Military victory remains an alluring idea for governments across the globe. A short, violent campaign that swiftly defeats an enemy promises immense payoffs at a tolerable price. The Trump administration expected precisely such an outcome regarding Iran in February 2026. The Netanyahu government sought a similar swift resolution in Gaza beginning in October 2023, later expanding its military ambitions to Lebanon and Iran. Russian President Vladimir Putin similarly assumed his 2022 invasion of Ukraine would deliver a quick, decisive battlefield triumph.
Many critics of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have long decried a supposed failure to achieve traditional military victory, contrasting those protracted engagements with the decisive battlefield outcomes they believe were achieved in the 1990–91 Gulf War and World War II. Until recently, the overarching debate regarding U.S. aid to Ukraine featured widespread calls to help the country secure a pure military victory, frequently dismissing negotiations as a form of dangerous appeasement.
Yet, those who invoke the term rarely define what it actually entails. "Victory" fundamentally means achieving the political aims for which a nation went to war. However, the phrase "military victory" implies considerably more. The modifier signals that those core objectives are secured directly through combat rather than at a bargaining table. Negotiations inherently require compromise and invite stalling that can easily exhaust a nation’s political will. Battlefield victory, by contrast, dangles the tempting promise of a prostrate enemy with no meaningful choice but to accept the victor’s terms strictly on the victor’s timetable. This enticing promise is precisely what makes the concept of military victory so attractive and ubiquitous in modern statecraft.
Nevertheless, the notion of military victory is a dangerous and persistent myth. All modern wars ultimately end in negotiated settlements; diplomatic talks are never merely a second-best fallback option. To successfully end a war, both belligerent sides must consciously choose to stop fighting, and those choices invariably require nontrivial bargaining. Destruction matters, of course, as it is precisely what distinguishes war from peacetime politics. However, the true role of military force is to shape the contours of the bargain, not to completely annihilate the enemy—an outcome that almost never happens in contemporary conflict.
This myth of military victory has repeatedly led governments to launch or prolong wars based on false premises regarding how those conflicts would eventually conclude. The Trump administration believed military force could compel Iran’s unconditional surrender; instead, the United States has found itself mired in a costly stalemate. The Netanyahu government’s deep conviction that it can utterly defeat Hamas militarily has significantly lengthened the war in Gaza in pursuit of an unattainable goal. Similarly, Putin’s persistent expectation of a battlefield triumph in Ukraine has trapped both nations in a grinding war with no apparent endgame in sight.
Should Chinese leader Xi Jinping make this same fundamental mistake, an attack on Taiwan could easily ensnare Beijing in a conflict that is far easier to start than to stop, carrying strategic stakes that extend well beyond the Taiwan Strait. Conversely, if Washington assumes it could secure a clean military victory in a potential war with China, it too could find itself exhausted in a fight it cannot easily conclude.
Muddled thinking regarding how wars conclude also breeds prewar errors in intelligence, modernization, and force design. Furthermore, misunderstanding the intrinsic relationship between bargaining and fighting produces a systematic failure to integrate overarching negotiating strategy with military campaign planning. As long as policymakers fail to grasp that wars truly end only when both sides are ready to lay down their arms, they will continue to be frustrated by the inherent inability of military force alone to achieve their ultimate political goals.
Carthage Was the Exception
No modern war has successfully destroyed an enemy’s underlying ability to resist. Combatants can almost always keep fighting if they choose to do so, even after enemies sweep their conventional military forces from the field or capture their capital city. Such persistence can dramatically reverse fortunes and ultimately decide wars. Winning a war requires offering surviving and potential fighters a deal that they actively prefer to continued resistance. These deals can certainly be one-sided, but terms and bargaining always matter: no war ends unless both sides choose to accept a settlement and stop fighting.
