A fragile April 2026 ceasefire has failed to steady the Persian Gulf. After an attempted surprise attack on US forces on July 28, the United States responded with large airstrikes on July 30 targeting Iranian military command centers and missile sites, intensifying a conflict that began in February. Iran has endured heavy damage to military and civilian infrastructure and suffered thousands of casualties. US allies in the Gulf and Israel have also faced sustained Iranian assaults. Despite nearly $40 billion in US expenditures and damage to American assets, the war has not produced a broad, engaged public debate in the United States.
Protected by geography and unmatched military strength, the US can insulate daily life from the immediate burdens of war and thereby shield policymakers from sustained public scrutiny. Official US deaths remain relatively low by historical standards—the most recent Iranian strike brought the total to 18—and life at home has continued with few interruptions: the US even cohosted the 2026 FIFA World Cup during the conflict. Yet the fighting has already outlasted initial projections. President Donald Trump earlier predicted a four- to five-week campaign that would topple Iran’s government; instead, the conflict has expanded, complicated further by growing attacks on shipping and infrastructure around the Red Sea by Houthi forces.
This detachment from war marks a departure from earlier American experience, when conflicts reshaped everyday life and national imagination. Two historical moments—America’s Civil War and Europe’s slide into World War I—offer stark lessons about how societies misjudge the costs and contours of war.
The end of “glorious” war
Before the Civil War, Americans still imagined combat in the old romantic register: decisive, heroic charges, vivid patriotic scenes, and quick, honorable victories. Southern elites, confident in the economic power of cotton and in their martial virtue, claimed secession and war would be brief and bloodless. Political leaders boasted of easy triumphs; spectators packed picnic gear to watch the First Battle of Bull Run expecting a swift success. Instead, that 1861 clash shattered illusions. The war turned into one of the first industrialized conflicts: railroads and factories mobilized armies and weapons at unprecedented scale, and disease and attrition killed huge numbers.
Approximately 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War—roughly half of all US war deaths across history—and two-thirds of those deaths were from disease. The conflict preserved the Union and abolished slavery, but it also created enduring political and social trauma, and it showed how quickly romantic fantasies of honor and quick victory can give way to prolonged national suffering.
Europe and the road to World War I
A generation later, European states and publics repeated a similar misjudgment. In 1914, military leaders and political elites on several sides predicted a short, decisive campaign. Young men across Europe enlisted with the belief they would be home by Christmas; crowds cheered as troops boarded trains. Intellectuals and propagandists framed war as a regenerating force that could remake society. Within months, optimism collapsed into stalemate and slaughter in the trenches.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, it did so after Europe had already endured years of attrition, revolution, and economic collapse. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration understood that American public opinion required active cultivation; it created the Committee on Public Information to mobilize support through speeches, films, and print. US intervention limited homeland casualties—around 116,000 military deaths—and spared the continental devastation Europeans suffered, yet the experience left many Americans questioning involvement and contributed to a postwar turn toward isolationism.
The long retreat from mass war
World War II drew the US fully back into large-scale mobilization, but the postwar era shifted the calculus of intervention. Korea and especially Vietnam exposed how prolonged conflicts with heavy casualties could become politically unsustainable. From the 1980s onward, US policy increasingly favored lighter, technology-driven engagements: brief interventions in Grenada and Panama, the Gulf War’s demonstration of overwhelming firepower, and 1990s operations in the Balkans showed that high-tech advantage could produce rapid results with limited American losses.
The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s briefly revived large-scale expeditionary warfare, but the difficulties of prolonged counterinsurgency, nation-building, and costly human and political tolls pushed US policy back toward a lighter model. That model—airpower, special operations, contractors, and local partners—limits immediate American visible sacrifice while offloading many costs to others, often producing regional instability, state collapse, and refugee flows even when direct US casualties are small.
The contemporary challenge: apathy and risk
The present conflict with Iran tests that lighter model. Popular motivation and the rhetoric of democratic crusade have largely faded; instead, much of the American public reports opposition or indifference to the conflict while daily life continues with little disruption. That insulation, though, is a double-edged sword. Distance and low casualty figures can blunt public scrutiny and democratic debate about the aims, limits, and exit conditions of war.
Yet the stakes remain real. The conflict could accelerate Iran’s pursuit of nuclear options, disrupt vital sea lanes like the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea, raise global energy prices, spread retaliation beyond the region, or escalate into a wider confrontation. History—Civil War, World War I, the Iraq invasion, and more recent conflicts—shows governments and societies routinely underestimate how wars begin, how long they last, and what they ultimately cost.
A society insulated from the immediate hardships of war may avoid the fervor and jingoism of earlier eras, but it also risks failing to ask the hard questions: Why are we fighting? What constitutes success? How long is this sustainable? The costs may be deferred or borne disproportionately by small segments of society, but the long-term political, economic, and humanitarian reverberations of conflict can endure long after the last shots are fired.
About the author
John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent. He contributes to several foreign affairs outlets and is the author of Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas (2022).
