ទេវកថានៃជ័យជំនះយោធា

 The Dangerous Idea Driving Today’s Wars of Choice

Military victory is an alluring idea. A short, violent campaign that defeats the enemy promises payoffs at a tolerable price. The Trump administration expected such an outcome in Iran in February 2026. The Netanyahu government sought it in Gaza in October 2023, then in Lebanon and Iran. Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed his 2022 invasion of Ukraine would deliver it. Many critics of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq decry a failure to achieve military victory, contrasting such wars with the decisive battlefield outcomes they believe were achieved in the 1990–91 Gulf War and World War II. And until recently, the debate over U.S. aid to Ukraine featured widespread calls to help the country win a military victory, dismissing negotiations as appeasement.

Yet those who invoke the term rarely define it. “Victory” means achieving the political aims for which one went to war. But “military victory” implies more. The adjective signals that those aims are secured through combat rather than at the bargaining table. Negotiation requires compromise and invites stalling that can exhaust political will. Battlefield victory, by contrast, promises a prostrate enemy with no meaningful choice but to accept the victor’s terms on the victor’s timetable. That promise is what makes the idea so attractive and so ubiquitous.

But the notion of military victory is a dangerous myth. All modern wars end in negotiated settlements; talks are not a second-best fallback. To end a war, both sides must choose to stop fighting, and those choices always require nontrivial bargaining. Destruction matters, of course. It is what distinguishes war from peacetime politics. But its role is to shape the bargain, not to annihilate the enemy, which almost never happens.

The myth of military victory has repeatedly led governments to start or prolong wars on false premises about how those wars would end. The Trump administration believed force could compel Iran’s unconditional surrender; instead, the United States finds itself in a stalemate. The Netanyahu government’s conviction that it can defeat Hamas militarily has lengthened the Gaza war in pursuit of an unattainable goal. Putin’s expectation of battlefield victory in Ukraine has mired both countries in a war with no apparent endgame.

If Chinese leader Xi Jinping makes the same mistake, an attack on Taiwan could ensnare Beijing in a conflict that is easier to start than to stop, with stakes far beyond the Taiwan Strait. And if the United States assumes that it could secure a military victory in a war with China, then it, too, could find itself exhausted in a fight it cannot easily end.

Muddled thinking about how wars conclude also breeds prewar errors in intelligence, modernization, and force design. And misunderstanding the relationship between bargaining and fighting produces a systematic failure to integrate negotiating strategy with campaign planning. As long as policymakers do not grasp that wars end only when both sides are ready to lay down their arms, they will continue to be frustrated by the inability of military force to achieve their political goals.

CARTHAGE WAS THE EXCEPTION

No modern war has destroyed an enemy’s ability to resist. Combatants can always keep fighting if they choose, even after enemies sweep their military from the field or capture their capital. Such persistence can reverse fortunes and decide wars. Winning a war requires offering surviving (and potential) fighters a deal they prefer to continued resistance. These deals can be one-sided. But terms and bargaining always matter: no war ends unless both sides choose to accept a settlement and stop.

The only alternative is to physically annihilate one’s enemies. Rome succeeded in doing so when it ended the Third Punic War by enslaving Carthage’s surviving citizens and, according to legend, salting the city’s ruins so nothing would grow there again. But no war in the modern era has met this criterion, and few have come close. Since the Napoleonic Wars ended, in 1815, the defeated parties in interstate wars have lost a median of eight percent of their forces. In two-thirds of those cases, that figure was under ten percent. The only country to lose more than 90 percent of its forces was Paraguay, in the Triple Alliance War (1864–70). Most belligerents accept defeat—settlement on unfavorable terms—long before their capacity to resist runs out.

War-ending settlements can be explicit or tacit. Explicit negotiations involve direct communication, offers, and counteroffers; examples include the Korean War armistice and the 1995 Dayton accords that concluded the Bosnian war. Tacit bargaining uses actions, threats, or declarations to signal acceptance or rejection of terms without formal talks.

