Which Wars Should the U.S. Have Kept Out Of?

I would like to share with you a stunning essay from RealClearHistory.[1] By “stunning” I don’t mean it is absolutely correct but it is eye-opening. David Pyne lists the wars the U.S. shouldn’t have entered or supported—but did. These wrong wars start with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and end with today’s Ukraine-Russia war. As for the wars we should have fought, he bluntly explains how they were badly managed.

Pyne writes:

“A study of the outcome of major wars America has fought over the past 125 years strongly suggests that U.S. military involvement in these conflicts has resulted in tragic and unforeseen consequences leading to tens of millions of unnecessary deaths while also serving to create new, and, in some cases, much more powerful enemies, making the U.S. much less safe and secure in the process.”

This man is not a left-winger writing for The Nation or Mother Jones. He is deputy director of a nonprofit organization, EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security.  EMP refers to electromagnetic pulses, which can be used to disrupt the electrical grid and possibly other critical infrastructure. The organization was initially authorized by Congress as an advisory board and works with conservative members of Congress.

According to his biography, Pyne is a “former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003.” In other words, he has been both an insider in the U.S. foreign policy machine and a think tank analyst.

Whether you agree with Pyne or not, his alternative history makes for fascinating reading.

He says the nation could have avoided nine wars. They are: the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Vietnam War, both Iraq wars, the NATO-Yugoslav War, the Syrian Civil War, the Libyan Civil War, and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Some specifics:

World War I:

“U.S. military involvement in this war essentially prevented Britain and France from being bankrupted and exhausted militarily by the conflict and being forced to negotiate a far more just and equitable compromise peace agreement.”

Failure to do that led to the punitive peace treaty at Versailles that spawned Hitler and World War II, he says.

First Iraq War:

“The U.S. decision to decimate the Iraqi military in the process of forcing it out of Kuwait greatly weakened Iraq’s ability to continue fighting its war against Iranian terror, which had been strongly supported by President Ronald Reagan. The ensuing U.N. embargo and U.S. bombings of Iraq continued for a decade after the war supposedly ended, causing the deaths of up to half a million Iraqi children.”

There’s much more in that vein. But what about the wars we should have engaged in, such as World War II?

He is just as outspoken in his statements about them, suggesting that, while we may have participated in just causes, the way we conducted these wars led to outcomes far worse than were necessary.

Regarding Japan in World War II:

“President Franklin Delano Roosevelt should not have provoked Imperial Japan to attack Pearl Harbor with his joint U.S.-UK-Dutch oil embargo in August 1941, but once the Japanese attacked the US. Pacific Fleet and Hitler declared war on the U.S., the U.S. had no choice but to fight both Nazi Germany and Japan.”

Regarding Germany in World War II:

“[T]he best possible outcome of the war would have been if the U.S. and U.K. had accepted German resistance leader Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’ offer to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis and surrender to the Western Allies with the only condition being that FDR provide a written guarantee that the US would keep the Red Army out of Europe and limit Soviet control to their prewar borders. His offer was actually accepted by the heads of U.S. and British intelligence in June 1943, but was subsequently rejected by both FDR and Churchill.”

The Afghan War:

“While U.S. military intervention was justified in Afghanistan in the wake of Al Qaeda’ s attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, once the goal of the overthrow of the Taliban had been achieved and Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been chased out of most of Afghanistan, U.S. military forces should have been withdrawn after a two or three month campaign by the end of that year.”

As you can see, he names names and takes no prisoners.

Pyne is a strong anti-Communist, an attitude that readers may think he takes too far. One of his underlying criticisms is that Roosevelt and Churchill allowed the takeover of much of Europe by the Soviet Union and, in his words, “godless Communism” led to the deaths of many people. “Godless Communism” aside, his criticism is not all that controversial.

Regarding Japan, I agree that FDR in some ways pushed Japan into attacking, although I do not think Pyne relies on the best source by citing Richard Stinnett. Others’ books  are more persuasive in challenging our assumptions about Pearl Harbor, such as George Victor’s The Pearl Harbor Myth, which I discussed in an earlier post.

As for Pyne’s claims about a potential deal on overthrowing Hitler, they seem plausible but he doesn’t have authoritative sources.

And what of today? He suggests that the major threats—both actual and potential—facing the U.S. could best be settled by negotiation rather than open confrontation. About the Ukraine conflict, he calls it “one of the most unnecessary and easily avoidable wars in modern history.”

Like it or not, this is quite an essay.

Note

[1] Originally published in somewhat different form in the National Interest, the updated version appears on Pyne’s blog on Substack.

A scene from Vietnam in 1968 by mannhai from Creative Commons.