There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts, but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force.
The last months of 1953, and the early ones of 1954, are a Groundhog Day of disappointments. After summer’s Korean Armistice Agreement, Americans came to realize what it was like to fail at war. Yet for a lifetime to come, they would wake again, and again, and again to discover that they had failed once more, and for the same reasons. The time loop that has led to four failed wars in a row continues, largely unrecognized.
In Korea, fighting had stopped on July 27, roughly along the lines where it had begun three years earlier. A peace conference was supposed to follow. Instead, China, the prime opponent, laid down conditions in mid-September. Subsequent talks went nowhere. Worse, only 4,482 of the 8,177 American prisoners thought to be held by North Korea and China were returned.
Beyond Western Europe, where the NATO alliance was coalescing, Americans realized they would be on their own against Soviet Russia and Communist China. U.S. troops, under the banner of the United Nations, had intervened in Korea by late June 1950. Except “UN coalition forces” turned out to have been far less than expected. So testified General Douglas MacArthur, first head of the UN Command, who called them “token forces at best.”
“Failure” in Korea meant that the war had ended up unrecognizably, disastrously far from the mission declared at the start. Initially, during the summer of 1950, South Korea had been rescued from Kim Il-sung’s invasion at the cost of 5,394 Americans dead. Four months after Kim’s Soviet-choreographed attack, however, a U.S.-led counter-invasion to “liberate” North Korea ended up with 28,345 more Americans lost. In this light, the war was a catastrophe.
Seventy years ago, on January 26, 1954, the Senate ratified a mutual defense treaty with Seoul. By then, a new slogan had entered U.S. politics, taken from a general’s memoir: Never Again: would the United States allow itself to be trapped in a limited, losing war in the back of beyond?
Nonetheless, Korea was to be followed by Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. After 2021’s debacle in Kabul, we can see that three key influences have afflicted every conflict: delusional objectives, a belief that victory was to be easy, and the fact that the officials who got the United States entangled in the first place were considered celebrities. An array of lesser influences also exists in each case: recurring hopes placed in “coalition forces,” misplaced faith in high tech, and a belief in the malleability of foreign cultures. Obtuse historical analogies get added to a movie script that Americans have been unable to rewrite.
“Liberating North Korea”
Today, foreign policy experts forget that the U.S. mission in Asia had, by October 1950, ballooned from just defending South Korea. It had shifted to not only “liberating” the North but to “liberalizing“ it as well. MacArthur promised “complete victory” by Christmas, and his staff planned a victory parade in Tokyo.
That October, Kim Il-sung’s army was reeling after MacArthur’s brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon weeks earlier. From his Tokyo headquarters, MacArthur told Congress and the Pentagon that the United States could do more than just rescue South Korea. Ten million North Koreans could be saved from communism as well. China wouldn’t intervene, he added. Should it try, his B‑29 Superfortresses would turn the Yalu River, which divided China from North Korea, into “history’s bloodiest stream.” Defense Secretary George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs had their doubts, as did President Harry Truman, yet they approved a counter-invasion.
The purpose was to build a united, prosperous, and democratic Korea and to do so within half a year. The dams and power plants of the North were to be used for reconstructing the devasted South. A unified, democratic Korea seemed feasible. After all, the Marshall Plan was recasting Western Europe while West Germany and Japan had become well-tutored democracies.
However, no one involved had a clue about Korea. Exhibit A is the career of Donald Nichols. This thirty-six-year-old motor pool sergeant with a sixth-grade education attained immense responsibility. At least he had learned Korean, which helped him to influence South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee. As a result, much of the Fifth U.S. Air Force was at Nichols’ disposal, plus whatever troops he required. The list of “country experts” was thin.
As U.S. forces advanced up the peninsula toward the Yalu River, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was slipping 300,000 battle-hardened veterans into the northern mountains under the cover of night and fog. History’s greatest ambush was sprung in late November, causing the longest-ever U.S. military retreat back to the 38th Parallel.
MacArthur was a larger-than-life figure celebrated as the “American Ceasar” of victory in the Pacific and Japan’s occupation. Few dared to refute his bold decisions. Secretary of State Dean Acheson labeled him a political “sorcerer” after Inchon, and most Americans revered MacArthur. For a fateful time, the country went along and backed the counter-invasion.
“Containing China”
Ten years after the laments of the winter of 1953-1954, elite opinion had shifted. Pledges of “Never Again” were forgotten. Instead, memories of a very partial victory—the rescue of South Korea—shaped the decision to escalate in Vietnam. To be sure, it would be done “step-by-step” so as not to provoke China again.
It is forgotten that President John F. Kennedy used the dreadful phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” in October 1963 to promise success in South Vietnam. Upholding its government in Saigon, he told newsmen, would block Mao Zedong from devouring all of Indochina, plus Thailand and Malaysia. If South Korea could be held against a conventional Communist attack, his thinking went, surely Green Berets and SEALs could defend South Vietnam against Soviet and Chinese-backed guerrillas.