The 1990–91 Gulf War, for example, ended when the U.S.-led coalition announced a unilateral cease-fire, and the Iraqis stopped fighting, too, without diplomatic exchanges. Combat had shown Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that continued resistance would bring further coalition advances, potentially to Baghdad; the cease-fire signaled that U.S. and allied forces would hold their positions if the Iraqis did the same. Saddam understood and reciprocated. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the coalition commander, then instructed Baghdad to send a military delegation to Safwan airfield to negotiate disengagement. The result heavily favored the United States and its allies. They liberated Kuwait, their central aim. Saddam preserved his regime but lost his conquests and faced postwar restrictions, leaving him worse off than he was before his invasion.

All modern wars end in negotiated settlements.

This was an unambiguous victory, but it was not achieved by destroying Iraq’s capacity to resist. At the cease-fire, the Iraqi army retained most of its prewar strength. Up to 50,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed and 75,000 wounded out of a force exceeding a million—under 15 percent. Over 800,000 troops survived and could have kept fighting. Days later, Iraqi forces crushed Shiite uprisings in the south.

Saddam’s decision to stop in 1991 was not a mere acceptance of reality. Iraq’s experience in its next war with the United States shows why. In 2003, the Iraqi military disintegrated after just seven weeks of fighting, its soldiers abandoning posts, weapons, and commanders and shedding their uniforms. By mid-May, Saddam could bring far less military power to bear than at Safwan in 1991. If a country could ever end a war by disarming the enemy, the United States should have done so in Iraq by May 2003. It did not.

The Iraqi military could no longer hold ground or resist coalition advances, but many of its soldiers carried on, even after Baghdad fell and their only option was to resort to irregular tactics. Sunni Baathists understood the implicit terms on offer: life under a U.S.-installed Shiite government. They preferred to fight on. The U.S. military suffered fewer than 3,000 casualties in 2003 but more than 33,000 in the next eight years. The insurgents failed to restore Saddam’s regime, but the war did not end in 2003, when Baghdad fell and its uniformed military evaporated.

Afghanistan offers a similar example. By mid-2002, the U.S. invasion had disarmed the Taliban’s military, occupied Kabul, and driven the group’s leaders from the country. Like Iraqi Baathists a year later, the Taliban faced a dominant enemy controlling their homeland, with no immediate prospect of retaking the capital. If “military victory” can terminate a war, then Afghanistan, too, should have been a decisive U.S. success. It was not. Taliban survivors rejected the terms on offer—an Afghan government that excluded them—even though their situation was far bleaker than Saddam’s in 1991. They kept fighting as irregulars, and by 2021 they had recaptured Kabul, driven out U.S. forces, and restored their rule.

The elusiveness of military victory does not make battlefield effectiveness irrelevant. But the purpose of fighting is to shape the two sides’ bargaining leverage by shifting their expectations of future costs, not to annihilate the enemy. Success in combat enables productive talks, but it is no substitute for them.

TERMS OF SURRENDER

Perhaps the most frequently cited example of military victory—the imposition of a brute-force triumph on a prostrate enemy—is the Allied conquest of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II. In conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza, policymakers and pundits invoke Germany’s and Japan’s ostensible military destruction in direct contrast to wars that ended with negotiated outcomes. Yet World War II did not end because the vanquished had no choice but surrender. The fighting did not disarm Germany or Japan. Both retained the capacity to inflict enormous casualties on the Allies, and neither surrendered unconditionally. The victors offered explicit terms—conditions—to both. These concessions were small, and the Allies unambiguously won. But even World War II ended in bargains between actors with options.

Imperial Japan fielded nearly eight million troops during the war. Fewer than two million died in combat. When Japan surrendered, in August 1945, more than six million armed, equipped, uniformed, and commanded soldiers remained in the field. These forces could not reclaim Japan’s conquests, which the Allies had steadily reversed since mid-1942. By the summer of 1945, the United States had driven the Japanese navy into port and severed Tokyo’s control of airspace and sea-lanes, leaving the Allies poised to invade Japan and depose Emperor Hirohito.