The only true alternative is to physically annihilate one’s enemies entirely. Rome succeeded in doing so when it ended the Third Punic War by enslaving Carthage’s surviving citizens and, according to historical legend, salting the city’s ruins so that nothing would grow there again. Yet no war in the modern era has met this stringent criterion, and vanishingly few have even come close. Since the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, defeated parties in interstate wars have lost a median of just eight percent of their active forces. In two-thirds of those historical cases, that figure remained under ten percent. The sole country to lose more than 90 percent of its forces was Paraguay, during the catastrophic Triple Alliance War from 1864 to 1870. Most belligerents willingly accept defeat—meaning settlement on highly unfavorable terms—long before their actual capacity to resist is exhausted.
War-ending settlements can be explicit or tacit. Explicit negotiations involve direct communication, formal offers, and counteroffers, such as the Korean War armistice and the 1995 Dayton Accords that concluded the Bosnian war. Tacit bargaining, on the other hand, utilizes actions, implicit threats, or public declarations to signal acceptance or rejection of terms without holding formal talks.
The 1990–91 Gulf War, for instance, ended when the U.S.-led coalition announced a unilateral cease-fire, and the Iraqi forces simultaneously stopped fighting, completely bypassing diplomatic exchanges. Combat had clearly demonstrated to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that continued resistance would bring further coalition advances, potentially threatening Baghdad itself. The cease-fire signaled that U.S. and allied forces would securely hold their positions if the Iraqis did the exact same. Saddam understood the signal and reciprocated. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the coalition commander, subsequently instructed Baghdad to send a military delegation to Safwan airfield to negotiate the final disengagement.
The resulting arrangement heavily favored the United States and its allies. They successfully liberated Kuwait, which was their central war aim. Saddam managed to preserve his domestic regime but lost all his territorial conquests and faced crippling postwar restrictions, leaving him demonstrably worse off than he was prior to his initial invasion.
This was an unambiguous victory, but it was definitively not achieved by destroying Iraq’s overall capacity to resist. At the moment of the cease-fire, the Iraqi army retained the vast majority of its prewar strength. Up to 50,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed and 75,000 wounded out of an active force exceeding one million—representing under 15 percent total casualties. More than 800,000 troops survived and theoretically could have kept fighting. Indeed, just days later, Iraqi forces violently crushed Shiite uprisings in the south.
Saddam’s decision to halt in 1991 was not a mere passive acceptance of reality. Iraq’s subsequent experience in its next war with the United States starkly illustrates why. In 2003, the Iraqi military disintegrated after a mere seven weeks of conventional fighting, with soldiers abandoning their posts, weapons, and commanders while shedding their uniforms. By mid-May, Saddam could bring vastly less military power to bear than he could at Safwan in 1991. If a country could ever truly end a war by completely disarming the enemy, the United States should have accomplished this in Iraq by May 2003. Yet, it did not.
Although the Iraqi military could no longer hold ground or directly resist coalition advances, many of its former soldiers carried on fighting even after Baghdad fell and their only remaining option was to resort to irregular guerrilla tactics. Sunni Baathists clearly understood the implicit terms on offer: a subjugated life under a newly installed Shiite government. They overwhelmingly preferred to fight on. The U.S. military suffered fewer than 3,000 casualties during the conventional invasion in 2003, but endured more than 33,000 casualties over the subsequent eight years of insurgency. While the insurgents ultimately failed to restore Saddam’s regime, the war did not end in 2003 when Baghdad fell and its uniformed military evaporated.
Afghanistan offers a remarkably similar historical parallel. By mid-2002, the U.S. invasion had effectively disarmed the Taliban’s military apparatus, occupied Kabul, and driven the group’s leadership out of the country entirely. Like the Iraqi Baathists a year later, the Taliban faced a vastly superior enemy controlling their national homeland, with no immediate prospect of ever retaking the capital. If "military victory" could successfully terminate a war, then Afghanistan should have stood as a decisive U.S. success. It was not. Taliban survivors categorically rejected the terms on offer—namely, an Afghan political government that permanently excluded them—even though their immediate strategic situation was far bleaker than Saddam’s had been in 1991. They continued fighting as irregular insurgents, and by 2021 they successfully recaptured Kabul, drove out remaining U.S. forces, and fully restored their rule.
