July 4, 2026
The men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 were, under the law they still lived beneath, signing a confession. Treason carried the gallows. They knew it, which is why Benjamin Franklin’s line about hanging together or hanging separately was a joke with a corpse in it. The country now marks that afternoon with barbecue, fireworks and, this year, a semiquincentennial spectacle large enough to feel like a comment on the republic itself. In Washington, the Trump-backed Freedom 250 celebration turned the National Mall into the Great American State Fair, advertised as a modern World’s Fair with state pavilions, military flyovers, concerts, a Ferris wheel and a midnight closing time for Independence Day.
Great American State Fair in Washington D.C., July 2026. Source: https://freedom250.org
Two hundred and fifty years ago, America began as an act of armed defiance against the strongest empire of its day, and it won, and it has been arguing with the meaning of that victory ever since. The republic was built partly to answer Europe – its dynasties, its standing armies, its habit of bleeding itself white every generation over thrones and borders. Then America spent the next two hundred and fifty years acquiring power on a scale those same European empires would have envied. The country that declared itself against imperial rule became a continental power, then an oceanic one, then the organizing force of the international system. To understand what kind of power that is, look at the wars it lost.
A lost war, in the sense that matters here, need not end with an enemy army in the capital. It is a war that leaves the country worse off than it found it: strategically drained, morally exposed, politically split, financially mortgaged, or trapped by consequences no one thought to game out. By that measure America’s defeats are not embarrassing exceptions to its strength. They are the clearest window onto it.
The flaw in the foundation
Start with the sentence everyone quotes. “All men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, and he wrote it as a Virginia plantation owner who enslaved more than a hundred people over his lifetime. The republic of liberty was, from its first breath, a republic of bondage. By 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, nearly four million people were held as property in the United States, mostly in the slaveholding South. The contradiction between a founding promise of equality and a political economy built on slavery finally broke the country apart.
and again, the republic has tried to make its power serve its principles, and again and again it has discovered how costly the distance between intention and reality can become.
A republic enlarged by conquest
The continental expansion was not a peaceful settling of empty land. It was taken. The Mexican-American War ended in February 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which Mexico surrendered fifty-five percent of its territory – the ground that became California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and pieces of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming – for a payment of fifteen million dollars. For the United States it was a triumph. For Mexico it was a national amputation. The same decades saw Native nations pushed off their land by treaty, coercion, removal and force, their sovereignty dismantled to make room for the settler tide moving west.
Gen. Scott’s grand entry into Mexico City, Sept. 14, 1847.
Half a century on, the appetite went to sea. The Spanish-American War opened in April 1898 and was effectively over by an armistice in August – Secretary of State John Hay called it “a splendid little war,” and on the battlefield it nearly was. Fewer than four hundred Americans died in combat. More than two thousand died of yellow fever, typhoid and dysentery, killed by the mosquito and the mess tent rather than the enemy. The Treaty of Paris that December handed Washington the remains of Spain’s empire: Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, a protectorate over Cuba. Hawaii was annexed in the same season. Filipino nationalists who had fought Spain for their independence declined to accept a new landlord, and the war America then fought to hold the islands exposed how far the anti-colonial republic had traveled from its own founding language.
Rehearsals for responsibility
Before America became the guarantor of world order, it tried to be its mediator. President Theodore Roosevelt helped broker the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War, a performance of great-power arbitration that won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
President Woodrow Wilson took the ambition further after the First World War. America entered the war in April 1917 and helped tip the balance against Germany, but Wilson wanted the victory to become a new international grammar: the Fourteen Points, self-determination, open diplomacy, collective security, the League of Nations. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he tried to turn American intervention into a peace architecture. Then came the paradox, immediate and very American. The United States helped imagine a new world system and then refused to join its central institution. The Senate rejected membership in the League. America wanted to write the rules without being trapped inside them.
President Woodrow Wilson returning from the Versailles Peace Conference (1919)
Between the wars, the same double impulse ran through Europe. The United States retreated politically, but not economically. American loans and financial plans helped keep Weimar Germany afloat in the 1920s, especially through the Dawes Plan and later the Young Plan, which reorganized reparations and tied Germany’s recovery to American credit. Washington did not want Europe’s quarrels. When the Great Depression hit after 1929, that structure broke, and the crisis that began in American finance helped tear apart the fragile European settlement America had refused to police.
