From the safety and comfort of a tent on a college quad, it’s easy to argue ad nauseam about the horrors of war and why they shouldn’t happen. And it’s similarly easy to do the same from the oval office and halls of Congress. Brett Stephens argues that it’s the reason America has  in the past 50 years gone from the winner of wars to loser.

But what about wars that are existential?

We know how America fought such wars. During the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, hunger “yielded to starvation as dogs, cats, and even rats vanished from the city,” Ron Chernow noted in his biography of Ulysses Grant. The Union did not send food convoys to relieve the suffering of innocent Southerners.

In World War II, Allied bombers killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans. All this was part of a declared Anglo-American policy to undermine “the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.” We pursued an identical policy against Japan, where bombardment killed, according to some estimates, nearly one million civilians.

Over the past 50 years, however, America has become a dilettante warrior, punching with one arm tied behind its back and, ultimately, walking away in sniveling failure, with myriad excuses to conceal the shame of being a loser.

We withdrew in humiliation from Saigon in 1975, Beirut in 1984, Mogadishu in 1993 and Kabul in 2021. We withdrew, after the tenuous victory of the surge, from Baghdad in 2011, only to return three years later after ISIS swept through northern Iraq and we had to stop it (which, with the help of Iraqis and Kurds, we did). We won limited victories against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, only to fumble the endgames.

And that’s the mentality Americans have brought to their positions on Ukraine and Gaza, wars which evoke passion but, let’s face it, are hardly existential to most of us. Winning or losing, or something in between, is mostly fodder for passionate arguments, after which we will drink chard or a PBR and munch on Fritos.

But can’t we do better, now that we have more sophisticated tools of war? President Biden keeps calling on Netanyahu to do more to avoid harming civilians. President Biden refuses to give Zelensky fighter planes to safeguard its skies from Russia. Why can’t we do battle nicely, without killing the undeserving or escalating the already inflamed passions?

This often ends in tragedy, as it did on Sunday when an Israeli airstrike targeting Hamas leaders reportedly led to the deaths of at least 45 civilians in Rafah. This has always been the story of warfare. Terms like “precision weapons” can foster the notion that it’s possible for modern militaries to hit only intended targets. But that’s a fantasy, especially against enemies like Hamas, whose method is to fight and hide among the innocent so that it may be rescued from destruction by the world’s concern for the innocent.

It’s equally a fantasy to imagine that you can supply an ally like Ukraine with just enough weaponry of just the right kind to repel Russia’s attack but not so much as to provoke Russia into escalation. Wars are not porridge; there’s almost never a Goldilocks approach to getting it just right. Either you’re on the way to victory or on the way to defeat.

For Ukraine and Israel, these wars are existential. They can either win or lose, and if they lose, the consequences will mean their existence comes to an end. But are we not concerned with humanitarian needs? Should this not trump the “win at any cost” view of war?

But the tragedy of America’s recent battle history is that thousands of those soldiers died in wars we lacked the will to win. They died for nothing, because Biden and other presidents belatedly decided we had better priorities.

That’s a luxury that safe and powerful countries like the United States can afford. Not so for Ukrainians and Israelis. The least we can do for them is understand that they have no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.

War is hell, not because we want it to be or we lack the will to do better, but because that’s the nature of war. We used to know that when we won wars, but that was when winning was existential to the United States. We’re now dilettantes in other people’s existential wars. They didn’t ask for wars. Ukraine didn’t ask Russia to invade. Israel didn’t ask Hamas to invade. But it happened and they are now compelled to deal with it. They have the will because they have no choice. We do not.