The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.

It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in. The USA's industrial output back in WWII was staggering, its enemies had little hope of victory given the sheer number of materiel that would eventually get deployed. Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.

> The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.

It feels like semantics here. The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.

But just knowing the US military is too weak to accomplish its objectives doesn't help much, because the US leadership is so mercurial it might decide to attack anyway. The deterrent effect only helps if you have rational leadership who is capable of evaluating the chance of failure.

Repelling such an invasion, while possible, is still a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking, because so much of their population will suffer in the invasion regardless.

If you set out to achieve an objective, but the enemy prevents you from achieving that objective, you lost.

>The USA has never been defeated. It's never been taken over by force and forced to submit to a foreign power. War getting a little too expensive or politically unpopular for their tastes is not really a loss, and it implies nothing about their true capabilities.

Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.

On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as Kosovo, or various strikes on particular targets.

>Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.

American workers just don't want to do those jobs any more, at least not enough of them, and the country won't tolerate enough immigration to make up the shortfall domestically. There just aren't tens of millions of Americans sitting around waiting to take up manufacturing jobs. If citizens prefer to do other jobs, then non citizens have to do them, whether that's in the USA or outside it.

Sorry, but this is a comic book understanding of victory and defeat. Not your fault, many people think this way post-WWII as they have come to see this conflict as a template for what “real” war looks like.

Tactical defeat is when you are prevented from meeting your objectives for a particular operation, such as securing a target area or destroying/degrading a target enemy force. Strategic defeat is when the enemy prevents you from achieving your broader objectives (typically political, as war is politics by other means). The US has experienced both of these in the last century.

Most active militaries have experienced both types of defeat at one time or another. It’s practically impossible to avoid losing sometimes if you overuse war as a tool of diplomacy.

the modern USA territory was never taken over, but the US military had to pack and leave quickly in a few occasions. Just because Vietnamese couldn't fight back in the US, nor the Talibans, doesn't mean that the US wasn't defeated.

But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.

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