write an essay on the topic 'there is no real victor in a war
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H. L. Mencken, America's early-20th-century curmudgeon, was well ahead of his time when he said that war (like love) is easier to start than to stop. Before 1945, there was something like a formula for how wars were fought and ended. When groups disagreed, usually over a piece of land, and failed to reconcile their differences amicably, they duked it out until one surrendered and the other carried off the prize. When they ended, wars had clear winners and losers.
With U.S. troops leaving Iraq and deploying in Afghanistan, it's worth asking: how are wars won now? Increasingly, they're not. Instead, says Page Fortna, a political scientist at Columbia University who researches war outcomes, nearly half of all wars since World War II have ended indecisively. That trend between states started with the Cold War, and for civil wars it began when the Cold War ended. (By contrast, only half a percent of all wars fought between 1816 and 1946 ended without a victor, according to the Correlates of War, an academic project that codes war outcomes.)
Partly, that's because the meaning of victory itself is changing. Even military routs have become divorced from political resolution, prompting a rise in "frozen conflicts" that seem to drag on through endless cycles of ceasefires, stalemates, and resurgences without ever properly concluding, says Fortna. "Because of changing norms about what is acceptable to gain through warfare, issues that were once resolved militarily are now often left unresolved," she says. "There are still cases when one side is clearly stronger militarily, but that often doesn't translate into political victory. For example, what would victory in Iraq look like? Or Afghanistan? It's pretty open to interpretation." In a world where many guerrilla groups consider not losing to be the same as winning, it has become much harder to translate military success into the political stability necessary for peace.
Some political scientists blame—or credit—the new reliance of U.N. peacekeeping forces for these changes. Others note the shift away from territory as the primary war goal after financial holdings overtook property as the pillar of economic power. But unconditional surrender is so rare nowadays—what, then, does it mean to win a war? And what happens in its place? NEWSWEEK put these questions to political scientists mining conflict data; here, we break down outcomes into seven rough categories that have replaced the clear-cut results of yesteryear.
"There are two conditions that need to be met for a war to end in a draw," says Fortna. "One, neither side clobbers the other. And two, the sides can agree to stop fighting." To get to the second, she says, the parties have to overcome a "fog of war"—an information gap that keeps each one from trusting that the other won't attack.
In the Korean War, for example, there was no neutral peacekeeping force; it took two years and millions of lives before the parties settled on the terms of a ceasefire. With that, the 38th parallel, where Allied forces had partitioned the country in the first place, became the unofficial border between North and South. The armistice held for years, then decades, never leading to peace accords or solving underlying political issues, never convincing either party it could move its troops away from the border zone. It has, so far, kept the aggressors from firing at each other. But technically, without a peace treaty, the United States is still at war with North Korea.
Such draws are as old as warfare itself, except for one change: there are more of them now. Fortna attributes that trend largely to the rise in peacekeeping, since neutral forces help combatants to see through war's fog and negotiate a settlement (see slide 4). Since the end of World War II, peacekeepers have rendered a tie from several Cold War conflicts between states—with a psychological assist from the specter of mutually assured destruction. Later, after the Cold War ended, they shifted their focus to civil wars, coinciding with more draws in internal conflicts.