America at War Abroad: Every U.S. War Won and Lost, 1798–2026 (infographic)

 Military History · United States

America at War Abroad

Every major U.S. war and military intervention fought beyond American soil, sorted by strategic outcome. Stalemates and ambiguous endings are counted as losses.

19

Conflicts abroad

12

Won

7

Lost & drawn

63%

Win rate

Each square is one conflict

WON

LOST OR DRAWN

2001 · The turning point

The unipolar moment begins to close.

Within months of 9/11, the United States walked away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. Together these marked the end of unchallenged American dominance — and every war the United States has entered since has ended in defeat or stalemate.

3 of 7

losses came after 9/11

100%

of post-9/11 wars lost or drawn

Essay  /  michelerovatti.com  /  2026

The Mirror Facing the Mirror

On the neverending present, the death of historical consciousness, and what Justin Bieber pulling up YouTube at Coachella has in common with veterans of twenty years of war who feel their wars never happened.

Michele Rovatti  ·  June 2026

At his 2026 Coachella headlining set, Justin Bieber performed some of his older hits by pulling them up on a laptop via YouTube. Not by playing them. Not by performing them live. By finding the videos — the existing recordings, the already-produced content — and playing them to the audience as part of the show. A concert in which the performance of previous performances replaces performance. A video of a video, played to a crowd who filmed it on their phones to post as a video. The mirror facing the mirror, the reflections receding into a vanishing point, no original anywhere in the sequence.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a curiosity, an artist in uncertain health taking the path of least resistance at a high-stakes event. But the gesture is too precise to be accidental, and its precision reveals something about the era we are in that a more conventional concert would have hidden. What Bieber did at Coachella is what the content economy does to everything: it replaces the live event with the circulation of previous events. It substitutes presence with reference. It converts the unrepeatable moment into a loop of already-existing material. The neverending present does not generate new events. It recycles the ones it already has.