Why Do U.S. Presidents Keep Risking Foreign Quagmires?

During the past three-quarters of a century, beginning in 1950 and continuing right through to the current war with Iran, U.S. presidents repeatedly have risked involvement in conflicts that resulted in military quagmires with disappointing endings. Why do presidents keep repeating the same mistakes in the name of “national security”? 

By 1950, the U.S. government had taken then-poor South Korea out of the U.S. defense perimeter. The United States had withdrawn its forces after the Second World War, because the Joint Chiefs of Staff became resigned to the fact that non-strategic South Korea would eventually come under the influence of the Soviet Union because of its proximity to the opposing superpower. This exclusion North Korea took as a green light to invade the South. In response, President Harry Truman panicked and, without getting a congressional declaration of war or any congressional approval, rushed U.S. air and naval forces to help the South Koreans and then later added large ground forces. The American and South Korean forces repelled the invasion back to roughly the 38th parallel, the original boundary between North and South. Then the worst mission creep in American military history occurred.

Bedazzled with success, Truman then succumbed to General Douglas MacArthur’s plan to go north of the 38th parallel to liberate North Korea from communism, despite Chinese warnings not to come near the Yalu River, the border between China and North Korea. As the U.S. military disregarded the clear signals, the threatened Chinese launched a massive invasion of Korea, pushing allied forces back to close to the 38th parallel. Truman, unable to extricate himself for two long years of continuing slaughter on both sides, chose not to run for re-election because of the unpopular war. He then turned the tar baby over along with the presidency to General Dwight Eisenhower, who wisely called it quits.

Military quagmires in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, the 20-year loss to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the debacle in Iraq are fresher in the public mind. Virulent anticommunism—after China fell to the communists in 1949 and after the Korean War—pressured the Democratic Party to fear losing Vietnam, as Truman had been blamed for losing China. President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated war in an economic and strategic backwater that he knew in advance would probably end poorly. Again, a president’s political career suffered from the lingering pointless slaughter. When Richard Nixon took over, he delayed fulfilling his pledge to withdraw until after his reelection because he didn’t want to be blamed for the first losing American war; tens of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives were lost in those four years.

The long failures in Afghanistan and Iraq are even fresher in the public mind. Instead of merely trying to hunt down Osama bin Laden and degrade Al Qaeda after 9/11, President George W. Bush, disregarding British and recent Soviet failures to remodel the “graveyard of empires” through military force, engaged in a nation-building Afghan war that he had purported to despise. He also peddled the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11 and would likely give his alleged (but nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, all as an excuse to invade. The invasion turned into a counterinsurgency nightmare that created more terrorists, including the even more virulent ISIS, which rampaged across the region. Again, it was very difficult for subsequent presidents to get out of military tar pits once the U.S. military was in them.

So, the lesson for U.S. presidents should be to be wary of intervening in places where an escalation trap exists—that is, where the president must escalate or be blamed for losing the war when things don’t initially meet stated expectations.

Although we don’t know for sure, it seems that President Donald Trump—bedazzled by the quick attack on Venezuela to kidnap Nicolas Maduro and favorable publicity received for plinking boats in the drug war—was convinced by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that starting a massive air campaign against Iran would avenge alleged Iranian attempts to assassinate Trump and that decapitating the leadership would lead to regime change.

Trump has seemed surprised that the 47-year-old institutionalized regime was more entrenched than he thought and that, when threatened with regime change, it would pull out all the stops to save itself by threatening oil shipments to the world through the Strait of Hormuz and attacking Israel and the Gulf Arab states with drones and missiles. Now, Trump is escalating by sending thousands of Marines and Army troops to join the 50,000 already in the region—threatening to conquer Iranian oil facilities on Kharg Island to pressure Iran to open the strait, or perhaps to use them directly on the shores to open it.

Trump has now entered the escalation trap. He can’t credibly say he won the war unless the strait is opened. But attempts to eliminate the threat to the waterway and keep it open near a hostile Iran may result in a long war involving higher American casualties in an already unpopular war or blowback from Iranian-linked terrorism against U.S. targets for a long time, including on American territory.

But it is not all Trump’s fault. The trouble started after the Second World War. During that war, defense production had to be more massive than in any previous war. After the war ended, defense industries outside of cities lobbied for continued production during peacetime, creating a permanent defense industry (sometimes called the military-industrial complex or MIC) for the first time in American history. Then after the Korean War, a large army was retained during peacetime, another first in U.S. history. This not only gave plenty of business to the MIC, but also made it more convenient for the president to start wars without congressional approval, as the Constitution still requires. The MIC and the pressure on the president to intervene everywhere and anywhere in the world with a large standing military—which gives him the capacity to do so—have been underlying factors in all the quagmires since the Second World War.