The United States keeps stumbling into the same type of conflict - wars that are too big to ignore but too small to mobilize the nation. Robert D. Kaplan, writing in Foreign Affairs, has argued that this is not a coincidence but a structural feature of how democracies fight, one that has plagued America for over seven decades.

The pattern was first identified by military historian James Stokesbury in 1988, Kaplan noted in a Foreign Affairs essay reported by "Hvylya". Democracies, Stokesbury observed, are good at two things: small wars fought by professionals that barely register with the public, and total wars that engage all of society. What they cannot handle are middle-sized wars - conflicts "where some go and some stay home."

Kaplan applied this framework to the full arc of American military history since 1945. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq all began as limited operations and metastasized. None approached the scale of the two world wars, but all caused immense destruction and "ruined presidential administrations along with the American public's regard for the U.S. government's ability to conduct foreign policy."

The pattern carries a cruel irony. After each middle-sized war, the American public and its leaders declared such conflicts finished - never again. This was especially true after Vietnam and Iraq, both of which destroyed the reputations of senior policymakers. Yet each time, the cycle restarted. Kaplan argued that this is inevitable for a country that functions as a de facto empire: "The point of imperialism is to involve the empire in places that are potentially beneficial but not necessarily vital to its national interest."

Small wars that stay small - like the invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, or the air campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo - do not trigger this pattern. They are, in Kaplan's framing, "imperial policing actions" that make headlines for a few days and end. The danger begins when a small war encounters unexpected resistance, local complexity, or leadership hubris, and begins to grow.

The Trump administration's operations in Iran now sit at precisely this inflection point. The air and naval campaign has not yet crossed into ground engagement, but the conditions for escalation - factional chaos, calls for intervention, incremental deployments - are all present. After each past disaster, Americans swore off middle-sized wars. Kaplan's argument is that swearing them off has never been enough.

Previously: Foreign Affairs Reveals Trump's Hidden War Doctrine - and Why It Inverts Everything Powell Built