The elusiveness of traditional military victory does not render battlefield effectiveness irrelevant. However, the true purpose of combat is to shape the bargaining leverage of both sides by altering their expectations of future costs, not to completely annihilate the enemy. Success in combat enables productive political talks, but it can never serve as a substitute for them.
Terms of Surrender
Perhaps the most frequently cited historical example of military victory—the imposition of a brute-force triumph on a totally prostrate enemy—is the Allied conquest of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan during World War II. In modern conflicts ranging from Afghanistan to Ukraine and Gaza, policymakers and pundits regularly invoke Germany’s and Japan’s ostensible military destruction, contrasting it directly with wars that concluded via negotiated outcomes. Yet, World War II did not end simply because the vanquished had no alternative other than unconditional surrender. The fighting did not physically disarm either Germany or Japan. Both nations retained the capacity to inflict staggering casualties on the Allies right up until the end, and neither surrendered truly unconditionally. The victors offered explicit terms and conditions to both adversaries. While these concessions were relatively small and the Allies achieved an unambiguous victory, even World War II ultimately concluded through concrete bargains between actors who retained options.
Imperial Japan fielded nearly eight million troops over the course of the war. Fewer than two million died in combat. When Japan formally surrendered in August 1945, more than six million armed, equipped, uniformed, and commanded soldiers remained active in the field. These forces could no longer reclaim Japan’s overseas conquests, which the Allies had steadily rolled back since mid-1942. By the summer of 1945, the United States had driven the Japanese navy back into port and completely severed Tokyo’s control of airspace and vital sea-lanes, leaving Allied forces poised to launch a mainland invasion and depose Emperor Hirohito.
Yet, Japan continued to resist—not because it realistically expected to destroy the Allied militaries, reconquer lost territory, or throw an invasion force back into the sea, but because it sought to secure more tolerable settlement terms by threatening to kill significantly more Allied servicemen than Washington and London were willing to sacrifice. Japan retained substantial leverage. At the battle of Okinawa, which fell in June 1945, Japanese forces inflicted 50,000 casualties on U.S. troops. In August, the U.S. War Department estimated that invading the Japanese mainland would cost hundreds of thousands more lives. Japanese leaders understood this stark math and hoped the grim prospect would persuade Americans to soften their diplomatic terms. Ultimately, it did.
The Allies had famously demanded "unconditional surrender" at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, but they never formally defined what that phrase actually meant. Officials in Tokyo naturally assumed it included dismantling the sacred imperial system and publicly imprisoning the emperor. For more than two years, Japan fought on rather than accept such an unacceptable outcome.
On July 26, 1945, ahead of the planned November invasion of the Japanese mainland, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration. Although the document once again called for "unconditional" surrender, it simultaneously offered multiple explicit conditions. Japan would retain sovereign control over its four main islands, its military personnel would be permitted to return home without enduring internment, the country would keep its domestic industry, and its civilian population would not be subjected to forced labor. Furthermore, Japan would regain access to essential raw materials and international trade. The declaration did not actually demand unconditional surrender; instead, it carefully articulated specific conditions for surrender.
Most importantly, the declaration remained entirely silent regarding the status of the emperor, reflecting extensive and contentious debate among U.S. government officials. Some figures, such as Secretary of State James Byrnes, strongly advocated an explicit demand that Hirohito be prosecuted as a war criminal. Others, such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, argued that this stance would unnecessarily prolong the war and favored allowing Hirohito to remain on the throne. The final document compromised by simply omitting the subject entirely. Stimson hoped Tokyo would interpret this omission as an implicit offer to preserve the monarchy, and he was correct. Tokyo interpreted the silence as a clear signal that the emperor could remain. Hirohito ultimately served as emperor until his death in 1989.
