Why America Hasn’t Won a War in Thirty Years — The Triple Failure of Its Way of War and the Lost Weinberger–Powell Doctrine

Daalder counts them off on his fingers — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the current Iran conflict. Only the 1991 Gulf War qualifies as a genuine victory, and the core lesson of that victory — restrained war aims — has been repeatedly discarded ever since. What his analysis reveals is not a shortfall in firepower but a fundamental structural defect in the American way of thinking about war.

Below are the three layers of structural failure that Daalder identifies, along with the corrective framework he endorses but that successive administrations have abandoned — the Weinberger–Powell Doctrine.

Failure One: Inverting Means and Ends

Daalder sees the first flaw in the American war model as a misordering of war’s means and ends. Rather than first defining a political objective and then choosing the appropriate means, Washington uses military force first and hopes the political outcome will follow naturally. Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, Operation Shock and Awe in Iraq, Operation Epic Fury against Iran — every time, overwhelming force is committed in the conviction that comprehensive destruction will purchase the desired result. It never has.

The root of this inversion lies in standing the Clausewitzian definition of war on its head: war is treated not as the continuation of politics but as the second-best option once politics has been abandoned. The U.S. government treats war as the last resort after diplomacy has broken down, rather than as one instrument among many in a carefully designed political toolkit. Going into war without having thought through “what happens after we win” is, in Daalder’s view, the starting point of every subsequent error.

Failure Two: Strategic Overreach

The second flaw is that America sets war aims that are grandiose and unmoored from reality: regime change, civilizational transformation, exporting democracy, the end of terrorism — objectives that lie beyond what military force can accomplish. Military force can topple a regime, but it cannot install an entirely new system of governance in a society. It can disintegrate a terrorist organization, but it cannot remove the political soil in which terrorism grows.

Daalder holds up the Gulf War as a control sample: George H. W. Bush won because he withstood pressure from all sides and locked the mission onto a single clear, limited objective — “expelling the Iraqi forces that invaded Kuwait.” A 34-nation coalition, international legitimacy, explicit exit conditions — this operation is still regarded as the standard template for American military intervention abroad. George W. Bush, urged on by the same circle of advisers, made the diametrically opposite decision — topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, remake the Middle East — and ended up dragging the United States into a decade-long quagmire, emboldening Iran, and dismantling the regional order.

Failure Three: Ignoring Asymmetric Motivation

The most fatal flaw, Daalder argues, is that Washington’s decision-makers consistently underestimate their adversaries’ “asymmetric motivation” — believing that absolute force can compensate for a gap in will. His examples are telling: the Viet Cong, the Taliban, the Ba’ath Party, Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries — none of them lost a war because they failed to grasp how ferocious American firepower is. Quite the contrary: they knew exactly how wide the military gap was, but they also knew exactly why they were fighting.

The 1968 Tet Offensive is the textbook case of this flaw: in purely military terms the Viet Cong achieved none of their objectives of occupation, yet the scale and suddenness of the offensive shattered the American public’s will to fight. “The Viet Cong knew why they were fighting; Washington had long since lost its bearings” — a sentence verified again and again in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now come true once more in the Iran conflict: the United States has drawn up no contingency for a possible Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, put forward no plan for nurturing a moderate successor, and left itself no exit in the event of failure.

The Weinberger–Powell Doctrine: An Abandoned Standard

After the critique, Daalder offers a reusable corrective framework: the Weinberger–Powell Doctrine. Born in the aftermath of Vietnam and distilled by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, its core demands are:

• Use force only when a core national interest is at stake
• Possess clear and attainable military objectives
• Guarantee victory with overwhelming force
• Secure broad support, both domestic and international
• Have a clear exit strategy
• Resort to war only as a last resort

This doctrine was perfectly vindicated in the Gulf War — and was then gradually abandoned by successive administrations. After 9/11, it was displaced by the Rumsfeld Doctrine, with its emphasis on rapid response: a more aggressive, more adventurist, less constrained set of rules for the use of force. Daalder points out that the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, claims to be guided by the Weinberger Doctrine in the military campaign against Iran — yet his actual conduct has departed from every single one of its precepts.

Known Contradictions

Daalder’s analytical framework is narrative in nature; it assigns no quantitative weight to each failure. Among the three failures he lists, “inverting means and ends” and “strategic overreach” overlap heavily across different wars — the Iraq War exhibits the first and the second failure at once, yet the causal relationship between the two remains unclear. Beyond that, Daalder sidesteps a key question: even if the United States returned to the Weinberger–Powell Doctrine, how would a “clear exit strategy” be defined in complex proxy wars and counterinsurgency operations? — the doctrine’s boundary of applicability in an age of great-power competition is a question Daalder leaves unanswered.