Russia showed the pattern even more sharply. Washington refused to recognize the Bolshevik government after the 1917 revolution and sent troops into Russia during the civil-war chaos, yet American relief under Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration helped feed millions during the famine of 1921–1923. The United States could reject Bolshevism ideologically and still deal with Soviet reality when hunger, trade or strategy required it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression and at the beginning of the New Deal era, when America itself was trying to rescue capitalism at home while reopening relations with a communist state abroad. That was not hypocrisy exactly. It was the American habit of moral language meeting the furniture of power.
The victory that made America responsible
The Second World War answered any lingering question about American might and immediately posed a harder one. The industrial output, the finance, the shipping, the reach of the U.S. military became decisive in the Allied victory. In July 1944, with the fighting still raging, delegates from forty-four nations gathered at a resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and drafted the machinery of the postwar economy — the International Monetary Fund, the institution that became the World Bank, a dollar-anchored order with the United States at its center. Power was being poured into concrete before the guns went quiet.
One correction belongs here, because the standard telling sidelines the people who paid the most. The Soviet Union bore the deadliest burden of the European war — but “Soviet” is doing enormous work in that sentence. The killing fields and the occupation did not fall on Russia proper. They fell on Ukraine and Belarus, the republics Nazi Germany overran and held, where the largest battles were fought and the reprisals carried out village by village. Belarus lost something on the order of a quarter of its entire population; entire settlements were burned with their inhabitants inside. Ukraine’s dead numbered in the millions. When the United Nations was founded in San Francisco in 1945, the Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics sat as founding members in their own right, seated beside the USSR — a recognition, however cynically Stalin also used it to pad his votes, of a sacrifice too vast to be folded silently into Moscow’s account. Remember that the next time the war is described as Russia’s victory alone.
Winston Churchill saw the size of the bill before the war ended. Accepting an honorary degree at Harvard in September 1943, he told his American hosts that “the price of greatness is responsibility.” He meant it as flattery and as prophecy. After 1945 the United States was a nuclear superpower, the guarantor of alliances, the anchor of the dollar, the country the world expected to act when something broke. And then it discovered that overwhelming force does not deliver political outcomes.
The weapon, and the second thoughts
The war in the Pacific ended with the single most consequential act of American power in history. On August 6, 1945, one bomb erased most of Hiroshima; three days later a second destroyed Nagasaki. By the end of that year the two blasts had killed somewhere between 110,000 and 210,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, many dying slowly of burns and radiation sickness in the months after the sky turned white. The United States remains the only country ever to have used a nuclear weapon in war.
Atomic Cloud Rises Over Nagasaki, Japan. Photo by Lieutenant Charles Levy, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Then it spent the next eighty years trying to force the weapon back into its box. The nation that opened the atomic age built most of the architecture meant to contain it – the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the test bans, the long grinding decades of arms control with Moscow. In November 1985, standing beside Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, Ronald Reagan put his name to a single sentence that has anchored the nuclear order ever since: “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The country that had incinerated two cities became the most insistent voice on earth for never doing it again. Guilt and cold strategy pointed in the same direction, and the paradox held: American power learned restraint from the one occasion it abandoned it. Hold that image. It will matter when we reach the man in the Kremlin who has spent this decade threatening to do what America, having done it once, has spent three generations swearing off.
The wars the U.S. could not finish
Korea came first. Fighting under a United Nations command, the United States stopped North Korea’s 1950 invasion from destroying the South, at a cost of 36,574 American dead. The armistice signed in July 1953 halted the shooting without ending the war; there has still never been a peace treaty, and the line the two Koreas hold today runs close to where it ran when the killing began. South Korea went on to become a wealthy democracy, so Korea was no simple defeat. It was the first demonstration of a pattern that would define the American century – a superpower able to hold a line and unable to resolve the conflict behind it.
The Korean War 1950 – 1953: A wounded US infantryman is helped away from the front line by two comrades
Vietnam turned the pattern into a catastrophe the country could not explain to itself. The United States had the aircraft, the money, the technology and the firepower, and none of it produced a South Vietnamese government that could stand on its own. Henry Kissinger diagnosed the trap in Foreign Affairs in 1969, before he took office to live inside it: “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” Fifty-eight thousand Americans died before the Paris accords let Washington out in 1973; Saigon fell in April 1975. The war taught a generation that the body count was a lie dressed as a metric, that bombing tonnage was not a strategy, and that staying longer bought nothing but more graves.
That was the vice the country kept returning to – the faith that engineering could substitute for politics, that enough precision and payload would eventually manufacture a legitimate state. The general who had commanded the largest war machine in history understood the danger better than the technocrats who came after him. In his farewell address in January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans to guard against the “unwarranted influence” of what he named, for the first time, the military-industrial complex. The warning landed because of who spoke it. A man who had ordered the invasion of Europe was telling his countrymen to fear their own arsenal.
