A nominal ceasefire reached in April
2026 has done little to halt the escalation in the
Persian Gulf. After Iran’s “attempted surprise attack”
against US forces on July 28, the US retaliated by launching
a “heavy wave” of airstrikes on July 30, according
to NPR, targeting Iran’s “military command centers and
missile facilities,” and intensifying the fighting in the
Middle East.
Since the war began in February, Iran has
suffered extensive destruction to military and civilian
infrastructure, resulting in thousands of casualties.
Washington’s Gulf allies and Israel have likewise faced
sustained pressure from Iranian attacks. Yet, despite nearly
$40 billion in US spending on the war with Iran and
damage to American military assets in the region, the
conflict has not sparked widespread public debate among its
citizens.
Protected by two vast oceans and
overwhelming military power, the US has long been able to
separate everyday life from the consequences of war and
shield policymakers from public scrutiny. The casualties in
the current conflict remain relatively low, with the latest
Iranian strike bringing the official
number of US deaths to 18. Life at home has continued
largely uninterrupted, with the US even cohosting the 2026
FIFA World Cup during the conflict.
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But the war has
already outlasted initial expectations. US President Donald
Trump had earlier stated that the Iran war would
last four to five weeks, according to Al Jazeera, and
the American strikes would
lead to the collapse of the Iranian government. The July
26 expansion of Houthi attacks
on shipping and infrastructure around the Red Sea has,
however, further complicated the war as it is unclear what
they aim to achieve.
America’s detachment from the
war marks a departure from its early history, when conflicts
were felt more directly and romanticized through glory and
duty. The Civil War shattered those beliefs by exposing
Americans to the realities of industrial warfare, while
Europe’s descent into World War I revealed how easily
countries could underestimate the costs of conflict while
overestimating their ability to adapt to them. Those lessons
are worth revisiting as the modern US approach to conflict
continues to evolve.
The End of Glorious
War
The last time war fundamentally transformed
everyday life in the US was arguably during the Civil War.
Before that, conflict was
still imagined through the lens of the Revolutionary
War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the
frontier wars. Armed clashes were subjects of songs, novels,
paintings, and patriotic myths, which portrayed them as
decisive battles won through heroic charges, often
accompanied by the fanfare of flags and drums.
As
sectional tensions intensified in the lead-up to the Civil
War, many Southern figures confidently insisted the
commercial-minded North would never risk a costly conflict.
In his infamous “Cotton is King” speech from 1858, South
Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond declared,
“No power on earth dares to make war upon” the South’s
lucrative cotton economy.
Even if war came, political
leaders assured it would be swift and with minimal loss of
life. Judge Samuel F. Rice boasted,
“we can whip the Yankees with popguns,” while South
Carolina Senator James Chesnut Jr. claimed
he would “drink all the blood shed” over secession.
The first Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Pope Walker,
similarly told
a crowd in April 1861, at the start of the war, that any
blood spilled as a result of secession “could be wiped up
with a handkerchief,” predicting that “before the first
of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from
the dome of the old Capitol in Washington,” according
to Reason magazine.
Mark Twain would
later blame the novels of Sir Walter Scott in particular
for fostering romantic notions of chivalry among Southern
elites and the idea that war would be noble and
victorious.
Northern leaders were generally more
restrained but no less susceptible to overconfidence. The
New York Tribune stated,
“Forward to Richmond!… the place must be held by the
National Army!” Historian
David B. Blight argues that “Lincoln, under the
pressure of public opinion,” pushed General Irvin McDowell
to advance before his army was ready in the hope of
delivering a knockout blow that would end the
rebellion.
The First
Battle of Bull Run in 1861 became the defining symbol of
the North’s misplaced optimism. Politicians, journalists,
and curious civilians—some arriving with picnic
baskets—gathered to watch what they believed would be the
war’s decisive battle. Instead, they fled alongside
retreating Union troops as Confederate forces prevailed, and
the illusion of a short war vanished.
What followed
was one of the earliest industrial
wars in history. Railways moved large armies, factories
produced weapons on an unprecedented scale, and entire
regional economies were reorganized for the war. Much of the
South was devastated as the North countered, while the North
also experienced localized destruction. Around 750,000
Americans died in the war, which amounts to roughly half
of all US war deaths in the nation’s history. Far from
the romantic image of combat imagined in 1861, two-thirds
of those who died in the war succumbed to
disease.
The war preserved the Union and ended
slavery, one of the most consequential achievements in
American history, but it bore little resemblance to the
swift and bloodless campaign envisioned before it started.
Lincoln’s assassination also
derailed hopes for a smoother Reconstruction and led to
the political and racial divisions continuing for
generations. The conflict demonstrated that even conflicts
fought for essential causes rarely unfold as predictably as
their supporters expect, producing lasting trauma and
resentment alongside historic victories.
The Road to
World War I
The Civil War left Americans wary of
entering another conflict on the same scale, even as the
country became an assertive world power. As Europe drifted
toward World War I in 1914, Washington initially watched
from afar, observing a continent that had avoided a great
power conflict for decades, and seemed to have convinced
itself that a new war would be short and even
desirable.
European military leaders believed they
could secure victory before calamity set in. German army
officers Wilhelm von Blume and General von Liebert assured
that the war would be
quick, while German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly
told troops in August 1914 that “You will be home
before the leaves fall from the trees” in
autumn.