Yet Japan continued to resist—not because it expected to destroy the Allied militaries, or reconquer lost territory, or throw an invasion force into the sea, but because it sought to secure more tolerable settlement terms by threatening to kill more servicemen than the Allies were willing to sacrifice. Japan retained significant leverage. At Okinawa, which fell in June 1945, Japanese forces inflicted 50,000 casualties on U.S. troops. In August, the U.S. War Department estimated that invading Japan would cost hundreds of thousands more. Japanese leaders understood this and hoped the prospect would persuade the Americans to soften their terms. It did.

The Allies had demanded “unconditional surrender” at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 but never defined what that meant. Officials in Tokyo assumed it included dismantling the imperial system and imprisoning the emperor. For over two years, Japan fought on rather than accept such an outcome.

On July 26, 1945, ahead of the planned November invasion of Japan, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration. Although it again called for “unconditional” surrender, the document offered multiple explicit conditions. Japan would retain sovereignty over its four main islands. Its military personnel would return home without internment. The country would keep its industry, and its people would not be subject to forced labor. It would also gain access to raw materials and trade. The declaration did not, in fact, demand unconditional surrender; instead, it articulated conditions for surrender.

Most important, the declaration was silent on the emperor’s status, reflecting extensive debate among U.S. government officials. Some, such as Secretary of State James Byrnes, advocated an explicit demand that Hirohito be prosecuted for war crimes. Others, such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, argued that this would prolong the war and favored letting Hirohito remain on the throne. The final document compromised by saying nothing on the subject. Stimson hoped Japan would understand this omission as an implicit offer to preserve the monarchy, and he was right. Tokyo interpreted this silence as a signal that the emperor could remain. Hirohito served as emperor until his death, in 1989.

This concession was modest but not trivial. Regime change remained the Allies’ central goal, but it was never the only one. The entire U.S. war cabinet valued prosecuting the emperor. Some members would sacrifice this aim to end the conflict; others would not. Sparing Hirohito meant giving up an objective that mattered less than regime change, but one that still mattered.

Holding out for this concession cost Japan dearly. Accepting the pre-Potsdam terms a few months earlier would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and averted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet Tokyo did manage to coerce a change in the Allies’ offer, and as a result, its surrender was not unconditional. The defeat of Japan was a one-sided bargain, not a military victory imposed on an opponent without agency.

Germany presents a similar case. When it surrendered, in May 1945, the Wehrmacht still fielded more than three million armed and actively resisting soldiers. German forces had been losing ground since the Battle of Stalingrad, in 1943, and by early 1945, the Allies were advancing deep into the Reich. Yet the German army kept fighting, inflicting severe casualties until the very end. In the Battle of Berlin, waged in April and May, more than 360,000 Soviet troops were killed, wounded, or reported missing.

The Wehrmacht’s millions of surviving troops could have melted into the countryside, turned to insurgency, and fought on after Berlin fell—as the Afghan Taliban and Iraqi Baathists would do decades later. Hitler’s inner circle had considered doing just that and developed written plans for guerrilla resistance. Yet his successors chose to stop the war and signed the instrument of surrender on May 7. As with Japan, this was a choice, and the Germans could have chosen differently. Instead, their leaders decided that the terms on offer were preferable to the cost of a protracted struggle that Germany was fully capable of conducting.

No modern war has destroyed an enemy’s ability to resist.

Although highly one-sided, the terms Germany accepted did not amount to unconditional surrender. The Allies offered explicit conditions, which they softened in early 1945 to persuade the Germans to lay down their arms. That autumn, U.S. policymakers had proposed the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany. Originally outlined by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, it sought to render the country incapable of future aggression by deindustrializing it, disarming it, and dividing it into impoverished rump states. The plan would strip the country of its factories, internationalize the industrial Ruhr Valley, resettle the region’s workforce elsewhere, destroy its mines, force German civilians into labor abroad, and expropriate German assets.

