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America Is Addicted To Unwinnable Conflicts and The Addiction Is Lethal
And it’s bankrupting the country
Since the Vietnam War, the United States has decisively won only one major military conflict. The Persian Gulf War. Every other military conflict the United States has gotten involved in has devolved into a multiyear-long slog of expenditure and death. The result has been thousands of US military casualties, millions of civilian casualties, and trillions of dollars spent on the world’s largest credit card.
This cycle is constantly perpetuated because the United States is addicted to getting dragged into unwinnable wars instead of prudently staying on the sidelines.
The Vietnam War was an unwinnable nightmare that we lost. The Yugoslav Wars lasted a decade, from 1991 to 2001. The War on Terror has dragged on for over twenty years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The War in Afghanistan was a disaster that cost us trillions. The second Iraq War technically ended in a “win” for the United States, but few can point to Iraq today as a place that is safe for international democracy and western values.
Now the United States once again finds itself embroiled in an unwinnable war in Europe and a new Cold War in Asia. The result? More spending. More civilian deaths. More unwinnable quagmires to fall into.
The US Rarely Knows When To Cut Its Losses
The problem with the United States is that they are endlessly susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy. Sunk cost fallacy says that you have to keep going down a fruitless path because you’ve already invested X amount into the outcome, even if the outcome is unachievable. Many people fall into this trap, but the United States falls into it regularly.
The War on Drugs started in 1971 and is clearly unwinnable. Drug deaths are rising exponentially instead of falling. Meanwhile, the United States spends an estimated $51 billion per year on this conflict with nothing to show for it other than prisons filled with casual weed smokers. The United States has spent over $1 trillion since this initiative started. Yet, we continue to set record high deaths for drug overdoses. Sunk cost? Absolutely. Clearly, this isn’t working, yet we continue to…
