In what amounts to universal journalistic malpractice, Nick B. Steves notes, it goes criminally under-reported that the United States has not, in fact, won an actual war since 1945:
All of this lends confirmation to my suspicion that the US Military, the Red Empire, has itself been Cathedralized, i.e., brought under the reign of her once despised master the Blue Empire, and forced to implement a corporate culture that rewards ideological subservience in place of objective, demonstrable merit.
Certainly the US Military remains the most outrageously powerful fighting force in the world. But only so at increasingly costly supports, bureaucratic restraints, and political favor seeking.
I think it would be more accurate to say that 1945 was the last time the media and academia would present the US as unambiguously victorious. US victory in WWII is textbook Cathedral consensus, but you don’t have to look too far for arguments that the US was a minor player (in coalition with UK and Soviet Union, which did the majority of the fighting) and that the US did not receive a lot of benefits for its participation.
I agree with Space Nookie; how the media paints things is very important. Korea’s a good example: we achieved pretty much all our initial war aims (South Korea existed and its sovereignty was safe, or at least as safe as that of the Western European states we liberated in WWII) but today gets painted as a draw at best. I have a half-serious belief that the reason it was ignored so much it got the “forgotten war” moniker was because it couldn’t be shoehorned into an American defeat narrative!
The First Gulf War was also a pretty resounding victory. Quibbles that it wasn’t a permanent victory, we didn’t “finish the job,” etc. are besides the point. As K. von Clausewitz would point out, there is no such thing as permanent victory; no “finishing the job.” There’s always another war tomorrow.
Well, if anyone won WW2 it was the Soviets. USA won some influence at most as a counter against USSR.
Yes, the strategy of the military in Gulf War I was to win the thing quickly, before the media and the leftist spin machine could lose it for them. It worked fairly well, but it’s not a sign of a healthy culture’s relationship with its armed forces.