The United States has fought a number of wars in its recent history that have proven to be failures—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, among others. Even after public opinion has swung against these conflicts, they have shambled on indefinitely, which is why they’re often called “forever wars.” The White House now appears intent on escalating the war in Iran to no practical end but to delay acknowledging Tehran’s ability to disrupt or toll shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—threatening to turn Iran into another losing, unpopular forever war.
This raises the question: why does the United States repeatedly find it so hard to cut its losses, and why can’t it avoid these wars before the fact?
To understand why these conflicts become forever wars, we first have to understand why they fail. As I’ve written elsewhere, these wars fail because they are motivated by interests too unimportant to the United States to warrant the commitment of forces that would be required to achieve their open-ended and ambitious goals.
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