When Lyndon Johnson came to office six weeks later, the aims of U.S. intervention began to expand. They became as grandiose as in Korea. His officials at the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Pentagon believed South Vietnam to be primed for economic development, with democracy to follow. They spoke of a Marshall Plan and a public works program modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority. And perhaps a Marshall Plan could even include North Vietnam if only its leader, Ho Chi Minh, gave up his dream of uniting the nation.
Another war of murderous naivete escalated, stoked by fanciful objectives and visions of easy victory.
This time, policymakers and military planners expected helicopters to be the decisive high-tech wizardry. Hueys, Cobras, and Chinooks did, in fact, provide radically mobile and dispersed airborne assault capacities unknown to the French, who had lost their own Vietnam war in 1954. General Paul Harkins, an early U.S. commander in Vietnam, promised to crush the Viet Cong guerrillas “by Christmas” of 1963. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, forty-two, recently a Harvard professor, expected U.S. casualties to be roughly comparable to the annual traffic-related toll in Washington, DC.
Yet hopes fizzled. Washington landed army and marine divisions in 1964 and began an air war over North Vietnam in February 1965. However, bombing a preindustrial society proved no more conclusive than against North Korea.
Again, a coalition was assembled. The Pentagon labeled it the Free World Military Assistance Force, which, in theory, included 68,889 men. Yet Johnson muttered that it was smaller than the “token” coalition in Korea.
That third consistent reason for failure—the influence of celebrated, irrefutable decisionmakers—became a byword of the Vietnam War.
Kennedy and Johnson’s national security cadre got stamped eternally as “the best and the brightest” by reporter David Halberstam. Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara knew little of the world. Yet, as the recent president of Ford Motor Company and star of the Fortune 500, he crowed that “any problem can be solved.” Bundy had his own certainties, though he concluded by 1965 that “this damn war is much tougher“ than he had anticipated.
Cheerleading came from General William Westmoreland, the daunting commander of U.S. operations in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. He was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” for 1966, which lauded him as the “Guardian at the Gate.” And who was to rebut Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Maxwell Taylor, whom the New York Times said existed “somewhere between Virgil and Clausewitz”?
As in Korea, no one at the top knew enough about the Vietnamese. McNamara bemoaned that ignorance decades later.
When Richard Nixon’s presidency began in 1969, another eminent professor came down from Harvard for his first Washington job. By autumn, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was fuming, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.”
Kissinger and Nixon knew as little about the hard men in Hanoi as MacArthur and Truman had of those in Beijing. Therefore, the war continued, despite a spurious peace deal in 1973, to ultimately extract a toll of 53,849 American dead by April 1975 when the world saw helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel from a Saigon rooftop.
“Realigning” the Middle East
America’s first clash with Iraq occurred sixteen years later and can’t be described as a “war.” The Pentagon might as well be shuttered if an authentic, half-million-strong U.S.-led coalition in 1991 couldn’t trounce within hours an army of Iraqi conscripts strung out in the Kuwaiti desert. By the time U.S. forces finally did charge into Iraq in early March 2003, the notion of a “best and brightest” in Washington had lost all sense of irony.
President George W. Bush had assembled what he styled a war cabinet following Al Qaeda’s September 11 attack in 2001. Journalists called its members a “dream team” because of their glittering credentials. For a while, they were celebrities—men like CIA director George Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the secretary of defense himself, Donald Rumsfeld. Before long, a CIA inspector general’s report blamed Tenet for allowing the agency to be taken by surprise on 9/11; Congress recognized that Wolfowitz had lost count of the American dead in Iraq, the correct number being 51 percent higher than he testified. Rumsfeld would be fired outright in 2006 as Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled downward.
For a while, however, the “dream team” outweighed its critics. On the cusp of invading Iraq, a naysayer might facetiously call Bush’s advisors “the best and the brightest.” But Vietnam had become ancient history. Instead, other officials, think tankers, and reporters nodded their heads in friendly agreement. Yes, how fortunate the nation was to be guided by these extraordinary public servants.
As U.S. forces entered Iraq, Bush spoke of the triumph that had already occurred in Afghanistan: the Taliban had merely been “the first regime to fall in the war on terror.” In fact, a victory parade was planned for New York.
Winning in Iraq was supposed to be as easy as in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld insisted that taking over the Arab world’s most populous oil-producing state would last “six days, six weeks”—at worst, “six months”—before a satisfying departure. Washington wrangled up a coalition of fifty-four nations, with most, like Micronesia, being “tokens” indeed.
U.S. objectives were even vaster than those of Korea and Vietnam. America was to “realign” the Middle East, said one member of the dream team, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. And Iraq—the pivot of such a realignment—was expected to have a thriving tourism industry soon. So promised one academic, Frederik Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, before heading to Kabul in 2009 as part of what the military called its “pundit group.” Basically, it was to do public relations for the top commander, Stanley McChrystal, a legendary special operations officer.
