Words of War

By Eliot A. Cohen

Thursday, May 28, 2026

 

Decades ago, it was a truism that the 24/7 news cycle exercised a malign influence on policy making. It kept senior leaders fixated on a flickering television screen when their time would have been better spent weighing evidence, debating alternatives, and considering opposing views. All true. But today we contend with 24/7 commentary, which is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it, even as it causes a kind of dry rot of our good judgment.

 

Supporters of the Trump administration’s war against Iran periodically complain that much of the criticism the administration faces is as ludicrous as denouncing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war leadership in April 1942 would have been, before Midway, Guadalcanal, and the North Africa landings. They have no record of extending that sort of charity to previous administrations, but that does not invalidate the larger point.

 

The 24/7 commentary treadmill means that certain simplifying words get used over and over. But in war, above all things, realities are almost invariably complex. Take the very word war. Advocates and critics of the Iran conflict assume, without question, that this is a war that began on February 28, and that it was launched by President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

That is arguably the biggest strategic mistake of all: not knowing when the war you are in began, or even who started it. The past few months of bombing, blockading, and missile and drone strikes are but the latest campaign in a war that began at the inception of the Islamic Republic. American service personnel have died for nearly five decades at the hands of Iranian mines, IEDs, and missiles. The speeches of Iran’s leaders leave little doubt that they believe that they have always been at war with the United States and Israel. Their unprovoked missile attacks on Israel and acts of terrorism in the past few years alone—including the attempted assassination of Trump during the Biden administration—suggest that we should concede the possibility that they may be right.

 

Americans hate long wars, to the point that they frequently refuse to acknowledge their existence. Yet World War II did not begin at Pearl Harbor: Arguably it began in 1937, when Japan began its major onslaught against China. The Vietnam War did not begin in 1965, with the shift of American forces to conventional combat rather than advice and support; it had begun by 1946, and perhaps earlier. And although Islamists of various stripes think the Crusades are an interesting and important model to study, Americans blanch at the idea of a war lasting centuries, and fought over religious issues, no less. This current bout of fighting looks different, however, if one frames it as merely a particularly violent episode in a much longer conflict.

 

The words victory and defeat are often misleading. Even wars that seem exceptionally clear-cut in their outcomes can be ambiguous. The Japanese were vanquished by American naval and air power in World War II, but they achieved a major war aim, shattering permanently the European empires of East Asia. Hitler perished in the bunker in Berlin, but achieved much of his most vital war aim, the destruction of European Jewry. And although Britain was, in one sense, a victor in that war, it lost its vitality, empire, and sense of world power.

 

In some wars, everyone loses. In others, both sides may reasonably claim victory. At the end of the War of 1812 the British believed, correctly, that they had administered a thorough drubbing to the Americans, saved Canada from conquest, and demonstrated the supremacy of British naval power. The Americans, for their part, believed (equally correctly) that Britain could no longer project power into the North American heartland to block America’s westward expansion, and that they had taught the Royal Navy a healthy respect for America’s naval potential. Canadians celebrate today the formation of a distinct identity based on the cooperation of their varied peoples in fighting off American invaders. Native Americans, who were not formally parties to the war, were in fact its only real losers.

 

Sometimes the words winning and losing make little sense. Wars are composed, as Churchill once said, “of trends and episodes,” by which he meant the long-term pressures applied by such measures as blockade and bombing, and the sharp fighting of battles with a defined beginning and end. In the present case, is Iran winning by closing the Strait of Hormuz? In some ways, yes, but then again, its oil exports are equally strangled, and it has suffered a battering by the two most advanced air forces in the world, using the world’s most advanced munitions, guided by exceptional intelligence. Maybe winning the narrative counts as victory, but that does not make good hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. In the current war, both sides have had successes and failures; better to accept that this will not resemble a basketball game, with a single outcome based on points.

 

The most overused word is quagmire, easily found in foreign-policy periodicals, politicians’ speeches, and pundits’ sound bites. It is a lazy word. When you go into a quagmire, you are sunk, and will either die there or come out exhausted and filthy. It is a word that, like much of the commentary surrounding war, assumes away not only variable outcomes but the importance of operational choices, individual personalities, accident, fortune, and contingency—in short, the stuff of any real war.

 

Quagmire became particularly prevalent in American usage to describe the Vietnam War, and that is the implicit comparison lurking behind its use today, now compounded by the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. Applying it to a war in which the United States has not sent (and is very unlikely to send) large expeditionary forces to fight a protracted insurgency, but rather is using air power and a naval blockade against a state, is ludicrous.

 

For decades after the Civil War, Republican politicians could guarantee reelection by “waving the bloody shirt,” reminding voters that a lot of Democrats had either been southerners or sympathized with the southern cause. It was a good way to avoid having to come up with solutions to the problems the country faced. So, too, waving the bloody shirt of Iraq, or harkening back to the jungles of Vietnam, fails to aid in understanding the particular problem of Iran, which all U.S. administrations have had to face since 1979, and none successfully.

 

None of this excuses the blundering and incompetence of the Trump administration’s entry into the war, and quite likely its conduct of it. The administration did not begin, as it should have, by occupying key islands around the strait, deploying such mine-hunting assets as the Navy possesses to the theater, devising schemes for war insurance, or, above all, securing the support of allies rather than spewing venom at them.

 

But it does suggest that we should be wary of lazy pronouncements, festooned with questionable analogies and tired catchphrases. That the administration is often simpleminded in its reasoning and outrageous in its rhetoric does not excuse any of its critics for behaving in the same way. Worse still, it is all too easy to slide from slipshod thinking into prophecies to which one clings despite disconfirming evidence. From there it is not that far to begin rooting, in effect, for your country’s enemies to prove you right.