When the plan leaked in September 1944, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seized on it to rally the German public. If this was what the Allies would do, he argued, then Germans had to resist to the last cartridge. He instructed German forces in the city of Aachen, then under American attack, to make “every house . . . a fortress.” Blaming the city’s fanatical resistance on the Morgenthau Plan, Allied officials publicly repudiated it and softened their position. At Yalta in February 1945, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany.” The eventual surrender terms omitted deindustrialization, forced labor, and permanent economic destruction. In the war’s final weeks, the Allies added explicit conditions: Germany would avoid annexation, remain independent (although not sovereign or unitary), and rely on armed German citizens for policing.

These conditions were modest. The Allies clearly won. Germany forfeited all its war aims, suffered occupation, and remained partitioned for 45 years. Yet the terms on which the war ended were not trivial. The Allies wanted the Nazi regime gone, but that was not all they wanted. The status of post-Nazi Germany mattered greatly to Germans and Americans alike.

Roosevelt preferred a punitive peace that would humble and permanently weaken Germany; he settled for a more generous outcome because his first-choice model was apparently unacceptable to the Germans. Intense deliberation produced this decision, reflecting a conscious effort to ease conditions that Allied leaders judged to be too harsh. Germany accepted terms that offered at least some postwar guarantees, once the signatories understood that the Allies no longer intended to cripple Germany forever. The result was a one-sided and tacit coercive bargain, but a bargain all the same.

NO DEAL, NO PEACE

No war can end without an offer the enemy can accept, no matter how powerful one’s armed forces or how one-sided the fighting. Belligerents can almost always fight on, as the Taliban did in 2002 and as Iraqi Baathists did in 2003, even after losing their capitals and their conventional militaries, and as the Germans and the Japanese could have done in 1945. This continued resistance can sometimes reverse fortunes dramatically, as it did for the Taliban by 2021. The choice to continue may be costly, but it is not necessarily futile.

This is more than semantics. Misconceptions about military victory matter profoundly. Policymakers who see negotiation as a second-best alternative to military victory may reject diplomatic feelers that could shorten wars or even reverse their ultimate outcomes. After Kabul fell, representatives of the former regime approached the United States, seeking a deal that would give them legal status and a role in a new Afghanistan. The George W. Bush administration, believing it had won a military victory and had no need to bargain with a defeated enemy, rejected these overtures and established a government that excluded the Taliban and their supporters. The result was two decades of war, tens of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars in costs, and an eventual Taliban restoration far less compatible with U.S. interests than a compromise settlement in 2002 would have been.

This problem is not limited to Afghanistan. During World War II, an anti-Hitler resistance within Germany sought to topple the Nazi government and negotiate an early end to the war. The movement nearly assassinated Hitler in 1944. But Allied insistence on unconditional surrender hamstrung this opposition. Its members could hardly persuade other German elites to risk their lives in a coup conspiracy when success would just yield Germany’s destruction by the merciless Allies. Even had the 1945 terms been offered sooner, the plotters might have failed anyway, or a coup might have succeeded without producing an earlier settlement. Yet the Allied pursuit of military victory did not improve the odds.

The Trump administration’s war with Iran offers another example. The White House outlined various aims but designed its campaign from the start to compel what President Donald Trump described as Iran’s unconditional surrender, not to create leverage at the bargaining table. Breaking earlier deals, launching surprise attacks amid ongoing talks, and killing officials that Washington had identified as more willing to negotiate—all of which the United States did in the war’s opening weeks—are not tactics meant to foster agreement. The expectation of military victory has left the administration without a theory of how to end the fighting, even as the costs mount: billions of dollars in expenditures, strained weapons supplies, and broader economic disruption.

