When Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 for a second presidential term, he convinced a lot of people within his MAGA movement and many others who deviated wildly from the Trumpist ethos that, in contrast to the incumbent Joe Biden, he would turn away from the image of the United States as a fomenter and supporter of war and focus on the needs of the American public. That is a major reason why he chose JD Vance to be his running mate and why peace-oriented Democrats such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard not only visibly supported him but accepted prominent positions in his administration.

Trump’s rapidly expanding, unprovoked war conjointly waged with Israel against Iran has dispelled many of his supporters’ illusions, even of some insiders such as Joe Kent, Trump’s counterterrorism expert as well as popular media figures, such as conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. With this in mind, I thought it useful to share with Claude my own reading about how this may have come about:

From Roman history we learned the concept of a Pyrrhic victory. Would it make sense today to talk instead about Pyrrhic wars? My sense is that the US has been engaging in a number of such wars thanks to a strategy that consists of doing enough damage to claim a total victory and then allowing the ensuing loss to take so long to play out that the enemy cannot claim a victory. I suspect that there’s even another dimension which can be characterized by the following logic. You launch the war not to obtain victory but to install disorder.

In so doing you prove two things: that you are powerful enough to totally neutralize the military capacity of the enemy, which gives you permanent bragging rights. The second thing is that you’ve created a permanent impossibility for a new order that is in any sense effective to the extent of challenging you in the future.

This logic would seem to apply to all wars perhaps going back to Vietnam or even Korea. I suspect that the pattern became clear enough to constitute a strategy only after two or three failures. Initially, there was hope for traditional victory, but when it proved impossible, creating lasting disorder became the deliberate objective, redefined privately as victory.  

Does such a reading of Washington’s politically defined military strategy over the past 80 years make sense? Has such a theory been formulated by others or is there a public debate that exists around such a concept?

Your analysis is genuinely interesting and touches on several real currents in strategic and political thought. Let me engage with it seriously and then point you toward where related debates actually exist.

The core of your argument

You’re describing something more sophisticated than a Pyrrhic victory — not a win that costs too much, but a deliberately engineered ambiguity where:

1. Military dominance is demonstrated conclusively (the “bragging rights” dimension)
2. Traditional victory is never consolidated, because consolidation would require ongoing costly commitment
3. The resulting disorder serves as a long-term deterrent — no successor state or movement can plausibly challenge you because the preconditions for effective governance have been destroyed
4. The loss is absorbed so slowly and diffusely that no clear defeat can be assigned

This is a genuinely coherent framework, and I think the progression you describe — from Korea through Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan — does reflect something real about how American strategic culture evolved.

Where your theory connects to existing scholarship

Several thinkers have approached this territory, though rarely with your specific framing:

Edward Luttwak, in The Paradox of Strategy and elsewhere, argued that war has an inherent logic that tends to exhaust and reverse itself — but he also noted that great powers increasingly fight wars they consciously design not to win decisively, because the costs of total victory exceed the benefits.

Andrew Bacevich, particularly in The Limits of Power and America’s War for the Greater Middle East, comes closest to your reading. He argues that American military strategy post-Vietnam became decoupled from coherent political objectives — but he frames this as dysfunction rather than as a deliberate strategy of disorder. Your reading is actually more cynical and in some ways more coherent than his.

Noam Chomsky and the broader critical left tradition have argued for decades that American interventions were never really about the stated goals — democracy, stability, counterterrorism — but about demonstrating imperial power and foreclosing alternatives. The destruction of functioning states as an end in itself is implicit in much of this analysis, even if rarely stated so directly.

David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency theorist who advised the US military, argued from the inside that American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from what he called “accidental guerrilla” dynamics — but he, too, frames it as failure rather than design.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine comes at the same phenomenon from an economic angle — arguing that the disorder created by military intervention was deliberately exploited to impose economic restructuring. This partially overlaps with your thesis but privileges economic over military motivations.

The most radical version of your argument appears in some realist IR theory, particularly in the work of people like John Mearsheimer, who argues that the US systematically destabilizes potential regional hegemons — not to build order, but to prevent any order from emerging that could challenge American primacy.

The strongest version of your argument

I think your framework is most persuasive when applied to Iraq (2003 onward). The destruction of the Ba’athist state, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the de-Baathification policy — these decisions make little sense if the goal was stability, but considerable sense if the goal was permanent fragmentation of a state that had previously demonstrated regional ambition. Whether this was strategic design or strategic negligence that was then rationalized is the genuinely hard question.

Where it faces the most challenge

The theory risks over-attributing coherence to what may be a combination of institutional inertia, domestic political pressures, military-industrial incentives, and genuine miscalculation. The strategic culture of Washington is famously fragmented — the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and White House often pursue contradictory goals simultaneously. A true strategy of engineered disorder would require a degree of unified intentionality that the historical record makes difficult to sustain.

There is also a Korean counterexample worth considering: South Korea became a spectacularly successful state and a genuine American ally. That outcome fits poorly with a doctrine of deliberate disorder — unless you argue the doctrine only crystallized after Korea, which is in fact your own suggestion.

A term worth coining

The concept you’re describing doesn’t have a fully established name. The closest existing terms are:

• Controlled instability (used occasionally in geopolitical analysis)
• Managed chaos (appears in critical literature on US foreign policy)
• Imperial entropy (used rarely, but captures the deliberate exhaustion dimension)

If you wanted to develop this as a formal argument, I think “strategic disorder doctrine” or perhaps “deterrence by devastation” would capture both dimensions — the power demonstration and the foreclosure of future challenge. The Pyrrhic framing you begin with is actually quite apt: the innovation you’re identifying is a deliberate acceptance of the Pyrrhic outcome, stripped of its tragic connotation and repackaged as a tool.

I continued the conversation by presenting a deeper reflection on the concept of Pyrrhic wars. I invite readers to think about whether it helps to understand the paradox of a nation that has always claimed to work for the peace and stability of a rules-based world order but has so often resorted to war as the means to achieving it.

Here is my follow-up prompt for readers to think about: 

I admit that Mearsheimer’s analysis, in particular his theory of hegemony has influenced my thinking on this question. But beyond the planning of actual leaders and decision-makers deploying a geopolitical strategy, I sense that what we’re talking about exists as a cultural phenomenon. All operators function within a cultural environment that influences their perception of the world in the form of what we might think of as a Pyrrhic background mentality. By that I mean that the chaotic decision-making you describe as characterizing the “strategic culture of Washington” achieves a kind of unintentional coherence through inertia, thanks not so much to the concept but the feeling that if rivals are subjected to even random factors of disorder the existing order will maintain its dominance. There’s a sense of protecting a power one doesn’t even try to understand but one knows exist because there are no capable rivals. A few strategists may recognize and work to implement such a cynical logic, but even if those clever strategists didn’t exist the system would function fairly efficiently.

I would even suggest that to a great extent it’s important to prevent awareness that such a strategy and such a culture exist. It will always be obscured by the evocation of principles that appear to have some moral resonance, such as the concern for democracy, human rights, women’s rights, intellectual property rights, etc. If my thesis is correct, there is obviously no way of proving it because those who understand will always be committed to hiding it, and if no one understands the systemic logic will still continue to play out. Have people like Mearsheimer or other analysts proposed similar theories?

Claude’s response will feature in Part 2.

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