Win some, lose some
Dealing with defeat
Bad guys always win the wars.
This statement is not as extreme or despairing as it sounds. In every war, each side considers itself the good guys and the other side the bad guys. Whichever side wins, they are the bad guys to the other side. Ergo, bad guys always win.
And good guys always lose. So what do the good guys do when they lose?
Americans might reflexively think this question doesn't apply to us. We’re the good guys. And we usually win.
Not quite. Leaving aside the very contestable point of whether we’re always the good guys, we’ve often been on the losing side. At least some of us have. A large number of Americans sided with the British in the Revolutionary War. Many Americans, especially in New England, opposed the War of 1812—which ended in a draw, with neither winners nor losers.
The losers in the American war against Mexico included lots of people who became Americans as a result of the war. All the losers in the Civil War were Americans. The losers in the Indian wars were Americans—indigenous ones.
Of America 's seven wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, only three were clear-cut victories. And of these, World War I soon seemed less than a resounding triumph. The Gulf War of 1991 wasn’t big enough to brag about. And America’s allies in World War II included some nasty characters, namely Stalin and Mao. Churchill was a democrat at home but an imperialist abroad.
The larger point is that at the end of every war, people have to reconcile themselves to defeat. Sometimes they spin tales minimizing their responsibility. White Southerners denied that secession had anything to do with slavery. Hitler claimed that Germany hadn't legitimately lost World War I but had been betrayed by German Jews. Vladimir Putin says something similar about the Cold War, blaming not Jews for the dissolution of the Soviet Union but traitors led by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Sometimes the losers flee for their lives. Scores of thousands of Loyalists sailed away with the British after the Revolutionary War. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fled their country after the North Vietnamese victory.
Sometimes the losers get slaughtered or enslaved. Enslavement isn’t done openly any more, and slaughter was more common before human rights and war crimes became conceptual categories. But the 20th century produced its share of killing fields during and after wars. And if one counts domestic conflicts like the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s, we moderns aren’t all that different from our forebears.
Sometimes the losers cast defeat as victory in disguise. Many Japanese after World War II expressed relief that their country had been liberated from the generals and admirals who drove it to destruction. Alumni of the Johnson administration retrospectively proclaimed the American effort in Vietnam a holding action against a larger communist offensive in Asia. Though America lost in Vietnam, they said, by delaying the communist victory for ten years it allowed the rest of Southeast Asia to get its act together, so that the other dominoes didn’t fall.
This review of the past isn't a matter of historical curiosity only. The war in Ukraine won't go on forever. Both sides aren't going to win. How will the losers treat their loss?
If Putin and the Russians don't subdue all of Ukraine, they doubtless will say they never intended to. This definitely will be the case if there is a negotiated settlement. Harry Truman did something like this after the American attempt to liberate North Korea failed. The liberation of North Korea hadn't been part of the original strategy, he said correctly, and so failure to accomplish it wasn't a big deal.
If the Ukrainians somehow expel the Russians from all of Ukraine's territory, including Crimea, Putin will have a harder time rationalizing things. But if that happens, Putin 's own job might be in jeopardy. Any successors will simply blame him for the Russian defeat. The American Revolutionary War ended after the British government that prosecuted the war fell from power.
What if Ukraine loses? Suppose Russia destroys the Ukrainian army and resistance ends, what then? In America’s wars of conquest in the 19th century—against Indian tribes and Mexico—the driving force was the perceived need for more territory to accommodate a growing population. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the aim was for lebensraum—living space. But Russia has a declining population. It doesn’t need new territory. Nor does it need Ukraine’s other natural resources, having plenty of its own.
What would a victorious Russia do with Ukraine? It would occupy strategic parts of the country and probably impose a compliant Ukrainian regime in Kyiv (or Kiev, as it might become again). It might find ways to extract revenues from Ukraine. But it would probably treat Ukraine much as the United States treated Cuba from the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Castro revolution of 1959: as a protectorate where it exercised a veto in foreign policy but accepted little responsibility for day-to-day affairs. Ukrainian nationalists, like Cuban nationalists, would resent and occasionally challenge the foreign influence. In time they might revolt against it, as Castro eventually did. But most Ukrainians would get on with their lives. The older ones might reflect that things weren’t very different from what they had been during Soviet days.
And they might suppose things weren’t very different from what they would have been had Ukraine won the war. Ukraine’s prewar government was hardly a paragon of democratic virtue.
A surprising aspect of war is how little it changes lives. The exceptions loom large, with World War II being the most conspicuous example from fairly recent history. Wars shock existing systems, but they rarely reset systems in fundamental ways. Big resets take longer than wars usually last.
Win some. Lose some. Life goes on.