Some other political leaders were less
optimistic, like Britain’s former Foreign Secretary Sir
Edward Grey, who feared a continental war would
be disastrous, but conceded to the idea that such a
conflict was inevitable. Historian William Mulligan argues
that “political elites understood that war would bring
in its wake revolution, chaos, and impoverishment,” but
“lacked the emotional frameworks to grasp the scale of
destruction.”
In The State, published
posthumously in 1919, Randolph Bourne argued that democratic
societies cultivated a “democratic
desire for war,” encouraging citizens to identify the
interests of the state with those of the nation. French
writers Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, under
the pseudonym Agathon, described how younger French
citizens, with no experience of war, embraced militarism and
patriotism with striking enthusiasm.
As mobilization
began, crowds
packed railway stations across Europe to cheer departing
soldiers. Schoolboys lied about their ages to enlist, with
many believing they’d be “home by Christmas,” and
feared missing the adventure if they stayed behind.
Nationalists and revolutionaries alike welcomed the war as a
creative force
capable of remaking society. Enthusiasm was strongest in
major cities, but rural
populations were more apprehensive, accepting
mobilization as inevitable and a duty instead of a
celebration.
Within months, the optimism of the prewar
period had given way to the carnage of trench warfare.
Millions were killed or wounded as the conflict settled into
a brutal stalemate.
By the time the US entered the war
in 1917, Europe had exhausted itself through attrition,
revolution, and economic collapse. Germany’s unrestricted
submarine warfare, including the sinking of the Lusitania,
along with the Zimmerman
Telegram proposing a German alliance with Mexico, helped
push Washington toward intervention. Then-US President
Woodrow Wilson was encouraged by leading figures, including
Major
General Leonard Wood, Secretary
of State Robert Lansing, as well as former President
Teddy Roosevelt, and influential business
interests like J.P. Morgan, to join the war.
But
unlike in Europe in 1914, Wilson understood the US public
still needed convincing. Soon after declaring war on Germany
in April 1917, his administration created the Committee
on Public Information, mobilizing tens of thousands of
volunteers to deliver patriotic speeches in cinemas,
churches, and other public gatherings. Newspapers,
advertisements, films, and pamphlets, meanwhile, portrayed
intervention as both the quickest path to ending the war and
a moral crusade to make the world “safe
for democracy.”
When the war ended in 1918,
America’s late entry limited
the loss of lives to 116,000 soldiers, ensuring that the
homeland escaped the devastation that engulfed Europe. Yet
many Americans emerged questioning the nation’s
involvement, helping propel Warren G. Harding’s isolationist
campaign to the presidency in 1920. Even so, the war
permanently expanded Washington’s role in European affairs
and established the promotion of democracy as a recurring
justification for military intervention for the 20th
century.
The Long Retreat from Mass War
The US
again entered World War II after years of fighting by
combatants from other countries in Europe. It suffered far
fewer casualties and destruction, and emerged as the
world’s dominant military power. Afterward, the US assumed
responsibility for containing Soviet influence, framing
military intervention as the defense of democracy. But US
wars in Korea, and especially Vietnam, demonstrated that
prolonged conflicts with tens of thousands of US casualties
were becoming politically unsustainable.
From the
1980s onward, the US increasingly engaged in a lighter war
model. Brief interventions in Grenada
and Panama,
followed by the Gulf
War and Yugoslav
wars in the 1990s, demonstrated that overwhelming
technological superiority could deliver victory with limited
American losses.
Even though the occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq temporarily revived large-scale
expeditionary warfare in the 2000s, historian Andrew J.
Bacevich argued that Americans had grown
accustomed to near-permanent military engagement because
its costs were borne by a relatively small volunteer force
rather than society as a whole. Without conscription,
rationing, or heavy casualties, wars could expand with
little effect on daily life beyond the headlines.
The
prolonged insurgencies and failed nation-building efforts of
the 2000s occupations soon pushed Washington back toward a
lighter model, seen in Libya in 2011. Built around airpower,
special forces, private contractors, and local partners, the
immediate American costs were limited, even if the wider
consequences—state collapse, refugee flows, and
regional instability—were more severe for
others.
The ongoing war in Iran represents the latest
test of that approach. The promises of spreading democracy
and the patriotic enthusiasm that accompanied previous
interventions have all but disappeared. In its place is a
general apathy, with most Americans opposed
to the Iran conflict without feeling or even seeing it
directly. The potential consequences, however, remain
significant: what if Iran accelerates its pursuit of nuclear
weapons, the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea face permanent
disruption, resource prices surge, retaliation reaches the
US homeland, or the conflict expands beyond the region
significantly?
From the Civil War and World War I to
the modern US invasion of Iraq and Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, governments and societies have repeatedly
underestimated how wars unfold. The current lack of public
interest in the Iran conflict may seem like progress
compared with the nationalist euphoria that accompanied
earlier conflicts, but a society insulated from war is less
likely to question why it is fought, how long it may last,
and what success looks like. Distance from conflict can
delay its costs, but the consequences of war can still
reverberate long after the final shot has been
fired.
Notes:
By John P. Ruehl
John P.
Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in
Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the
Independent
Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign
affairs publications, and his book, Budget
Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy
Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December
2022. Follow him on X
@john_ruehl.
This article was produced by
Economy
for All, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
