Why America Can't Get Out of Wars
There's a huge war machinery built up around wars that people don't want to pull the plug.
One of the more persistent puzzles in contemporary US foreign policy is why the nation that can rapidly mobilize for military action struggles so profoundly to define or achieve exit conditions. Christine Arakelian addresses this disconnect by pointing to three overlapping mechanisms: institutional war machinery, psychological factors, and analytical blind spots.
First, there is the literal infrastructure. Wars generate entrenched interests across government agencies, defense contractors, and political establishments. Once a war is established, constituencies depend on its continuation; pulling the plug meets resistance at every level, not necessarily because stakeholders deny the war’s limitations, but because they have built careers, budgets, and institutional power around it.
Second, Arakelian identifies a psychological component rooted in human cognition and group dynamics. Actors in conflict often succumb to echo chambers where dissenting voices are marginalized. This creates a mentality of pushing forward “one inch further, two inches further” in hopes of finally achieving the desired outcome, even when prior escalations failed to deliver it. History is littered with examples of wars that should have ended but didn’t because decision-makers pushed past the point of sustainability.
Third is the analytical gap. Few institutional actors adequately interrogate the fundamental limitation: what does victory actually mean? Without a clear, achievable definition of success, the military machine grinds on, consuming resources and lives. The US pattern in recent decades-from Afghanistan to the ongoing Iran war-reflects this inability to ask hard questions before commitment.
Arakelian’s framing matters because it suggests that the problem is not simply poor strategy or bad leadership, but rather structural features of how large democracies wage war. Until those features are recognized and actively countered, similar patterns will repeat.
Transcript
Christine Arakelian: Well, In part, I think because there's a huge war machinery built up around wars that people don't want to pull the plug. It's not so much basically that people don't recognize the limitations, but unfortunately, people start going into an echo chamber. There's a psychological component to it. And there's a thinking, I push it one inch further, two inch further, I'm going to get my way. Okay, so there's a lot of psychology that goes into war. There's an analytical component, but there's a component of human psychology that ultimately dominates and you have to look at those components to understand why wars last. Just open up your history book and you see many wars that should have ended and basically people pushed it beyond the point where it could be sustained and outcomes became very different than what people originally anticipated.