Victory Disease: When Winning Begets Defeat
A pandemic of self-destructive hubris has infected Trump, Putin, Khamenei, and others.
Winning a war can prove dangerous. Believing you won so handily that you might just be invincible can prove even more harmful than losing.
Military historians use the term “Victory Disease” to describe armies and governments that mistake success for proof of their own invincibility. We’ve been witnessing a pandemic. Evidence of the malady has emerged across the Strait of Hormuz, in Iraq, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel and elsewhere.
In fact, we can trace many of the wars of the 21st century to a chain reaction of victories followed by impaired conclusions about their implications.
The latest patient is the Iranian regime. It survived weeks of relentless bombing by the U.S. and Israel. But the men running the country now may just squander their success. They are puffed up with their achievement, and are doubling down, potentially gambling away their victory.
Other than surviving, their greatest success was persuading the U.S. to sign that disastrous Memorandum of Understanding that set the stage for strengthening the regime. Vice President JD Vance mused that U.S.-Iran negotiations might lead to relations between the two countries to “turn over a new lead.” But Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is instead flexing its muscles, attacking commercial ships, pushing so hard that they may just unwittingly destroy the leverage the Strait gives them.
President Trump has struck back, but even if he stops attacking Iranian targets tomorrow, Tehran has already shot itself in the foot: Everyone is working as fast as possible to build alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, ways to bypass Iranian control. Iran wants to dominate the channel, but a softer approach might have allowed it to maintain control without forcing other countries to find ways to avoid it.
When all the pipelines and alternative ports are ready, that storied maritime passage will no longer be described as “crucial.”
The Iran war itself was a case of Victory Disease.
Just a few months after he declared that the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program during what was a very successful, low-cost operation last summer, Trump decided to join Israel in a massive air campaign of regime change. The decision came just a few weeks after Trump authorized a daring mission in Venezuela that easily succeeded in capturing President Nicolas Maduro and turning Venezuela into a vassal state of the United States. Iran was rebuilding its missile capability to protect the nuclear program. But I’m convinced that Venezuela made him believe Iran would be easy. Without that quick victory he might still have attacked Iran, but perhaps he would have prepared better. Perhaps. After Maduro’s capture, Trump sounded downright euphoric. He was feeling invincible. He thought Iran would become another geopolitical trophy to burnish his legacy as a great man of history.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also feeling strong. Israel had sharply eroded the ability of Iranian proxies, sworn to its destruction, to cause serious damage. After the disastrous security failure that allowed Hamas to carry out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, 2023, Netanyahu oversaw mostly-Mossad operations that reshaped the region. Then he thought he might score another massive win against those who would destroy Israel, toppling their paymaster, Iran.
Like any pandemic, Victory Disease is not limited to one region. Consider Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. It happened because President Vladimir Putin drank his own Kool-Aid, tainted with the virus.
After cementing his hold on power, steadily dismantling the democratic opposition in Russia, Putin decided to make his mark in history as other czars had done in the past, by expanding Russia’s borders. The world’s largest country, it already spans eleven time zones. Neighboring Ukraine was the obvious target because its people have been working hard to become a functioning democracy. A successful democracy just across the border could inspire Russians to again try their hand at getting rid of their dictator.
So, Putin started nibbling at Ukraine, crafting his own version of history to claim Ukraine is not a real country but a part of Russia. In 2014, he took Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula without a fight, sending “green men,” unidentified, heavily-armed fighters to seize the strategic land on the Black Sea. The world complained and imposed sanctions, but not much happened. Russians, even Putin critics, were swept up in patriotic fervor.
It wasn’t hard to achieve that victory, and the cost was bearable, so Putin kept going. First, he started stoking separatist sentiment in Donbas, at Ukraine’s border with Russia. Then he sent troops to back them. The world protested, but the cost was acceptable.
Putin felt strong. The victory in Crimea gave him a severe case of the disease. Hubris, one of the symptoms, produced the delirium that made him think he could conquer all of Ukraine in a few days. Four years later, Russia is on its back foot. The war has only strengthened Ukraine’s sense of nationhood; it led to NATO’s expansion, and it has already caused more than a million casualties among Russians. Ukraine is admired around the world and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a global superstar. Putin is a pariah; Russians are viewed with suspicion. The cost of this war for Russia and Putin has been crushing, and the benefits non-existent.
But Putin was not the first leader to have his judgment clouded by success.
If you’re old enough to remember how the war in Iraq started, you may recall that President George W. Bush launched it in 2003 while U.S. forces were still in Afghanistan, having easily toppled the Taliban with small teams of Special Forces.
The U.S. thought it had won in Afghanistan — history had quite a surprise in store — and quickly moved to get rid of another vile regime, Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Washington split its attention, blurring its focus from why it had gone to Afghanistan, the host to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks against the United States.
The result was two disastrous, decades-long wars. The Taliban, whose fanatical version of Islam makes women’s lives a hell on Earth, are now back in power. And the U.S. struggled to gain the upper hand in Iraq, which endured a civil war and an excruciating invasion by al Qaeda’s demonic offspring, ISIS, which spread its medieval oppression, its enslavement of women, videotaped beheadings, across the border to Syria.
Is there a way to prevent Victory Disease? Losing wars is hardly advisable, but even the ancient Greeks warned about hubris, the precursor of disaster. The only way to win without overplaying your hand is to maintain a sense of perspective, to understand that one victory is no guarantee of future triumph. That war, although sometimes necessary and justified, is a Pandora’s box, whose unfolding and final outcome can never be fully predicted. The moment leaders begin to believe winning has made them invincible, they become infected with the very disease that has undone so many victors before them.