America’s record of failed wars exposes the limits of military power and raises serious questions about Australia’s continued reliance on the United States.
Throughout the Cold War years, and since, the USA has become a seemingly formidable military power in the world. It has a huge military. It has amassed the largest stockpiles of weaponry, including nuclear weapons, on earth. It has military bases strategically located around the world and spy satellites in space, leading to a widespread belief that America is the sole invincible superpower astride the globe.
That is Donald Trump’s view. It is also a view shared by some compliant Australian politicians and commentators. And, as the ABC’s 4 Corners program has exposed, it is a ploy eagerly peddled around the parliament by lobbyists who possess the self-assurance of sellers of snake oil. The problem with true believers in an invincible US superpower is that America’s track record at war-mongering since the end of World War II can hardly be reassuring, at least for those war-mongers in our midst.
Consider, for example, some major wars in which the gargantuan US military machine has been the lead protagonist. It was pushed to a near defeat, and then a stalemate, in the Korean War. It was defeated in the Vietnam War. After fighting the longest war in its history in Afghanistan, its ignominious withdrawal under the Biden administration (effectively a surrender) saw the vile Taliban regime take power. All of these wars came at a terrible cost in terms of blood and treasure, both for the US and for the countries involved.
And then there is the war with Iran. Professor John Mearsheimer has already identified it as a disastrous defeat for America. The Trump administration is now flailing around trying to extricate itself from a catastrophe entirely of its own making. The global economy is choked by the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz. The successors to the ‘decapitated’ Iranian leadership are stronger than ever. Iran’s march towards acquiring nuclear weapons has not been halted. Meanwhile, the US’s Gulf allies are being pounded by Iranian drones and American bases in the region are under attack. Lives are being lost. People are being wounded. Vital infrastructure is being fractured.
So, despite its enormous military capability, why has the American so-called superpower been so devastatingly unsuccessful in its war-mongering?
What so-called ‘great powers’ fail to understand is that bombing the proverbial out of smaller states rarely works if the governments and citizens of those states are prepared to endure extreme hardship and suffering over long periods in order to repel a great power’s attacks. That should have been the lesson for Washington in the wars mentioned above.
This was starkly evident during the Vietnam War when the Vietcong humiliated the US, with American personnel fleeing in helicopters from the rooftop of their Saigon embassy, like rats jumping from a sinking ship.
What is rarely acknowledged is the low morale among the American forces fighting in Vietnam which contributed to undermining their commitment to a war which many soldiers believed was unjustified, even unwinnable. Many US soldiers, too, were (and still today are) recruited from working-class and ethnic minority backgrounds, and were (and still are) often bullied, mistreated, punished, or misled by white superior officers. Drug taking and alcohol bingeing added to an undercurrent of insubordination that in some cases resulted in ‘fragging’ (murdering) officers with exploding grenades.
Low morale continues to menace the fighting capability of US forces, as illustrated by angry sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has now been hastily recalled from its prolonged deployment in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s references to armed forces personnel as “losers” and “suckers” certainly don’t help.
But there is another historical factor that makes America’s war-mongering even more problematic. It was identified by Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Towards the end of his book, Kennedy focused on the USSR and the USA superpowers, alluding to their eventual fall. The tipping point, he noted, would be when they separately began to invest far more in preparing for their war-mongering than in the truly productive sectors of their economies. The Soviet Union finally fell over by 1989, largely because the Kremlin had wrecked the Russian economy by massively over-investing in preparing for its war-mongering crimes.
A similar trajectory is now occurring in the United States where for far too long the military-industrial complex has been siphoning off vast swathes of the US budget to enable the military to engage in war-mongering – Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, etc. All to no avail! President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex back in 1961. If ever there were a ‘deep state’ in the US, this surely is it! Its power to influence – and even threaten – presidents and Congress is unconstrained.
And now, the war against Iran has seriously depleted America’s stocks of bombs, missiles, and related war-mongering technologies. While this will be a godsend to the CEOs and shareholders of the mega-corporations that make up the military-industrial complex, it means that other urgent claims on the American budget cannot be met, exacerbating an already deeply divided and unequal society.
What does this all mean for Australia? There is a prevailing belief in this country that America remains our ‘great and powerful friend’. We’ve willingly – if naïvely or obtusely – been complicit in nearly all of America’s war-mongering crimes since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in the early 1950s. This means that Australian blood and treasure have been spent by submissive governments in all the defeats that America has suffered over that time. In effect, Australia has gained nothing but lost much, including a great deal of its sovereignty. The AUKUS madness is just the latest example of this wanton profligacy by ill-advised governments, ideological commentators, and self-interested lobbyists.
Australia must comprehensively disengage from America’s criminal war-mongering. As historian Geoffrey Blainey once noted: “For every thousand pages on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace.” It’s time for Australia to become a regional and global peace power.
Dr Allan Patience is an honorary fellow in political science in the University of Melbourne.