A Brief History of How Countries Sleepwalk Into War

From the Civil War and World War I to the ongoing conflict in Iran, America’s and other nations’ expectations of war have repeatedly been challenged by the realities that emerge once fighting begins.

U.S. Marines in their gas masks during a gas mask drill, France, WWI, 1917

By John P. Ruehl

A nominal ceasefire reached in April 2026 has done little to halt the escalation in the Persian Gulf. After Iran’s “attempted surprise attack” against US forces on July 28, the US retaliated by launching a “heavy wave” of airstrikes on July 30, according to NPR, targeting Iran’s “military command centers and missile facilities,” and intensifying the fighting in the Middle East.

Since the war began in February, Iran has suffered extensive destruction to military and civilian infrastructure, resulting in thousands of casualties. Washington’s Gulf allies and Israel have likewise faced sustained pressure from Iranian attacks. Yet, despite nearly $40 billion in US spending on the war with Iran and damage to American military assets in the region, the conflict has not sparked widespread public debate among its citizens.

Protected by two vast oceans and overwhelming military power, the US has long been able to separate everyday life from the consequences of war and shield policymakers from public scrutiny. The casualties in the current conflict remain relatively low, with the latest Iranian strike bringing the official number of US deaths to 18. Life at home has continued largely uninterrupted, with the US even cohosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup during the conflict.

But the war has already outlasted initial expectations. US President Donald Trump had earlier stated that the Iran war would last four to five weeks, according to Al Jazeera, and the American strikes would lead to the collapse of the Iranian government. The July 26 expansion of Houthi attacks on shipping and infrastructure around the Red Sea has, however, further complicated the war as it is unclear what they aim to achieve.

America’s detachment from the war marks a departure from its early history, when conflicts were felt more directly and romanticized through glory and duty. The Civil War shattered those beliefs by exposing Americans to the realities of industrial warfare, while Europe’s descent into World War I revealed how easily countries could underestimate the costs of conflict while overestimating their ability to adapt to them. Those lessons are worth revisiting as the modern US approach to conflict continues to evolve.

The End of Glorious War

The last time war fundamentally transformed everyday life in the US was arguably during the Civil War. Before that, conflict was still imagined through the lens of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the frontier wars. Armed clashes were subjects of songs, novels, paintings, and patriotic myths, which portrayed them as decisive battles won through heroic charges, often accompanied by the fanfare of flags and drums.

As sectional tensions intensified in the lead-up to the Civil War, many Southern figures confidently insisted the commercial-minded North would never risk a costly conflict. In his infamous “Cotton is King” speech from 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond declared, “No power on earth dares to make war upon” the South’s lucrative cotton economy.

Even if war came, political leaders assured it would be swift and with minimal loss of life. Judge Samuel F. Rice boasted, “we can whip the Yankees with popguns,” while South Carolina Senator James Chesnut Jr. claimed he would “drink all the blood shed” over secession. The first Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Pope Walker, similarly told a crowd in April 1861, at the start of the war, that any blood spilled as a result of secession “could be wiped up with a handkerchief,” predicting that “before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington,” according to Reason magazine.

Mark Twain would later blame the novels of Sir Walter Scott in particular for fostering romantic notions of chivalry among Southern elites and the idea that war would be noble and victorious.

Northern leaders were generally more restrained but no less susceptible to overconfidence. The New York Tribune stated, “Forward to Richmond!… the place must be held by the National Army!” Historian David B. Blight argues that “Lincoln, under the pressure of public opinion,” pushed General Irvin McDowell to advance before his army was ready in the hope of delivering a knockout blow that would end the rebellion.

The First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 became the defining symbol of the North’s misplaced optimism. Politicians, journalists, and curious civilians—some arriving with picnic baskets—gathered to watch what they believed would be the war’s decisive battle. Instead, they fled alongside retreating Union troops as Confederate forces prevailed, and the illusion of a short war vanished.

What followed was one of the earliest industrial wars in history. Railways moved large armies, factories produced weapons on an unprecedented scale, and entire regional economies were reorganized for the war. Much of the South was devastated as the North countered, while the North also experienced localized destruction. Around 750,000 Americans died in the war, which amounts to roughly half of all US war deaths in the nation’s history. Far from the romantic image of combat imagined in 1861, two-thirds of those who died in the war succumbed to disease.

The war preserved the Union and ended slavery, one of the most consequential achievements in American history, but it bore little resemblance to the swift and bloodless campaign envisioned before it started. Lincoln’s assassination also derailed hopes for a smoother Reconstruction and led to the political and racial divisions continuing for generations. The conflict demonstrated that even conflicts fought for essential causes rarely unfold as predictably as their supporters expect, producing lasting trauma and resentment alongside historic victories.

The Road to World War I

The Civil War left Americans wary of entering another conflict on the same scale, even as the country became an assertive world power. As Europe drifted toward World War I in 1914, Washington initially watched from afar, observing a continent that had avoided a great power conflict for decades, and seemed to have convinced itself that a new war would be short and even desirable.

