All episodes of The Michael Shermer Show

The Michael Shermer Show · 2025-12-08 · 62 min · 11,550 words

Why Wars Last Longer Than Experts Predict

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player

Being a great power doesn't allow you to win wars. It just doesn't work like that. It's mostly military power. And I'm a great power, you're not a great power. But the issue is the great power paradigm as people talk about it, it doesn't work.

And the United States has been a great power, a superpower, but it's lost wars. It lost the Vietnam War. It lost war on terror in in many ways. And certainly about war, one of the frustrating things is there's this enduring short war myth that wars will, you know, from wars will be over by Christmas.

You know, we'll start this war, we'll win the war by Christmas. And yet that myth is always shown to be wrong and yet it always comes back. There was the American Civil War, the First World War, all of these, war will be over by Christmas. It never is, and yet here we were in 2022 thinking the war would be over in a week. By human nature, are we by nature warlike, peaceable, you know, what you know, have have we always fought war since our hunter-gatherer days, and it's part of our nature, and we'll it'll never go away, or what are your thoughts?

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