Like before, the silver bullets of high tech were expected to hasten victory, though General McChrystal added, contrary to all evidence, that “political will and demonstrated resolve are the most powerful thing we bring” to the fight. Hopes in drones and computer-laden net-centric warfare mirrored earlier faith in B-29s for Korea and helicopters in Vietnam.
That stew of far-fetched objectives, notions of easy victory, and the naivete of star decisionmakers again brought failure. Bush also pledged a “Marshall Plan” for Iraq and Afghanistan. As disclosed in 2023, Pentagon officials argued that a three-year timeline to reconstruct Iraq was too long. Democratization and all else had to be accomplished in less than a year.
By 2007, Rice, by then secretary of state, concluded of the war in Iraq, “I didn’t think it would be this tough.” She might as well have been complaining about Afghanistan, too.
Reliving the Past
Each time Americans awaken to failure, they hear experts insist that it was the particulars of a war that had gone wrong, not that the overall objective was misconceived.
After the Korean Armistice, for example, MacArthur’s friends on Capitol Hill kept asserting that he should have been allowed to win through escalation with China. Never mind that China itself had barely begun to intervene while 500,000 Red Army soldiers hovered near Russia’s twelve-mile border with North Korea. Still, the argument keeps being repeated.
Kissinger amplified it in his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957): “We could have achieved a substantial military victory” in Korea had America just committed but four more divisions against China’s PLA (which was limitless). And, in 2016, another eminent professor, who had served as a Bush appointee at the State Department, reflected that MacArthur “would probably“ have pushed the PLA back to the Yalu if only Truman had allowed him to resume the offensive. The Joint Chiefs and the Senate Armed Services Committee knew otherwise at the time.
The time loop continues regarding Vietnam. Fighting a “better war” would have achieved the mission. It’s the title of a seminal book by soldier-scholar Robert Sorley (1999). South Vietnam, this version goes, could have been saved if Westmoreland just hadn’t adopted what the army called a “war of attrition” against the victors of Dien Bien Phu. The better tactics of Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Abrams, it’s argued, should have been applied from the start.
Similar regrets arise from Iraq and Afghanistan. If only the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority hadn’t demobilized Saddam Hussein’s army overnight in 2002, we hear, or—to believe General David Petraeus, the most political general since MacArthur—a big, last-minute military commitment in 2021 “might have precluded withdrawal entirely“ from Afghanistan.
On balance, how could any of those original propositions that took the United States into war not have been sound? Surely, we merely bungled the follow-through. Therefore, new shibboleths arise as we repeat with a revived certainty that—next time—America will get things right.
While Americans licked their wounds into the winter of 1953-1954, the Eisenhower administration courted trouble.
Vice President Richard Nixon visited Indochina from October 30 to November 4, while touring the Far East. It was the first of his eight visits to Vietnam, the last in 1969. His statements in Saigon and Hanoi were designed to offset France’s disillusionment with what was already a seven-year-long, U.S.-financed war. He intended to quash any inclinations in Paris for a settlement, as had just occurred in Korea.
Eisenhower and Capitol Hill wouldn’t let an armistice without a victory happen twice. To this end, adamant U.S. backing of France’s bloody mountain and jungle campaign continued through the winter of 1954, which the United States chose so confidently to inherit a decade later.
“I want them to send more troops,” Ho Chi Minh said to the astonished Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin in 1963 when he was warned about the consequences of defying the Americans. He could not have devised a better strategy to cripple his giant opponent. Washington played into its enemy’s hands when it swamped South Vietnam with a half million men. A dozen years earlier, it had played into China’s when 200,000 GIs, Marines, and South Korean soldiers marched to the Yalu. Ho Chi Minh’s insight about getting the United States to work against itself peaked during the “Global War on Terror.” By then, it was Osama bin Laden’s wishes that were fulfilled when the United States embarked on remaking Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire Middle East.
In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Collins (Bill Murray) got to escape the time loop, but so far, we are stuck. Anger over the latest “forever wars” shadows the 2024 elections, as do proxy wars and new entanglements. The way out is, first, to accept that the U.S. “national security establishment” is not up to the task of political-military leadership. Yes, the United States won the Cold War. But that was a generation ago, and victory entailed countless diversions, including 100,000 dead on the Pacific Rim.
There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force. The examples of winter 2023-2024 include collapsed approaches to Ukraine and the Middle East. Whatever the compelling doctrines of such experts, most of them are winging it when in office, as did earlier high political appointees like Bundy, Kissinger, and Rice.
A lifetime of recurring moral and practical failures can be averted. Steps include a more restrained approach to the nation’s security and political fixes like limiting patronage positions in State, Defense, and other parts of the politico-military bureaucracy. Doing so in no way undercuts U.S. advantages of industrial, financial, commercial, and cultural engagement with the world. On the other hand, failing at a fifth misguided war could be the end of the story.
Derek Leebaert is the author of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, among other books. He was a founding editor of International Security and is a co-founder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.