Are We Still in the Forever War?

The term “forever war” first appeared as the title of a 1974 science-fiction novel. Its author was Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran who drew on his own military experiences to recount a war between humanity and aliens that lasts for centuries. His narrator, a soldier named William Mandella, lives through the entire conflict, because he travels in starships that approach lightspeed, and therefore, thanks to the relativity effect, ages only a few years while many lifetimes pass on earth. Mandella is a draftee and a deeply cynical, unenthusiastic soldier who nonetheless rises high in the ranks because of the enormous seniority he compiles over these hundreds of years. At the end of the novel, he discovers – spoiler alert! – that the entire war had begun by mistake.  But the military-industrial complex had seized on the opportunity with glee and rejected all opportunities to end the bloodshed. “The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.” The Forever War, at once inventive, exciting, and darkly comical, was one of the favorite novels of my SF-obsessed adolescence, and I still go back and reread it every few years.

In the 2000’s, however, the term “forever war” migrated into the political realm, as a way to describe the seemingly endless conflicts in which the United States had embroiled itself after 9/11, and it has remained a political commonplace. President Biden himself invoked it when he announced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Mostly, it has been used to criticize U.S. behavior. but at least one architect of the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz, has essentially embraced it. “Long wars aren’t the worst kind,” he argued in a predictable critique of Biden’s decision to withdraw. Even “decisive victory isn’t necessarily better than ‘forever war’ if a long commitment can keep America safe at a much lower cost in American lives.”

So is America’s “forever war” now finally over? Some critics, writing with Haldemanesque weariness and cynicism, insist that it is not. A new essay in The Nation by Karen L. Greenberg, for instance, proclaims that “Ukraine is Another Chapter in the Forever War.” She describes the increasing U.S. military aid to Ukraine, gives a long catalogue of other possible flashpoints (Taiwan, North Korea, Iran…) and then lists the areas in which the US still maintains a military presence, including the use of drones. She concludes: “Who even remembers when the First World War was known as ‘the war to end all wars’? Sadly, it seems that the era of Eternal War is now upon us.” She despairs of “our leaders” ever opting for peace over war.

Arguments of this sort, it seems to me, suffer from two sorts of over-simplification. First, they posit an essential continuity over the past two decades, between the period when Paul Wolfowitz was crafting US policies for the ruinous Iraq War and the period when Paul Wolfowitz is crankily denouncing Joe Biden for not continuing these policies. How does the continuing presence of 2,500 US troops in Iraq, which Greenberg points to, and the continuation of relatively low-level operations against terrorist groups in the Sahel and the Levant, compare to the massive deployments of US force in the decade after 9/11, and the hundreds of thousands of coalition and Iraqi dead that resulted? How does the hyper-aggressive rhetoric of the Bush administration, with its calls for imposing democracy on the Middle East, compare to the far more limited policy goals of the current administration? There are points in common, yes. But differences of degree can often matter more than similarities of kind. As for Ukraine, the idea of equating our help to a united Ukrainian population defending itself against Russian aggression with our intervention in Iraq seems simply perverse to me. Yes, there is a danger of escalation in the Ukraine War, but one can hardly count the possibility of future direct US involvement – which the US is trying very hard to avoid – as an actual conflict.

Secondly, articles of this sort tend to present the United States as almost the only principal source of meaningful action in the world. We act, the rest of the world reacts, and if only we didn’t behave so aggressively and greedily, peace would follow. “North Korea and Iran are also perceived in Washington as simmering threats,” Greenberg writes (emphasis mine). North Korea, she says, has been “playing a game of nuclear chicken” with the US, while tensions with Iran grew after the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear treaty with Iran in 2018. No one would deny the obvious, outsized importance of the United States on the world stage, but there are plenty of actors out there capable of having a great impact on the course of events regardless of what we do. It would be foolish to deny that the expansion of NATO did not have an effect on Vladimir Putin’s thinking and actions (whether that expansion was a good idea anyway is a separate issue). It would be equally foolish to assume that without this expansion, Putin would have become a friendly and cooperative partner for peace, as opposed to a bloodthirsty and aggressive dictator.

These over-simplifications in turn lead to two mistaken political conclusions. The first is to group liberals like Barack Obama and Joe Biden together with Bush and the neo-conservatives as forever warriors—heirs to the Cold Warriors of the past. Not only does this grouping elide the huge differences between the Bush of 2003 and the Biden of 2023, it also suggests that progressives like Greenberg can achieve their goals on their own, without the cooperation of liberals—that some new version of the Sanders campaign could somehow win the American electorate over to a radical reformulation of American foreign policy. This idea may allow some progressives to congratulate themselves on the purity of their own stances—not for us a compromise with (neo-) liberal interventionism! – but in practice it leaves them a small and impotent minority that has little chance of actually accomplishing anything.

Secondly, it suggests that transforming American foreign policy is simply a matter of restraining America’s gargantuan greed for resources and power. This greed is real enough and has driven this country into far too many disasters since the end of World War II. But the thing about superpower status is that other countries depend on the superpower. By this I don’t mean to glorify the United States as the one “indispensable nation,” As Madeline Albright once put it. I mean, simply, that it is a nation that other nations want and need countless things from. After the collapse of communism, for instance, the former Eastern and Central European members of the Warsaw Pact, and the Baltic states, desperately wanted to join NATO, to protect themselves against possible future Russian aggression. Many people in these countries, furthermore, believed that the US had abandoned them to Stalin after World War II, and insisted that we owed them NATO membership as a sort of reparation. NATO expansion, in short, was driven by far more than US ambition, and involved balancing a large and complex set of claims and principles against each other. Similarly, in the 1990’s, the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina desperately wanted the US to intervene in the new Balkan wars. Deciding whether or not to intervene again involved a complex set of calculations.

These sorts of calculations cannot be avoided. They should be informed, always, by a chastened awareness of how this country has tragically blundered in the past, and how American greed, ambition, and occasional paranoia has contributed to these blunders. But it is one thing to make these calculations, and another to shunt them all aside and simply damn virtually every American action as wrong or evil, another piece of the “forever war.” In Costa-Gavras’s great film Z, one of the characters remarks: “Always blame the Americans. Even when you’re wrong, you’re right.” It’s a funny line, but it’s not a basis for good foreign policy. In 1974, Joe Haldeman wrote a great novel. But it’s not a good guide for how the US should act in a world full of complex human situations, as opposed to fictional aliens.