Fear of Failure

Wars are often driven, prolonged, and escalated by leaders whose main concern is how history will judge them.

I’ve spent years studying conflict zones with my colleagues at the International Crisis Group. One pattern keeps reappearing through history, stubborn as a rusted lock. Wars often drag on long after the original strategic case has become obsolete, not because of an enemy’s persistence but because the leader who started or inherited the war can’t bear to be the one who lost.

Millions of people suffering the consequences of one man’s vanity is not a new phenomenon. It’s rooted in how humans organize power. A single leader, or the tight circle around one, can gain control of the military, the intelligence services, the key economic levers, and the narrative.

Once control is established, launching or sustaining large-scale violence does not require the active consent of the population. It simply requires the continued operation of those institutions and the absence of an effective internal or external guardrail. Disapproval, even if widespread, is hard to coordinate.

This dynamic was evident two centuries ago when Napoleon, a leader without dynastic legitimacy, repeatedly refused compromise terms in 1813-14. He told the Austrian negotiator Schwarzenberg that an established government could accept a harsh peace, but “I am a new man. If I signed a peace of this sort I would lose the confidence of my people, because the Frenchman loves glory and exaltation.” Translation: I love glory and exaltation, and nobody’s going to hang an L on me.

Since World War II American presidents have exercised enormous discretion over the use of force; formal declarations of war have mostly become a thing of the past. The “rally around the flag” effect produces initial public support. War fatigue sets in later, when exiting would already be politically costly.

An all-volunteer force and the distance of most citizens from the actual fighting reduce the immediate domestic price. Advisers, intelligence estimates, and ideological frameworks—domino theory, weapons of mass destruction, counter-terrorism, great-power restoration—supply rationales that provide cover for a leader’s personal aversion to the appearance of loss.

Human nature reinforces the structure. We accept dominance hierarchies and defer to perceived legitimate authority. Fabricated nationalism, ethnic identity, or fear of the enemy can make large segments of a population support or tolerate war even when it’s extremely costly.

Elite incentives, security services, and allied regimes often benefit from the status quo. These patterns appear across cultures whenever a polity values decision rights over violence. In other words, the majority of us are sheep living in a land dominated by wolves.

Citizens elect leaders who promise strength and then, once they unleash conflict, discover the difficulty of enforcing limits. Institutions designed for deliberation have been undermined by the speed of modern warfare and the political costs of appearing soft. And so large-scale organized violence turns on the psychological and political needs of the person at the top. Millions of others—soldiers, civilians, entire populations—are left to absorb the consequences.

Lyndon Johnson understood the personal stakes early in his first term term as U.S. president. Two days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, LBJ told Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge he would not allow South Vietnam to fall: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

The “loss of China” narrative had damaged the Democratic Party and fueled McCarthyism in the 1950s. LBJ, who preferred the domestic stage of his “Great Society,” feared being branded a coward or traitor. He told aides versions of “I know we oughtn’t to be there, but I can’t get out. I just can’t be the architect of surrender.”

What had begun as limited U.S. support for the South Vietnamese evolved into a major war. By 1968 more than half a million U.S. troops were engaged. Roughly 58,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died before the final collapse in 1975. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had prolonged the fighting in search of “peace with honor”—otherwise known as a refusal to accept the appearance of defeat.

In the US today, President Trump’s well-documented aversion to “losers”—rooted in his binary winners-and-losers worldview, his stated claims of victory, and his personal grandiosity—makes accepting a limited or ambiguous outcome in Iran highly unlikely.

In the current stage of that war (intermittent strikes, a naval blockade, on-again-off-again negotiations), Trump has repeatedly claimed decisive or near-decisive success, despite broad recognition that he’s caught in an obvious, increasingly costly stalemate.

Trump’s demands for unconditional surrender or regime-level change, his threats to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, and his framing the options as winning “the nice way or the not nice way,” reflect his need to declare a clear win rather than settle for something that can be spun as incomplete.

Meanwhile, Putin’s war in Ukraine, now well into its fourth year of attrition, is framed in civilizational and historical terms, even though Putin’s core grievance at the start was unrelenting NATO expansion. Russia’s territorial gains have been modest relative to the casualties and economic strain, but ending the war on terms short of his original aims—including full control of the Donbas—would require accepting visible failure.

Putin is reported to have expressed the fear that such an outcome would put him at risk (“They will hang me”), reflecting both personal legacy concerns and the logic of a personalized, heavily repressive system. His approval rating remains in the 70 percent range, yet the majority of Russians favor peace talks and would support ending the conflict if he decided to do so.

Russian elites, meanwhile, express private discontent over long-term costs, but they remain fragmented and dependent. The incentive is therefore to continue rather than accept a settlement that cannot be sold as a complete success.

There are two oft-repeated truths about war. Once a war starts, the outcome is unpredictable. And wars, no matter how contained at the outset, almost always escalate. Here’s a third truth: a leader’s personal stake in historical reputation often comes at the cost of the collective interest. Outcomes that don’t match the original rhetoric, in a political culture inclined to treat withdrawal or negotiation as proof of weakness, endanger us all.

Our abysmal record of conflict prevention since 1945 shows why peace is still worth fighting for—precisely because the alternative is so costly and unpredictable. That wars can be driven, prolonged, and escalated by a single leader’s fear of how history will judge him makes conflict in the nuclear age not just dangerous, but existentially so.