The country that put itself on trial
Vietnam was also where American methods turned monstrous, and – this is the part that matters – where America dragged its own crimes into the light. Between 1961 and 1971, under a program called Operation Ranch Hand, U.S. aircraft doused the forests and paddies of Vietnam with some twenty million gallons of herbicide. The most notorious, Agent Orange, was laced with dioxin; the Vietnamese Red Cross has estimated that three million people were harmed by it, including a hundred and fifty thousand children born with birth defects — a toll still arriving in delivery rooms half a century on. On the morning of March 16, 1968, an American infantry company walked into the hamlet of My Lai and murdered as many as five hundred and four unarmed villagers, women, children and old men, in the space of a few hours.
What happened next is the thing autocracies cannot do. The massacre did not stay buried. A soldier named Ron Ridenhour refused to let it go; the reporter Seymour Hersh chased it down and broke it in November 1969, winning a Pulitzer for forcing his own country to stare at what it had done; courts-martial followed. The war generated its own prosecution – and its own opposition, much of it in uniform. In April 1971 a decorated twenty-seven-year-old Navy lieutenant named John Kerry sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and asked the question the war never answered: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” The heavyweight champion of the world had already refused induction in 1967 — “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” Muhammad Ali said, and was stripped of his title and convicted before the Supreme Court cleared him. Bob Dylan had already set the decade’s dissent to music with “Masters of War.” Soldiers, athletes, reporters, songwriters and judges turned the instruments of a free society against the war that same society was waging.
Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marching with a protest banner during the 1971 “Dewey Canyon III” demonstration in Washington, D.C.
That is the self-correcting mechanism that will separate America from its rivals before this essay is finished. A country able to court-martial its own soldiers, print its own atrocities on the front page, and hand a draft-resister back his title is a country built to outlive its worst behavior. The genocidal edge of the Vietnam War was real, and it was documented — by Americans. So was the movement, legal and cultural and veteran-led, that named it, shamed it, and helped drag the country toward the door.
The long contest and the victory speech
After 1945, America’s wars no longer belonged only to the countries where they were fought. They were absorbed into the Cold War: the global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union over power, ideology, alliances and the shape of the postwar world. NATO, nuclear deterrence, the Marshall Plan, Korea, Vietnam, proxy wars, intelligence operations, coups, arms races and partnerships with ugly regimes all belonged, in Washington’s mind, to the same long contest. Even defeats could be explained as part of a larger struggle still being won.
Vietnam did not end that contest. It changed the way America lived inside it. The country became more hesitant in public and more indirect in practice, but it did not stop competing with Moscow. It armed partners, funded insurgents, built alliances, expanded intelligence work and kept the nuclear balance alive. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan mixed pressure with negotiation, calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and then sitting down with Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce the risk of nuclear war. The Cold War did not end because America won one clean campaign. It ended after decades of pressure, Soviet exhaustion, economic failure, political opening and a final diplomatic turn that made the impossible suddenly look inevitable.
US President Reagan, commemorating the 750th anniversary of Berlin, addresses the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987. Due to the amplification system being used, the President’s words could also be heard on the Eastern (communist-controlled) side of the wall. “Tear down this wall!” was the famous appeal by Reagan, directed at Gorbachev, to destroy the Berlin Wall. The address Reagan delivered that day is considered by many to have affirmed the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet bloc. Mike Sargent/AFP/Getty Images
Then came the victory speech. On January 28, 1992, in his State of the Union address, George H. W. Bush stood before Congress and declared: “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” The line reads now like a man spiking the ball on the ten-yard line. A generation later, something colder and older has returned — a revanchist Russia trying to redraw borders by force and unpick the postwar order — and the triumph of 1992 looks less like a finish line than an intermission. Did America want the Cold War over? It said so, and it believed it. History was not consulted.
The unipolar confidence found its purest voice in Madeleine Albright, who told NBC in February 1998 that “we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” It was a claim of responsibility that curdled, over time, into a permission slip. The 1991 Gulf War had seemed to prove that American force could be surgical – a broad coalition, a defined objective, Kuwait liberated, no march on Baghdad. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was built on the memory of that clean victory and delivered its opposite. Saddam Hussein’s regime fell in three weeks. Then came the war after the war: insurgency, sectarian slaughter, Iranian penetration, the birth of a jihadist movement that would later call itself a caliphate, and nearly 4,600 American military dead over the years it took to leave. The U.S. Army was never beaten in the field. The design of the war was beaten – the assumption that removing a dictator would be easier than the order that replaced him.
