Can we stop arguing about definitions? It's a waste of everyone's time. We all basically agree on the facts here, just not the definitions. America has lost wars for political reasons. America has not been "on the battlefield" but instead by attrition. While it could handle attrition militarily, it's populace and leadership could not support it to a completion.
Basically, given a non-nuclear war, America can turn any nation it wants into a shithole country while losing very little. It rarely can keep control of the country afterwards, and only then with a willing populace.
Also, things like Mai Lai, the way Captain McVeigh of the
Indianaipolis was scapegoated, Abu Ghrab, MK-Ultra, the Tuskegee Experiments, and the IC possibly using Epstein.
Military defeats. As in "armies defeated in the field" not "packed bags and went home because politicians."
You've said yourself war is politics by other means.
You do not need to defeat an army in the field if you can simply attrite it at a rate the domestic scene will not accept. It's the same thing Ukraine is hoping to do to Russia now it seems, though the Moldova stuff that came out today complicates that.
We cannot be blind or unwilling to face our own nations fuck-ups if we want to recover the unity needed to face the possible fight with the CCP and/or actual fight with Russia down the line.
If the US military leadership and DC has not been so stupid, greedy, petty, and wasteful will their military adventures, and if the military actually lived up to the image recruiters and PR people pitch, and if we could trust our elections anymore, we could have had unity like never before in the face of Putin going full retard.
Instead, well, DC has squandered many lives, a lot of time, a lot of good PR, and a shit load of money on fights we never should have fought, like Vietnam and Iraq.
Now, none of that takes away from the fact Russia should not have invaded, and that any good PR the Donbas rebels had died with MH17. At this point the only thing that might stop Russia and get them to rein themselves in is to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Kuril's aren't vital to the survival of the Russian state; is Moscow willing to get vaporized for a few islands they should have returned to Japan after WW2?