March 11, 2026

The Curse of Middle-Sized Wars

By: Robert D. Kaplan

This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

In 1988, the military historian James Stokesbury observed that democracies are best at fighting either little wars, which are reserved for “professionals” and don’t involve ordinary citizens, or really big wars that mobilize all of society. Those democracies, he continued, have “very real problems trying to fight a middle-sized war, where some go and some stay home.”

The United States exists in the world as a de facto empire, and misbegotten wars are embedded in the history of imperialism itself.

It may be uncomfortable to consider the so-called forever warsin the Middle East—which have killed or wounded tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and left countless dead on all sides—as merely middle-sized. But Stokesbury’s point is one of comparison. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those in Korea and Vietnam, as gruesome as they were, cannot be equated to the two big world wars of the twentieth century. Nor can they be grouped with little wars, such as the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and of Panama in 1989, which made headlines for a few days but were essentially imperial policing actions. U.S. military interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 also had exceedingly few American casualties and were mainly air operations conducted within strict limits.

Read the full article in Foreign Affairs.

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