I recently drove to a gas station in Massachusetts to fill my tank with regular gas, the cheapest around, and, to my surprise, given what’s going on, it was only $4.59 a gallon.

Okay, okay, I take back that “only” and admit it. It’s not good to joke about the nightmare of gas prices these days. But in truth, that may indeed still prove to be the good news, since Donald Trump remains at war (or perhaps at chaos) with Iran, a country a mere 6,300 miles or so from Washington, DC, and so crucial to American power on this distinctly overheating planet of ours (right?). And even as I was writing this, Iran had indeed again closed the Strait of Hormuz through which about 25% of global oil and 20% of global natural gas normally passes, and Donald Trump was threatening to take over the Strait himself.

The terrible (even terrifying) logic of what he is now doing is (or at least should be) overwhelmingly obvious to anyone who has even a faint memory of this country’s imperial history since it emerged victorious from World War II in 1945. And yet give Donald Trump credit. People deal with him as if he were a unique figure in American history and in some ways, of course, he couldn’t be more so. But not, it turns out, when it comes to American-style war. There, he seems almost boringly part of a story (now more than three-quarters of a century old) of how the seemingly greatest power on Planet Earth in the endless decades after World War II simply couldn’t—no, not ever!—win a war.

After all, Harry S. Truman got us into a major conflict in Korea, almost 7,000 miles from Washington, D.C., in 1950, and when it ended three years later, the US left the North Koreans with approximately half of the Korean peninsula.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy increased American support for what had been the French colony of Indochina (until its military lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu to Ho Chi Minh’s rebel forces in 1954). He would then oversee what would become a full-scale American war in Vietnam, a mere 8,500 or so miles from this country, as well as a war in Laos (also about 8,500 miles away) and Cambodia (nearly 9,000 miles away) that would last a mere 14 more years, ending in a chaotically disastrous US withdrawal and absolute defeat in 1975.

In 2001, President George W. Bush would launch a war in Afghanistan as part of what he labeled his Global War on Terror, a country a mere 7,000 miles from Washington. It would last just 20 more years before ending in—yes, of course!—a distinct American defeat and the grim withdrawal of the last US troops there by presidents Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden in 2021. In 2003, Bush would also launch a war in Iraq, a mere 10,000 or so miles from Washington, a conflict that would be ended by President Barack Obama, again in defeat, in 2011 (although Washington would continue to engage in some fighting there in subsequent years).

And that’s not even counting various other American war-making activities on this planet, including a never-ending air war in........

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