This concession was modest, but it was far from trivial. Regime change remained the central goal of the Allies, but it was never their only objective. The entire U.S. war cabinet valued prosecuting the emperor, yet some members were willing to sacrifice that aim to finally end the conflict while others were not. Sparing Hirohito meant relinquishing an objective that mattered less than total regime change, but one that still carried significant weight.
Holding out for this concession cost Japan dearly. Accepting the pre-Potsdam terms a few months earlier would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and averted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, Tokyo successfully coerced a vital change in the Allies’ offer, meaning its surrender was not genuinely unconditional. The defeat of Japan was a heavily one-sided bargain, not a pure military victory imposed on an opponent completely devoid of agency.
Germany presents a parallel historical case. When the Reich surrendered in May 1945, the Wehrmacht still fielded more than three million armed and actively resisting soldiers. German forces had been steadily losing ground since the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, and by early 1945, Allied armies were advancing deep into the heart of Germany. Yet the German army kept fighting, inflicting severe casualties until the bitter end. During the Battle of Berlin, fought in April and May, more than 360,000 Soviet troops were killed, wounded, or reported missing.
The Wehrmacht’s millions of surviving troops could easily have melted away into the countryside, transitioned to a persistent insurgency, and fought on long after Berlin fell—precisely as the Afghan Taliban and Iraqi Baathists would do decades later. Hitler’s inner circle had actively considered doing just that and had even developed written plans for prolonged guerrilla resistance. Yet his successors ultimately chose to stop the war and formally signed the instrument of surrender on May 7. As with Japan, this was a conscious choice, and the Germans could theoretically have chosen differently. Instead, their leaders decided that the terms on offer were vastly preferable to the catastrophic cost of a protracted struggle that Germany was still fully capable of waging.
Although highly one-sided, the terms Germany accepted did not amount to unconditional surrender either. The Allies offered explicit conditions, which they deliberately softened in early 1945 to persuade the remaining German forces to lay down their arms. That previous autumn, U.S. policymakers had proposed the harsh Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany. Originally outlined by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, it sought to render the country permanently incapable of future aggression by completely deindustrializing it, disarming it, and dividing it into impoverished rump states. The plan would strip Germany of its factories, internationalize the industrial Ruhr Valley, forcibly resettle the region’s workforce elsewhere, destroy its mines, force German civilians into overseas labor, and expropriate all German assets.
When the plan leaked to the public in September 1944, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seized upon it to fiercely rally the German public. If this was what the Allies intended to do, he argued, Germans had no choice but to resist down to their very last cartridge. He instructed German forces in the city of Aachen, then under direct American attack, to transform "every house… a fortress." Blaming the city’s fanatical resistance squarely on the Morgenthau Plan, Allied officials publicly repudiated it and softened their diplomatic position. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt explicitly declared, "It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany."
The eventual surrender terms omitted deindustrialization, forced labor, and permanent economic destruction. In the war’s final weeks, the Allies added explicit conditions ensuring that Germany would avoid formal annexation, remain independent—albeit not sovereign or unitary—and rely on armed German citizens for domestic policing.
These conditions were modest. The Allies won decisively. Germany forfeited all of its wartime territorial aims, suffered decades of foreign military occupation, and remained partitioned for 45 years. Yet the terms on which the war ended were far from trivial. The Allies wanted the Nazi regime gone, but that was not all they desired. The political status of post-Nazi Germany mattered intensely to Germans and Americans alike.
Roosevelt initially preferred a punitive peace that would humble and permanently weaken Germany, but he ultimately settled for a more generous outcome because his first-choice model was clearly unacceptable to the Germans. Intense internal deliberation produced this decision, reflecting a conscious political effort to ease conditions that Allied leaders judged to be excessively harsh. Germany accepted terms that offered at least some postwar guarantees once its signatories understood that the Allies no longer intended to cripple the nation forever. The resulting conclusion was a one-sided and tacit coercive bargain, but a bargain nonetheless.