U.S. soldiers raise a flag while standing on a destroyed Iraqi tank in Iraq, Feb. 27, 1991/
The price of being everywhere
The attacks of September 11, 2001, were mass murder, planned by al-Qaeda and defended by no serious person. They were also the return address on a world America had spent decades building – a world of bases, sanctions, client autocrats, intelligence operations and Gulf deployments, in which American power was experienced by millions as pressure, humiliation or occupation. Osama bin Laden’s ideology was a conspiratorial death cult, and it did not grow in a vacuum. Reach makes a nation visible everywhere, and visibility makes it a target where its footprint is felt as a boot.
After burning for 56 minutes, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses, killing more than 800 people in and around the building. Source: Thomas Nilsson/Getty Images.
Two years into the Gaza war, an American president said as much to an ally, out loud. Standing in Tel Aviv in October 2023, days after the Hamas massacre, Joe Biden warned Israelis not to let grief harden into strategy. After September 11, he said, the United States was enraged, and while it sought justice it also “made mistakes.” It was the most honest sentence a superpower can offer another: we know the hunger to strike back, and we know where it leads.
The lesson that will not stay learned
America’s relationship with Israel is a different instrument of power – patronage rather than warfighting, seventy-five years of weapons, intelligence, aid and diplomatic cover, and in the hardest hours, direct management of how far a war is allowed to spread.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers crossed from Gaza into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages in the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Israel launched its war in Gaza in response. By July 2026, the Gaza Health Ministry, in figures relayed by the UN, reported more than 73,000 Palestinians killed and more than 173,000 injured in the Strip. The war returned Washington to a lesson it had already paid for in Vietnam and Iraq: destroying an enemy’s forces is not the same as defeating the conditions that keep producing them.
That lesson was no longer only an American warning from history. In June 2024, Israel’s own military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, told Israeli television that “Hamas is an ideology” and that Israel could not “eliminate an ideology.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s office rebuked him within hours, but the sentence had already named the problem.
The same question appears, stripped of theory, in War, the 2024 book by Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington reporter who has been anatomizing American power since Watergate. On a call about Rafah, Woodward writes, Biden pressed Netanyahu: “What’s your strategy, man?” Netanyahu said Israel had to go in. “Bibi,” Biden replied, “you’ve got no strategy.”
Afghanistan, and the bill that outlives the war
Afghanistan began as the most defensible war of the post-1945 era. America had been attacked, al-Qaeda had trained on Taliban soil, and the campaign that opened in October 2001 scattered the network and toppled the regime. Then the mission mutated in slow motion — counterterrorism into state-building, state-building into occupation, occupation into endurance, endurance into a habit no one could remember how to break. Twenty years later, in August 2021, the American-backed republic collapsed in eleven days, faster than the embassy could burn its files. The Taliban walked back into Kabul.
Now weigh the receipt, because this is where the deepest American pattern shows itself. Ending a war does not end its costs. The United States spent roughly $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan and buried 2,461 of its service members there, and it left behind a country that fell to the enemy it had spent two decades and a fortune trying to defeat — a country that promptly slid back toward the conditions that first drew America in. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the full price of the post-9/11 wars near eight trillion dollars and the direct death toll above nine hundred thousand people, much of it borrowed, with the medical bills for wounded veterans still climbing into the 2050s. America walked away from the war. It cannot walk away from the debt, and the world it leaves behind when it goes is rarely safer than the one it entered. Withdrawal stops the fighting. It does not settle the account.
There is an old line, usually pinned on Churchill, that Americans can be trusted to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. Quote historians trace the more reliable root to the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, who observed that nations turn to wisdom only when every other option is exhausted. It is not a flattering thought. It is not entirely wrong, either. America arrives at restraint after expansion, at realism after ambition, at the exit long after the room has filled with smoke. That it arrives at all is more than most great powers manage.
The peace-and-war president
Donald Trump did not break this tradition. He is one of its most fully American expressions. He returned to power promising peace through strength and rest through dominance, and on election night in November 2024 he put it plainly to the crowd in Florida: “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” The line spoke straight to a public exhausted by open-ended commitments and moral lectures about distant conflicts, and it belonged to a lineage older than the country’s superpower status — the settler’s suspicion that the world’s quarrels are not America’s to bleed for.
Then-nominee former President Donald Trump arrives at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. Source: Evan Vucci/AP.
