The United States has fought in the following major conflicts: The Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, occupation of the Philippines, First World War, Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, the occupation of Afghanistan, and the (ongoing) occupation of Iraq.

US armed forces have also been involved in a massive number of other conflicts, including naval battles with the Barbary pirates, numerous wars against native peoples of North America throughout the nineteenth century, 1856 “Mormon War” where a federal army was sent following conflict between Mormon settlers in what is now Utah and federally appointed officials, and interventions in Latin America and around the globe across the 20th and 21st centuries.

It’s somewhat tricky to define which wars the US “started”— does the Mexican-American war, in which the US army troops into disputed territory and then treated it as an act of war when the Mexican troops in the same territory fired started by the US? It was intentionally provoked. The same holds true for the Civil War and Spanish-American War, among others.

Then there’s the challenge of evaluating who “won” a conflict. While the War of 1812 ended with the US, which had started the war, effectively surrendering following military failure on multiple fronts, the negotiated settlement included no loss of territory or reparations, and is widely considered a success for the US government because Britain was persuaded to treat the US as a contender in the Western Hemisphere and avoid further conflict.

In Afghanistan, a conflict the United States initiated unless one perceived the World Trade Center attack as an act of war by the Afghan government, which is a stretch despite the shelter they provided to other Islamists, the United States arguably achieved the war’s primary objective, the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the US military, and also successfully took territory from the Taliban and imposed a new government, but failed long-term to replace the Taliban permanently with a pro-US government, or to permanently end the threat of non-state Islamist terrorism. However, those were objectives that military occupation was ill-suited to produce. Similarly in Iraq the US could rightly claim “mission accomplished” following the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was cemented with his execution, but it’s still hard to call the conflict an unambiguous US victory.

The Mexican-American war was arguably initiated by the United States and ended in significant territorial expansion, and the Spanish-American war, which again the United States appears to have triggered unless one view the war as US intervention on behalf of the Cuban people, or in response to the non-attack on the USS Maine, ended with the withdrawal of Spain from the majority of its remaining overseas holdings and with most of those holdings clearly entering the US sphere of influence. The “Indian Wars” pursued in the name of Manifest Destiny often began with the US violating prior treaties, and all eventually ended with the United States seizing land and/or interning large numbers of native peoples in camps and reservations, which was the intended American outcome and certainly not the hoped for result of sovereign native nations. All of these conflicts could be taken as counter examples to the claim that the US has only won wars it did not start.

The US Civil War is, curiously, arguably relatable to the Afghan conflict. While the US military successfully invaded the secessionist states and coerced them to surrender and to form new governments loyal to the US while under military occupation, secessionists began a campaign of violence that ended in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops and governments that repudiated many of the federal governments supposed war aims. However, since these states had at one point formally surrendered and remained part of the US rather than successfully forming a breakaway nation, it’s generally considered a victory for the United States Army rather than an ignominious withdrawal with untold civilian casualties as a result of the abandonment of further occupation in the face of ongoing insurgent violence.

While it might be tempting to formulate a new rule and say the US wins wars where the objective is battlefield defeat of a specific regime and then quick withdrawal, rather than long-term military occupation, it’s worth noting that the occupation of the Philippines, which for over a decade seemed like a losing proposition against a determined local insurgency, ended post-WWII with the US military turning over the reins to a local government that remained a US ally. The US also militarily occupied post-war Germany and Japan for an extended period without facing any major insurgency, and as of August 2021 there are still more US troops deployed in both nations than in Iraq.

So there really isn’t a tidy rule for what kind of wars the United States wins. War, as the brutally pragmatic US general William Tecumseh Sherman observed, is hell. The lines of conflict are rarely clear, the causes even more mysterious, and the objectives are often murky. Victory is often a matter of debate and subject to later reversal rather than being absolutely cut and dried. Notably, none of the wars the United States has fought have begun with a foreign power invading the United States, and most US armed conflicts have taken place entirely on foreign soil, so even conflicts such as World War One have been wars of choice for the United States in a way they weren’t for many other combatant governments. It is much easier to say that the US fights wars than to define who truly initiated them or whether they can be categorically defined as victories.