pose as if it was and creatively defined defense as a matter of “national interest” (something we do all the time, yet decry when others like Russia or China do the same).  This situation inclines me to believe that Trump may be right to alter the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.  It would be a reflection of the sad truth, which we might then be more inclined to change.

A related problematic aspect of the World War II win was that one ally was an authoritarian empire.  The Soviet Union was not much better under Stalin than Germany was under Hitler, yet the enemy of our enemy was a temporary friend.  It turned out to be immensely beneficial for us to have the USSR out there as the next opponent.  Having a perceived threat kept our political factions united almost as well as being in the war had.  Republicans loathed the Soviet Union’s socialism.  Democrats abhorred the Soviet Union’s authoritarianism.  The USSR could hardly have been designed better to diminish our internal antagonisms to pursue a common project.  Having that common project assured our continued growth, wealth, and expansion. 

Our economic growth and anti-Soviet commitment subsumed the political ideals for which we claimed to have fought World War II. They made the political possibility of a peaceful, democratic world shrink with every new step in our world domination. To foil the USSR, we abandoned the ideals that we proposed in 1945 when we built the United Nations.  We supported vicious autocracies all over the world simply to deter statist communism, even in places where it was no real threat.

Then, once the Soviet Union finally collapsed under the weight of its own untenable system in the 1990’s, we helped its transition into a kleptocracy rather than facilitating a durable, democratic republic. Our actions there reflect how much more we had become committed to predator capitalism than to democracy.  We fostered the conditions that have given us the new, fascist Russia under Putin.

Thus, our path after World War II has led us right back to the situation that caused it.  Putin’s Russia invaded a sovereign neighbor using all the same reasoning as Hitler used.  Worldwide, a new version of fascism has been rising over the last decade.  Even the United States, the former champion of democracy, now has a dictatorial leader sending soldiers into cities which politically oppose him.  He daily violates the Constitution he swore to uphold.  He says “I can do whatever I want,” and seems correct about that so far.  By 2030, will the Nazis rightfully be able to claim the final victory?

This leads to ask, similarly, if we won the Civil War.  That gets more complicated because we have to ask which “we” is meant when claiming it. Since the war, “we” has meant the Union and its cause of, in Lincoln’s words, “a rebirth of freedom.”  However, our nation is still the home of the Confederates’ descendants.  While the Union accepted Lee’s and Richmond’s surrenders, and Reconstruction seemed at first to reflect the Union’s win, it is not so clear who won in the longer term.  True, we no longer have slavery and later had the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and other movements away from a caste society.  However, if you believe it couldn’t be brought back, you are fooling yourself. We already have politicians unafraid to announce that they believe the women’s vote should be rescinded, proposed white-only neighborhoods, and concentration camps for immigrants. 

Then there is the question of secession, which seemed settled by the Union victory:  How much more will the presidency need to sink into despotism until Democratic states see secession as the most viable path to escape tyranny?  By 2030, will the Confederate States have won the Civil War? I suppose, in that event, we could still claim that “we” won, but I certainly never perceived myself as part of the Confederate “we.”

There is one more war to consider.  We can rightfully claim victory in our Revolutionary War, but, as with the War of 1812, we prevailed because the British no longer felt it worthwhile or correct to pursue.  Voices in Parliament argued all along that trying to suppress colonial rebellion was the wrong path.  They believed, correctly, that trade with the American colonies (then states) was what mattered and that our calls for fair representation were perfectly well reasoned.  This group gained the upper hand by 1782 and were able to pass a resolution to stop spending on the effort. This left Cornwallis’ army unsupported in Yorktown against a French blockade and army as well as the Continental Army and state militias.  The way textbooks have usually presented the Revolution, it is as if we won outright and did so because of our wonderful fighting and plucky national character.  Certainly, there are a lot of positive things true of the Americans who fought in a situation where the odds were stacked against us and of General Washington as a leader who held the Continental Army together while being starved for resources.  He even managed to eke out a couple of victories before the French arrived.  But our victory as it occurred was the result of getting France to help and of the shift in English policy. 

We can fairly believe that there was no way England was going to win even if they had persisted.  Trying to conduct a long-term war in a distant part of the world against a population who does not want you there and increasingly detests your presence is futile.  This is what our Revolution taught England.  It is an irony that we did not learn the lesson we taught and, two hundred years later, had to experience it on the losing side not only in one war, but in two.

However, can we claim success in the war if the Revolution itself fails?  The revolution is the understanding that everyone is equal and acting upon that understanding.  It is in democratic government purposefully constructed and maintained of, by, and for the people.  The Constitution enacts the ideals of the Revolution through structuring limits on anyone’s political power. If we lose these things, we lose the Revolution.  If we lose the Revolution, what is the value of having won the military conflict?

History does not support what Trump says, that we clearly won every conflict back when we had a Department of War.   Nor does it support what he suggests, that we have lost wars because we are woke.  Vietnam and Afghanistan were lost for the same reason that the British lost the American Revolution: essentially unwinnable situations. Had we listened to our most woke people, we would never have been mired in either of those conflicts. 

Trump and his movement are so dangerous because, like all fascists, they weave propagandistic, ignorant bullshit into history.  To the extent that the movement he leads is succeeding, the outcomes of World War II, the Civil War, and our Revolution are getting reversed.