TEHRAN – U.S. military superiority and ever-rising defense spending have not prevented Washington from repeating its wartime failures, making a victory against Iran highly unlikely.

Yesterday it was Venezuela. Next week it could be Cuba or Greenland, or who knows where the next U.S. war will erupt? That is aside from the continuing U.S. bombing campaign in Somalia, which has already been carried out 75 times since the start of this year alone and is barely noticed by the American mainstream media.

And who knows what else to expect in an increasingly bizarre world from a president who repeatedly promised throughout his election campaign that he would never start a war?

Recently, the Secretary of War, an office that could hardly be more candid in the age of the man who needs no introduction, Pete Hegseth, warned that: “What happens with the future of Cuba is in the hands of the President of the United States and the leadership of Cuba. No matter what, the Department of War is going to be prepared and postured for any possible contingency.”

Historian of American culture and author, Tom Engelhardt, notes that any contingency is imaginable except, of course, victory, which has effectively disappeared from the American vocabulary since the end of the Second World War, or, for that matter, peace.

What could go wrong in a world that now boasts, astonishingly, its first trillionaire, Elon Musk, who is sometimes Donald Trump’s ally? Senator Elizabeth Warren summed it up plainly: “People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part. They’re right. The system is rigged.”

Engelhardt asks what could go wrong on such a manipulated planet? Certainly nothing that Trump or Musk seems capable of imagining.

What could go wrong in a world where no American president appears to recognize that the United States simply does not win wars, no matter how powerful it becomes or how enormous the Pentagon’s ever-expanding budget grows? That budget could soon reach $1.5 trillion a year if Trump has his way.

Ironically, it is still described in Congress as “defense” spending.

 Imperial wars

Trump remains at war, or perhaps simply in chaos, with Iran, a country roughly 10,000 kilometers from Washington, D.C., yet somehow portrayed as vital to American power on this planet.

Iran has once again closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 25 percent of the world’s oil and 20 percent of its natural gas normally pass, while Trump has threatened to seize control of the strait himself.

Engelhardt argues that the grim, indeed terrifying, logic behind what Trump is doing has become unmistakably clear, or at least should be to anyone with even a basic understanding of the history of the American empire since its victory in the Second World War in 1945.

Yet people continue to treat Trump as though he were a unique figure in American history. In some respects, he certainly is.

But the picture changes completely when it comes to the American way of war. There, Trump seems little more than another tedious chapter in a story spanning more than three-quarters of a century, a story of how what once appeared to be the most powerful nation on the planet, throughout the long decades after the Second World War, simply could not win a war.

President Harry Truman plunged the United States into a major conflict in Korea, nearly 11,000 kilometers from Washington, in 1950. When the war ended three years later, the United States had left roughly half of the Korean Peninsula under North Korean control.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy expanded American support for what had been the French colony in Indochina, following the French army’s defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu by Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary forces in 1954.

He then oversaw what would become a full-scale American war in Vietnam, about 13,600 kilometers from the United States, alongside conflicts in Laos, at a similar distance, and Cambodia, nearly 14,400 kilometers away.

The Indochina wars continued for another 14 years before ending in 1975 with a catastrophic American withdrawal from Vietnam amid widespread chaos and a crushing defeat.

In 2001, President George W. Bush launched the war in Afghanistan, around 11,000 kilometers from Washington, as part of what he called the “Global War on Terror,” which ironically saw a drastic rise in global terror.

That conflict lasted another 20 years before ending, predictably, in a devastating American defeat and the chaotic withdrawal of the last U.S. troops, completing a process initiated by Trump and concluded by President Joe Biden in 2021.

In 2003, Bush invaded Iraq, nearly 10,000 kilometers from Washington. That conflict ended under President Barack Obama with yet another defeat in 2011, even though Washington continued to participate in some fighting there afterward.

Rising military spending

This says nothing of America’s other military campaigns across the globe, including the seemingly endless air war in Somalia, whose origins date back to military intervention under President George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s and which continues to this day without any meaningful sign of success.

To underline the obvious, the greatest true imperial power on the planet, and the only one left standing after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has failed to achieve any significant military victory since the end of the Second World War in 1945, right up to Trump’s present moment, 80 years later.

This is, of course, the country with the largest military in the world, one that spends more on its armed forces, still labeled “defense spending,” even if the responsible department were renamed the Department of War, than the next six countries combined, accounting for 33 percent of total global military expenditure.

Engelhardt urges readers to remember this before Trump even attempts to raise annual military spending from roughly $1 trillion to nearly $1.5 trillion.

Despite the huge numbers, this is still a power that has not won a single war since the end of the Second World War.

No victory in a war with Iran

So, in light of all this, what should be expected from Trump’s war against Iran?

The American president and military are capable of inflicting destruction there, just as they did in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They are equally capable of killing vast numbers of civilians and turning the region into the center of a potential catastrophe. Trump has already insisted on reimposing an American naval blockade on Iranian ports while portraying himself and his country as the “guardian” of the Strait of Hormuz.

Engelhardt argues that history points to a different conclusion: Trump and those around him will not, in reality, be able to achieve victory in a war against Iran. When it comes to war and imperial powers, the United States has produced one of the great narratives of defeat in the modern era.

That may help explain why China, widely regarded as a rising global superpower, has shown little desire to follow the same path. It is true that China fought a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979, skirmished with India along their disputed border in 2020 and 2021, and has significantly expanded and modernized its military and nuclear forces in recent years.

Even so, China appears to have little interest in embracing the traditional imperial model of waging global wars, having witnessed the lesson offered by the United States: spending vast sums on futile conflicts, decade after decade, right up to the present. History may never have seen an imperial power with a record quite like it.