No Deal, No Peace
No modern war can end without an offer that the enemy can genuinely accept, regardless of how powerful one’s armed forces may be or how one-sided the fighting has become. Belligerents can almost always choose to fight on, just as the Taliban did in 2002 and Iraqi Baathists did in 2003, even after losing their capital cities and conventional militaries, and just as the Germans and Japanese could have done in 1945. This continued resistance can occasionally reverse fortunes dramatically, as it ultimately did for the Taliban by 2021. The choice to continue fighting may be tremendously costly, but it is not necessarily futile.
This distinction is much more than mere semantics. Deep-seated misconceptions about military victory matter profoundly in statecraft. Policymakers who view negotiation as an inferior fallback alternative to military victory frequently reject diplomatic feelers that could otherwise shorten wars or even reverse their ultimate unfavorable outcomes. Following the fall of Kabul, representatives of the former Afghan regime approached the United States seeking a deal that would afford them legal status and a political role in the new Afghanistan. The George W. Bush administration, convinced it had secured a total military victory and had no need to bargain with a vanquished enemy, flatly rejected these diplomatic overtures and established a government that systematically excluded the Taliban and their supporters. The result was two decades of protracted war, tens of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars in wasted costs, and an eventual Taliban restoration far less compatible with U.S. interests than a compromise settlement would have been in 2002.
This structural problem is by no means limited to Afghanistan. During World War II, an underground anti-Hitler resistance movement inside Germany sought to violently topple the Nazi government and negotiate an early end to the war, nearly succeeding in assassinating Hitler in 1944. However, the rigid Allied insistence on unconditional surrender severely hamstrung this domestic opposition. Plotters could hardly persuade other influential German elites to risk their lives in a coup conspiracy when success would yield nothing short of Germany’s total destruction by merciless Allies. Even if the more lenient 1945 terms had been formally offered sooner, the plotters might still have failed, or a coup might have unfolded without producing an earlier settlement. Yet, the unyielding Allied pursuit of military victory did nothing to improve those odds.
The Trump administration’s conflict with Iran offers yet another stark example. While the White House outlined various strategic aims from the outset, it designed its military campaign primarily to compel what President Donald Trump described as Iran’s unconditional surrender, rather than to create meaningful leverage at a bargaining table. Tearing up previous diplomatic deals, launching surprise military strikes amid ongoing talks, and assassinating foreign officials whom Washington had previously identified as being more willing to negotiate—all of which occurred during the opening weeks of the conflict—are not tactics calculated to foster eventual agreement. This persistent expectation of military victory has left the administration without a coherent theory of how to end the fighting, even as costs steadily mount in the form of billions of dollars in expenditures, strained weapons stockpiles, and wider economic disruption.
The war in Ukraine presents this exact same analytical error. Putin initiated a war that he had no feasible mechanism to conclude quickly or cheaply. When Russia’s initial gambit failed by April 2022, Moscow did not return to the fragile diplomatic bargaining track that had briefly opened in March. Instead, the Kremlin escalated the conflict. That September, Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian regions that it did not even fully control—a step that has critically narrowed Moscow’s own room to compromise ever since.
Rather than pursuing serious negotiations, the Kremlin has systematically widened the war through repeated escalations: bombing Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, mobilizing additional reserve forces, and striking at European industry via a thinly veiled sabotage campaign. All wars eventually end at the bargaining table, but no belligerent can summon a viable deal entirely on demand. Both sides must be fundamentally ready to settle, and Russia has shown no such readiness.