Governing is where that instinct meets its limits. Trump vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine war fast, and it did not end because the president wished it was gone. In March 2025 he suspended all American military aid to Kyiv to force it to the table — a lever that treated an invasion as a deal awaiting the right closer, and revealed both the appeal and the peril of the impulse. The desire to stop the killing is real. So is the danger of mistaking a war of conquest for a contract dispute. The globalist reflex that says only American strength can hold the world together, and the isolationist reflex that asks why Americans should pay for any of it, have always lived inside the same body politic. Trump did not invent the argument. He simply staged it louder than anyone before him. And then, in a stroke that told the whole story, his administration in September 2025 revived a name the Pentagon had shed in 1947, ordering it to call itself the Department of War again and to address Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War. The man who promised to stop wars now presided over a department that had dropped even the pretense of defense — the blunt old title that Eisenhower’s machine had always, in truth, deserved.
Why America can lose and carry on
Which brings us to the strangest source of American durability. The very trait that makes the country clumsy at empire is what lets it survive defeat. Niall Ferguson, the historian, has called the United States an “empire in denial” – a power that wields the fiscal, military and institutional weapons of empire while refusing, on principle, to admit that is what it is doing. A classical empire that means to keep a conquest builds the apparatus to hold it: governors, garrisons, courts, settlers, client elites, patience measured in generations. America, dressed in republican clothes, wants the result and disowns the method. It wants influence without colonies, transformation without occupation, victory without the long grey labor of rule. That refusal makes it reckless going in and incompetent staying on. It also makes it capable of leaving. An empire competent enough to occupy properly would be an empire unable to walk away, and the conscience that sabotages the occupation is the conscience that permits the exit.
Set that against the Kremlin. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fused into the survival story of one man’s regime; retreat has become synonymous with the death of the ruler’s myth, which is why the state answers failure at the front with repression at home rather than reappraisal. The historian Timothy Snyder has described the war as one in which “an aging tyranny seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy.” A personalist autocracy cannot afford to lose, because its authority rests on the pretense that it cannot lose. So it keeps performing certainty long after certainty has become absurd.
Now collect the debt on that earlier image of the bomb. America, the only nation ever to use it, spent eighty years trying to abolish it. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has never used it, reaches for it as rhetoric. In September 2022 he warned that Russia would defend itself with “all weapon systems available to us” and added, pointedly, “this is not a bluff”; five months later he suspended the last treaty limiting the two countries’ arsenals. He has rattled the nuclear saber dozens of times since. There is the whole argument in a single frame: the power that knows exactly what the weapon does prays never to use it again, and the power that has never used it treats the threat as a morning routine.
A democratic republic runs a different machine. It can lose a war and hold hearings about it. It can subpoena the generals, indict the intelligence, change the president, publish the lie and then expose it, and reset its posture without the state itself cracking — because in a republic the state is not the leader, and defeat is a policy failure rather than a mortal wound to the sovereign. Institutions can absorb humiliation. Myths cannot. That is not a moral claim about American virtue. It is a structural claim about how American power survives its own mistakes.
The harder lesson behind the fireworks
Independence Day is told as a victory: thirteen colonies defied an empire and became a nation. The deeper story is that the nation began by rejecting permanent domination and never resolved the tension that choice wired into its core. America wants to be the republic that breaks empires and the superpower that runs the world. It wants to defend sovereignty and keep primacy, to end wars and to win them, to believe that force can serve freedom while it keeps discovering that force can corrupt the very cause it was sent to protect.
The wars it lost are not footnotes to its greatness. They are the load-bearing structure of it. Korea marked the limit of power. Vietnam broke the arrogance – and then the republic put its own war on trial, in courtrooms and newspapers and the streets. Iraq exposed the fantasy of regime change. Afghanistan proved that time and money and technology cannot manufacture a state whose politics will not hold, and that the bill for trying comes due long after the last plane lifts off. September 11 showed that even American success breeds enemies willing to strike the center of the system. Gaza reminded Washington that even its closest partner can be condemned to relearn the lesson America paid for in Vietnamese and Iraqi and Afghan ground.
None of it ended American power. It wounded the country, embarrassed it and disciplined. America’s strength was never invincibility – no serious power is invincible, and the ones that believe they are do not last. Its deeper strength is the capacity to survive contradiction: to win, to lose, to withdraw, to argue in the open, to recover, and to remain itself. On the Fourth of July, under the fireworks, that is the harder lesson. America was born in rebellion, tested by victory, and humbled by defeat. It endures not because it always wins its wars, but because it can lose them without surrendering the republic.