European military leaders believed they could secure victory before calamity set in. German army officers Wilhelm von Blume and General von Liebert assured that the war would be quick, while German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly told troops in August 1914 that “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees” in autumn.

Some other political leaders were less optimistic, like Britain’s former Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who feared a continental war would be disastrous, but conceded to the idea that such a conflict was inevitable. Historian William Mulligan argues that “political elites understood that war would bring in its wake revolution, chaos, and impoverishment,” but “lacked the emotional frameworks to grasp the scale of destruction.”

In The State, published posthumously in 1919, Randolph Bourne argued that democratic societies cultivated a “democratic desire for war,” encouraging citizens to identify the interests of the state with those of the nation. French writers Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, under the pseudonym Agathon, described how younger French citizens, with no experience of war, embraced militarism and patriotism with striking enthusiasm.

As mobilization began, crowds packed railway stations across Europe to cheer departing soldiers. Schoolboys lied about their ages to enlist, with many believing they’d be “home by Christmas,” and feared missing the adventure if they stayed behind. Nationalists and revolutionaries alike welcomed the war as a creative force capable of remaking society. Enthusiasm was strongest in major cities, but rural populations were more apprehensive, accepting mobilization as inevitable and a duty instead of a celebration.

Within months, the optimism of the prewar period had given way to the carnage of trench warfare. Millions were killed or wounded as the conflict settled into a brutal stalemate.

By the time the US entered the war in 1917, Europe had exhausted itself through attrition, revolution, and economic collapse. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, including the sinking of the Lusitania, along with the Zimmerman Telegram proposing a German alliance with Mexico, helped push Washington toward intervention. Then-US President Woodrow Wilson was encouraged by leading figures, including Major General Leonard Wood, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, as well as former President Teddy Roosevelt, and influential business interests like J.P. Morgan, to join the war.

But unlike in Europe in 1914, Wilson understood the US public still needed convincing. Soon after declaring war on Germany in April 1917, his administration created the Committee on Public Information, mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers to deliver patriotic speeches in cinemas, churches, and other public gatherings. Newspapers, advertisements, films, and pamphlets, meanwhile, portrayed intervention as both the quickest path to ending the war and a moral crusade to make the world “safe for democracy.”

When the war ended in 1918, America’s late entry limited the loss of lives to 116,000 soldiers, ensuring that the homeland escaped the devastation that engulfed Europe. Yet many Americans emerged questioning the nation’s involvement, helping propel Warren G. Harding’s isolationist campaign to the presidency in 1920. Even so, the war permanently expanded Washington’s role in European affairs and established the promotion of democracy as a recurring justification for military intervention for the 20th century.

The Long Retreat from Mass War

The US again entered World War II after years of fighting by combatants from other countries in Europe. It suffered far fewer casualties and destruction, and emerged as the world’s dominant military power. Afterward, the US assumed responsibility for containing Soviet influence, framing military intervention as the defense of democracy. But US wars in Korea, and especially Vietnam, demonstrated that prolonged conflicts with tens of thousands of US casualties were becoming politically unsustainable.

From the 1980s onward, the US increasingly engaged in a lighter war model. Brief interventions in Grenada and Panama, followed by the Gulf War and Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, demonstrated that overwhelming technological superiority could deliver victory with limited American losses.

Even though the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq temporarily revived large-scale expeditionary warfare in the 2000s, historian Andrew J. Bacevich argued that Americans had grown accustomed to near-permanent military engagement because its costs were borne by a relatively small volunteer force rather than society as a whole. Without conscription, rationing, or heavy casualties, wars could expand with little effect on daily life beyond the headlines.

The prolonged insurgencies and failed nation-building efforts of the 2000s occupations soon pushed Washington back toward a lighter model, seen in Libya in 2011. Built around airpower, special forces, private contractors, and local partners, the immediate American costs were limited, even if the wider consequences—state collapse, refugee flows, and regional instability—were more severe for others.

The ongoing war in Iran represents the latest test of that approach. The promises of spreading democracy and the patriotic enthusiasm that accompanied previous interventions have all but disappeared. In its place is a general apathy, with most Americans opposed to the Iran conflict without feeling or even seeing it directly. The potential consequences, however, remain significant: what if Iran accelerates its pursuit of nuclear weapons, the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea face permanent disruption, resource prices surge, retaliation reaches the US homeland, or the conflict expands beyond the region significantly?

From the Civil War and World War I to the modern US invasion of Iraq and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, governments and societies have repeatedly underestimated how wars unfold. The current lack of public interest in the Iran conflict may seem like progress compared with the nationalist euphoria that accompanied earlier conflicts, but a society insulated from war is less likely to question why it is fought, how long it may last, and what success looks like. Distance from conflict can delay its costs, but the consequences of war can still reverberate long after the final shot has been fired.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Follow him on X @john_ruehl.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.