The United States of America has an enviable record of strategic foreign policy successes, one spanning more than two centuries. Just since the end of the Second World War and the emergence of the cold war in the late 1940s, the United States has conducted a highly successful foreign policy, including rebuilding Europe and Japan, mobilizing a global coalition against Soviet-style communism, and presiding over the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the late twentieth century it was American practice to interpret victory as the strategic equivalent of destroying another state in order to resolve a fundamental problem in international politics. The problem, however, is that decisions to intervene with military force have been based on an understanding of victory that is incomplete, however successful its results may have been in the past.

The French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul warned that societies should be cautious concerning the ideas that govern how their states conduct war: “The smallest error in the realm of war would cost countless lives and would be measured in terms of victory or defeat.” The question for policymakers and scholars is whether the prevailing “theory” of victory, honed during the middle of the past century, provides practical guidance for decisions about the use of force at present, when there is no ideological or geopolitical confrontation between great states, nor the looming prospect of war on a catastrophic scale as seen during World War II. The United States needs to ensure its notions of victory are relevant to modern challenges. At a time when international security is being reshaped by the forces of Islamist terrorism, ethnic and national struggles, religion, and weapons of mass destruction, a systematic reconsideration of victory is in order.