Military victory is an alluring idea. A short, violent campaign that defeats the enemy promises payoffs at a tolerable price. The Trump administration expected such an outcome in Iran in February 2026. The Netanyahu government sought it in Gaza in October 2023, then in Lebanon and Iran. Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed his 2022 invasion of Ukraine would deliver it. Many critics of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq decry a failure to achieve military victory, contrasting such wars with the decisive battlefield outcomes they believe were achieved in the 1990–91 Gulf War and World War II. And until recently, the debate over U.S. aid to Ukraine featured widespread calls to help the country win a military victory, dismissing negotiations as appeasement.

Yet those who invoke the term rarely define it. “Victory” means achieving the political aims for which one went to war. But “military victory” implies more. The adjective signals that those aims are secured through combat rather than at the bargaining table. Negotiation requires compromise and invites stalling that can exhaust political will. Battlefield victory, by contrast, promises a prostrate enemy with no meaningful choice but to accept the victor’s terms on the victor’s timetable. That promise is what makes the idea so attractive and so ubiquitous.

But the notion of military victory is a dangerous myth. All modern wars end in negotiated settlements; talks are not a second-best fallback. To end a war, both sides must choose to stop fighting, and those choices always require nontrivial bargaining. Destruction matters, of course. It is what distinguishes war from peacetime politics. But its role is to shape the bargain, not to annihilate the enemy, which almost never happens.

The myth of military victory has repeatedly led governments to start or prolong wars on false premises about how those wars would end. The Trump administration believed force could compel Iran’s unconditional surrender; instead, the United States finds itself in a stalemate. The Netanyahu government’s conviction that it can defeat Hamas militarily has lengthened the Gaza war in pursuit of an unattainable goal. Putin’s expectation of battlefield victory in Ukraine has mired both countries in a war with no apparent endgame.

If Chinese leader Xi Jinping makes the same mistake, an attack on Taiwan could ensnare Beijing in a conflict that is easier to start than to stop, with stakes far beyond the Taiwan Strait. And if the United States assumes that it could secure a military victory in a war with China, then it, too, could find itself exhausted in a fight it cannot easily end.

Muddled thinking about how wars conclude also breeds prewar errors in intelligence, modernization, and force design. And misunderstanding the relationship between bargaining and fighting produces a systematic failure to integrate negotiating strategy with campaign planning. As long as policymakers do not grasp that wars end only when both sides are ready to lay down their arms, they will continue to be frustrated by the inability of military force to achieve their political goals.

CARTHAGE WAS THE EXCEPTION

No modern war has destroyed an enemy’s ability to resist. Combatants can always keep fighting if they choose, even after enemies sweep their military from the field or capture their capital. Such persistence can reverse fortunes and decide wars. Winning a war requires offering surviving (and potential) fighters a deal they prefer to continued resistance. These deals can be one-sided. But terms and bargaining always matter: no war ends unless both sides choose to accept a settlement and stop.

The only alternative is to physically annihilate one’s enemies. Rome succeeded in doing so when it ended the Third Punic War by enslaving Carthage’s surviving citizens and, according to legend, salting the city’s ruins so nothing would grow there again. But no war in the modern era has met this criterion, and few have come close. Since the Napoleonic Wars ended, in 1815, the defeated parties in interstate wars have lost a median of eight percent of their forces. In two-thirds of those cases, that figure was under ten percent. The only country to lose more than 90 percent of its forces was Paraguay, in the Triple Alliance War (1864–70). Most belligerents accept defeat—settlement on unfavorable terms—long before their capacity to resist runs out.

War-ending settlements can be explicit or tacit. Explicit negotiations involve direct communication, offers, and counteroffers; examples include the Korean War armistice and the 1995 Dayton accords that concluded the Bosnian war. Tacit bargaining uses actions, threats, or declarations to signal acceptance or rejection of terms without formal talks.

The 1990–91 Gulf War, for example, ended when the U.S.-led coalition announced a unilateral cease-fire, and the Iraqis stopped fighting, too, without diplomatic exchanges. Combat had shown Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that continued resistance would bring further coalition advances, potentially to Baghdad; the cease-fire signaled that U.S. and allied forces would hold their positions if the Iraqis did the same. Saddam understood and reciprocated. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the coalition commander, then instructed Baghdad to send a military delegation to Safwan airfield to negotiate disengagement. The result heavily favored the United States and its allies. They liberated Kuwait, their central aim. Saddam preserved his regime but lost his conquests and faced postwar restrictions, leaving him worse off than he was before his invasion.

All modern wars end in negotiated settlements.

This was an unambiguous victory, but it was not achieved by destroying Iraq’s capacity to resist. At the cease-fire, the Iraqi army retained most of its prewar strength. Up to 50,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed and 75,000 wounded out of a force exceeding a million—under 15 percent. Over 800,000 troops survived and could have kept fighting. Days later, Iraqi forces crushed Shiite uprisings in the south.

Saddam’s decision to stop in 1991 was not a mere acceptance of reality. Iraq’s experience in its next war with the United........

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