I think my principle of “whoever starts it should lose it” holds up pretty well for most real world examples:
- Iraq invades Kuwait, Iraq loses
- America invades Iraq, America loses
- Argentina invades Falklands, Argentina loses
- Russia/America invade Afghanistan, Russia/America lose
- France/America invade Vietnam, France/America lose
- North/South Korea invade each other, both lose
- Germany/Japan invade everyone, Germany/Japan lose
- Germany invades France, Germany loses (WWI)
- France invades Germany, France loses (Franco-Prussian War)
honestly when you start listing them all out, starting a war begins to seem like a pretty stupid idea!
This is such basic stuff that it’s really embarrassing to hear self-described “antiwar” types equating the attacker and defender. The best deterrent to war is for the people to start them to lose reliably! I don’t know that I’d say that this rule always holds, but it’s a pretty good rule, and the more antiwar one is in general the better it looks.
What’s fascinating is that, like, this is super old news. Much like empires no longer call themselves that and all the Departments of War have been renamed to Departments of Defense, one always manufactuers a pretext by which invasions don’t count as wars of aggression; with propaganda, it’s easy to manufacture provocations and construct arguments that a strike is truly preemptive. The interesting thing about the Russian war is that they didn’t even try to do that, which I think is part of the reason the response against it from Europe has been so intense – it’s an unapologetic war of conquest, one without shame or discretion enough to pose as something else. It seems like a trivial distinction until you see it in practice, at which point it’s like no, that’s actually pretty concerning!
I think the examples in OP are wrong, and the addition is wrong on Russia
yes there is a massive selection effect here where wars that are won by the initiator tend to be won promptly and thus don’t make it to the list of Big Wars That Everyone Talks About, or they just fizzle out in talks that don’t really count as a win or a loss either way.
I would push back a little on the US vs. Iraq, it’s true that the US defeated Saddam but that can be seen as the delayed conclusion of Gulf War I which Saddam initiated, while the broader US aims of Gulf War II were not achieved (in George W. Bush vs. remake the Middle East and make it safe for American interests (and topple Iran) I think that Bush comes out the loser there).
however the fact that a lot of wars start by a series of escalations as more players get involved doesn’t mean that we can’t identify a classic example of a war in which one specific player masses an invasion force on the borders of another: this example is much more clear cut!
now of course you can still justify your invasion in any way that you like, whether it’s Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine or American tanks rolling into Iraq, but it’s clear to everyone that at no point were the tanks going to roll across the border in the other direction, the “security concerns” that justified an invasion were much more abstract than the immediate threat of a counter-invasion, and on those grounds we can label an initiator or aggressor.
(and the constant refrain of “provocations” to justify aggression is really just a way of saying “asking for it”).