(Page 4 of 49) - Victory and Defeat in International Relations authored by Tierney, Dominic.

guarantee that people will view events as a success. Sometimes, of course, victory and perceived
victory are synonymous, as in 1945. Quite often, however, one side can exploit geography,
technology, and strategy to defeat an opponent militarily, yet still emerge as the perceived loser,
with all the tribulations that this status involves. These perceptions are critical because
evaluations of victory can make or break the careers of politicians; shape the destiny of nations;
and strongly influence the lessons that people draw from events.

On the face of it, evaluating the winner and loser in quarrels between countries might seem to be
a straightforward question: who made the greater gains in the final outcome? Human nature
being what it is, however, makes the interpretation of victory and defeat, a matter of great
uncertainty and controversy. Unless the outcome of a war or crisis is very one-sided, people are
often unsure about how to judge the result. In the Vietnam War, for example, some insisted that
relative “body counts” were the best way of telling who was winning. Others thought they were a
useless measure. The same dilemma is playing out today in Iraq. Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich criticized the Bush administration for the same fallacy today: “The real key here is not
how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow…And that is a very
important metric that they just don't get.”

People’s beliefs about which country has won or lost

can be influenced as much by perceptions as they are by the actual material reality of the final
settlement or military situation. Quite often, people end up evaluating outcomes on the basis of
factors that are largely independent of the battlefield: their pre-existing beliefs, ideology and
expectations; symbolic events; and manipulation by elites and the media. Understanding these
sources of bias is vital for policy-makers who wish to hold on to power, and for democracy, if
the public and media seek to hold their leaders accountable.

As international relations becomes more complex, and countries become ever more entangled
and interdependent, our evaluations of international outcomes become more uncertain. Before
the modern era, victory and defeat were perhaps more obvious than they are today. Marauding
kings or warlords would conquer their enemies outright, steal their treasures, raze their towns,
kill their warriors, and imprison or enslave whoever was left. The reality of defeat was self-
evident for both the victor and the vanquished. After the seven-month siege of Tyre is 332 BC,
Alexander slaughtered eight thousand Tyrians and the remaining thirty thousand inhabitants
were sold into slavery. In these pre-modern wars, there was little room for the niceties of
twentieth century diplomacy, humanitarian intervention, or UN brokerage. Since 1945, the
wholesale conquest of rival states and populations has fortunately become rare.

Increasingly, in

a world of limited wars, multi-ethnic civil wars, UN peace deals and international intervention,
the relative winners and losers in the global chess game (or, indeed, of any single move) are
much more ambiguous, and evaluations are more open to interpretation and influence by the
psychological biases we outline in the book. In this chapter, we present the puzzle of “imagined
victory, imagined defeat”: why battlefield successes have often been perceived as failures, and
battlefield defeats seen as triumphs.

Nye, J.S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. 1st ed. New York:

John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1989).