Nor could any feasible strategy pursued jointly by the United States and Europe have ended Russia’s war without Putin’s ultimate acquiescence. Even with massive military assistance from the West, Ukraine could no more achieve a total military victory than Russia could, and Moscow’s maximalist terms amounted to the outright termination of Ukrainian sovereignty. From the very beginning, U.S. and European policymakers should have recognized that they were confronting a long war with no easy exit—one that demanded sustained industrial mobilization rather than a series of short-term aid packages. Those piecemeal packages signaled little credibility regarding long-term allied commitment, either to domestic defense contractors or to the Kremlin. The true purpose of combat is to open a functional bargaining space; Putin’s obstinate choices have opened none, and only significantly more hard fighting will produce one.
An Expensive Habit
Failing to understand how wars genuinely conclude regularly yields ill-designed military operations. Because all wars ultimately terminate in a political bargain, the only rational purpose of fighting is to shift the terms of that bargain in one’s favor. Yet, U.S. policymakers rarely integrate negotiating strategy into core campaign planning. American war plans for Afghanistan between 2009 and 2013, including those pursued after official talks with the Taliban began in 2011, notably excluded State Department officials responsible for political settlement and never explained how continued military operations would create diplomatic leverage. Instead, U.S. troops were largely tied down to fixed geographic locations simply to provide local population security. This severely weakened Washington’s diplomatic hand by limiting its ability to dynamically redeploy forces and credibly threaten or reward different Taliban factions based on their willingness to negotiate.
An unhealthy fixation on military victory can similarly distort peacetime defense planning. Contemporary U.S. military structures itself around precarious assumptions of short, decisive wars. Munitions stockpiles are tightly limited, preparation for rapidly reconstituting a highly skilled professional force remains minimal, and the maintenance of reserve weapons and equipment is chronically poor. These policy choices trade long-term staying power for short-term lethality, presupposing that the United States can quickly terminate any future conflict simply by destroying the opposing military. However, if ending a war is fundamentally a matter of coercive bargaining in which enemies can almost always choose to keep fighting, Washington cannot manufacture short wars by fiat. Prudence dictates thoroughly reconsidering strategic choices that assume the exact opposite.
U.S. planners are hardly alone in facing this recurring trap. Short-war assumptions premised on the myth of military victory are dangerous for every major power. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, should not operate under the assumption that a swift military campaign can successfully end a conflict over Taiwan. The duration of such a war would depend heavily on independent choices made in Taipei and Washington—variables that Beijing can certainly influence but never fully control. Initiating a war that only pays off if the enemy surrenders quickly is a massive strategic gamble, one that can easily devolve into a long, grinding conflict whose ultimate costs far outweigh the value of the original stakes.
Nor can the United States assume that maintaining a small stockpile of highly sophisticated advanced weapons would quickly defeat the Chinese military in a protracted clash. If China resolved to fight on, the war would not be short, regardless of the sheer volume of firepower Washington brought to bear. Similarly, if Taiwan were forced to accept deeply unfavorable terms rather than fight on indefinitely, the resulting settlement would be a poor one, no matter how much military assistance Washington provided. U.S. military power can effectively shape the bargaining space, but it cannot win a war in the absence of an agreement where all primary parties accept terms that preserve core U.S. interests.
Planning for such a contingency therefore demands far more than merely tallying ships, missiles, and aircraft. The ultimate outcome of a conflict over Taiwan would depend crucially on Taiwan’s domestic willingness to endure sustained bombardment and maritime blockade, on Xi Jinping’s political calculus weighing the costs of a protracted fight against the risks of backing down, and on the intrinsic motivation of Chinese forces facing large-scale conventional combat for the first time in half a century. These human and political variables are undeniably harder to quantify than comparisons of military hardware, but they are precisely what will determine how such a war ends.
Military force can never completely eliminate an adversary’s independent agency. Policymakers who consistently ignore this foundational reality will continue launching wars that they cannot successfully conclude, leaving their military plans and forces poorly adapted to the actual conflicts they are forced to fight. Clinging blindly to the myth of military victory remains an extraordinarily expensive habit.