The war in Ukraine presents the same error. Putin began a war he had no feasible way to end quickly or cheaply. When Russia’s gambit failed by April 2022, he did not return to the bargaining track that had briefly opened in March. Instead, he escalated. That September, Russia annexed four Ukrainian regions that it did not fully control, a step that has narrowed Moscow’s own room to compromise ever since.

Rather than negotiate seriously, the Kremlin has widened the war again and again: bombing Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, mobilizing additional forces, and striking at European industry in a thinly veiled sabotage campaign. All wars eventually end at the bargaining table, but no belligerent can summon a deal on demand. Both sides have to be ready to settle, and Russia is not.

Nor could any feasible strategy pursued by the United States and Europe have ended Russia’s war without Putin’s acquiescence. Even with significant U.S. and European assistance, Ukraine could no more achieve a military victory than Russia could, and Moscow’s maximalist terms amounted to the end of Ukrainian sovereignty. From the start, U.S. and European policymakers should have recognized that they faced a long war with no easy exit—one that called for a sustained industrial mobilization, not a series of short-term aid packages. Those packages signaled nothing credible about allied commitment, either to defense contractors or to the Kremlin. The purpose of combat is to open a bargaining space; Putin’s choices have opened none, and only a great deal more hard fighting will produce one.

AN EXPENSIVE HABIT

Misunderstanding how wars end can yield ill-designed military operations. Because all wars end with a bargain, the only rational purpose of fighting is to shift the terms of that bargain in one’s favor. Yet U.S. policymakers rarely integrate negotiating strategy with campaign planning. American war plans for Afghanistan from 2009 to 2013, including those Washington pursued after talks with the Taliban began in 2011, excluded State Department officials responsible for political settlement and never explained how continued military operations would create leverage. Instead, U.S. troops largely remained tied to fixed locations to provide security for the population. This weakened Washington’s hand by limiting its ability to redeploy forces and credibly threaten or reward different Taliban factions based on their willingness to negotiate.

A fixation on military victory can also distort peacetime defense planning. Today’s U.S. military structures itself around assumptions of short, decisive wars. Munitions stockpiles are limited. Preparation for reconstituting a highly skilled professional force is minimal. Maintenance of reserve weapons and equipment is poor. These policies trade long-term staying power for short-term lethality and presuppose that the United States can end a conflict quickly by destroying the opposing military. But if ending a war is a matter of coercive bargaining, in which enemies can almost always keep fighting, then Washington cannot create short wars by fiat. Prudence dictates reconsidering choices that assume the opposite.

U.S. planners are not alone in facing this problem. Short-war assumptions premised on military victory are dangerous for everyone. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, should not assume that a swift campaign can end a war over Taiwan. How long such a war lasts would depend on choices in Taipei and Washington that Beijing can influence but not control. Starting a war that pays off only if the enemy gives in quickly is a gamble, and one that can easily lead to a long, grinding conflict whose ultimate cost exceeds the value of the stakes.

No war can end without an offer the enemy can accept.

Nor can the United States assume that a small stockpile of sophisticated weapons would quickly defeat the Chinese military. If China fought on, the war would not be short, no matter how much firepower the United States brought. If Taiwan accepted unfavorable terms rather than fighting on, the settlement would be a poor one, no matter how much assistance Washington provided. U.S. military power can shape the bargaining space. But it cannot win a war without an agreement in which all parties accept terms that preserve U.S. interests.

Planning for such a conflict therefore demands more than tallying ships, missiles, and aircraft. The outcome of a war over Taiwan would depend on Taiwan’s willingness to endure bombardment and blockade, on Xi’s calculus about the political costs of a protracted fight versus the risks of backing down, and on the motivation of Chinese forces facing large-scale conflict for the first time in half a century. These variables are harder to assess than comparisons of hardware, but they are just as likely to determine how such a war ends.

Military force can never eliminate an adversary’s agency entirely. Policymakers who ignore this fact will continue to launch wars that they cannot end successfully, and their plans and forces will be poorly adapted to the conflicts they wind up fighting. Clinging to the myth of military victory is an expensive habit.

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