Since World War II, the United States has conducted extended wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Whether the Russian effort in Ukraine will be similarly extended has yet to be seen. However, should that come about, evidence about public opinion from America’s wars suggests lessons—and non-lessons—for assessing Russian opinion on the war in Ukraine.

The comparison suggests that, after a rally-round-the flag effect at the outset of the war, a decline of support is to be expected regardless of the effects of media coverage, antiwar demonstrations, censorship and propaganda efforts, or military happenings in the war. This will also result in an increasing willingness to accept failure or even debacle in the war and in a strong inclination not to attempt other such ventures. However, there is an important difference in the experiences, one that is potentially consequential: while the average American remained substantially untouched personally by the wars, that may well not hold for the average Russian.

Initial Support

Even discounting for the restrictions in civil liberties, initial Russian popular support for the war appears to have been quite high—probably around 70 or 75 percent. The same number roughly holds for the American wars except for the one in Afghanistan, conducted shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where support at the outset was closer to 90 percent.

People tend to believe what they want to believe. In all cases, the strong initial support for all the wars was likely the result of a rally-round-the-flag effect in which the publics overwhelmingly wanted to believe that the actions of their governments were justified, wise, and necessary.

The strong initial support for the Ukraine invasion among the Russian public has routinely been attributed to the propaganda efforts of the Russian government and its controlled media. But those same forces have for years sought to convince Russians of the value of the Russian anti-covid vaccine, Sputnik. Yet resistance to that message has been extensive. And, indeed, if extensive and purposeful promotion could guarantee acceptance, we’d all be driving Edsels and drinking New Coke—legendary marketing failures in 1958 and 1985 by two of the (otherwise) most successful businesses in history: the Ford Motor Company and Coca-Cola.

The acceptance of misinformation in such matters is hardly unusual. At the outset of the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans, nudged on by the Republican administration, said they believed that Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the 9/11 attacks. And, although the nudging stopped, 30 to 40 percent held to that belief for more than seven years. Moreover, the public substantially bought the ideas that a loss in Afghanistan would lead to more 9/​11s, that al-Qaeda presented an existential threat to the United States and had infiltrated thousands of trained operatives into the country, that wars in Vietnam and Korea were necessary to prevent World War III, and that Saddam Hussein would come to “dominate” the Middle East with his remarkably inept army and/​or hand off weapons of mass destruction to congenial terrorists. Plausible counters to such assertions generated little headway.

The Decline of Support

The American data suggest that Russian support for the war in Ukraine will decline—rather sharply in the first months as reluctant supporters drop off and then more slowly as the remainder comes increasingly to consist of harder core supporters. And the most important element in this decline is the cumulation of casualties—and particularly of combat deaths—by their forces.

It should not be assumed, however, that poll respondents have much of a grasp on what the actual number of causalities or battle deaths is—and their guesses on the issue do not correlate very well with support or opposition to the war. Rather, people seem to make a rough cost-benefit calculation in which the value of the war as they see it is put up against the cost thus far in America lives.

In all of this, what has chiefly mattered for American public opinion is American losses, not those of the people defended. Although, the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S. invasion has reached into the hundreds of thousands, the only cumulative body count that truly matters for American public opinion, and the only one that is routinely reported, is the American one.

There is nothing new about this phenomenon: Americans backed the wars in Korea and Vietnam because they saw them as vital to confronting the communist threat, and defending the South Koreans or the South Vietnamese was never thought of as an important goal. Due to the historic closeness of Russians and Ukrainians (“our brothers”), this effect may be different in the current war. However, it seems relevant to point out that, although fully 60 percent of the American public held the Iraqi people to be innocent of any blame for their leader’s policies, Americans have paid little attention to Iraqi deaths in the war.

The public did not weigh the stakes the same for every war. When support for the wars in Vietnam and Korea dropped below 50 percent, some 19,000 battle deaths had been suffered by the United States. In the war in Iraq, that level of support, using the same measure, was reached when around 1,500 had been killed. This lower tolerance for casualties is likely largely due to the fact that the American public placed far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam which were seen to be vital elements in the Cold War. How such a calculation will play out for Russians today has yet to be determined.

Specific events in the war seem for the most part to have had little longterm impact on the downward trend. Thus, a drop in support in 2004 after the disclosure of prisoner abuses in Iraq by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison was mostly reversed in a few months. And the same thing happened when there was a notable upward shift in support after Saddam Hussein was captured: support soon fell back to where it had been before and then continued its generally downward course.

More generally, as the Saddam capture suggests, if people have decided the war is not worth it, improvements on the battlefield will not increase support for the war. There was such a perceived improvement at the time of the surge in Iraq between 2007 and 2008 when, for example, the percentage of people holding that the United States was making significant progress rose from 36 to 46 while the percentage concluding that it was winning the war rose from 21 to 37. Despite this, however, support for the war itself did not increase—there was no change in questions asking if the respondents favored the war, felt it had been worth the effort or the right decision or a mistake, or favored staying as long as it takes. Successful prosecution of a war, it appears, is unlikely to convert people who have already decided it was not worth the costs.

If the decline in support is primarily caused by increasing casualties as suffered by the invading forces, media and propaganda efforts and public antiwar demonstrations will be less significant. This effect likely holds for the Ukraine war as well.

No amount of censorship and biased reporting can suppress the two most important elements in the public’s decision calculus: the war is still going on and our people are dying in it. And that noisy public antiwar demonstrations often fail to convince and may be counterproductive is suggested by a comparison of the Korea and Vietnam Wars—costly anti-Communist wars on the fringes of Asia. Although there were few, if any, antiwar demonstrations during the war in Korea, support for that war eroded as it did during the Vietnam War in which antiwar protest was frequent and highly visible.

Even if an antiwar movement is successful in getting like-minded officials into office, this may not change the prosecution of the war very much. Refusing to repeat the mistakes of their counterparts in the Vietnam War, opponents of the Iraq War, rather than expressing themselves in often unruly public demonstrations, worked assiduously within the Democratic Party, and, in 2008, they were the cornerstone of the success of the only major presidential candidate in the field to have opposed the Iraq War, Barack Obama. But he proved to be quite a disappointment: he appointed to office no one who had publicly and clearly opposed the Iraq war before it was launched, left that war more or less on George W. Bush’s timetable, and handed the war in Afghanistan over to his successor.

The Consequences of the Decline of Support

Although declining support for the war may not generally lead to abandonment of the war, it may still have consequences.

For example, the decline helped impel changes in military tactics to reduce the rate of American casualties in all four of the wars, although this had no effect on support for the war despite predictions that decreasing casualty rates would generate an increase of support.

A second effect can be the creation of a politically permissive atmosphere for withdrawal and even for debacle. This can been seen in the public acquiescence in the abrupt and embarrassing collapse in Afghanistan last year. The public generally accepted the disaster and was not interested in sending troops to attempt to rectify it. And the collapse seems to have had little effect on President Joseph Biden’s political standing. The same phenomenon was seen in the acceptance of utter collapse of the U.S. position in Vietnam in 1975 which led to a Communist takeover there. In fact, the man who presided over that debacle, President Gerald Ford, actually tried to use the fiasco to his advantage in his reelection campaign the next year, arguing that “we are at peace. Not a single young American is fighting or dying on any foreign soil tonight.” Although there are no poll data, the Russian public seems to have accepted the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and, in all, the experience suggests that in time they would accept even a humiliating withdrawal from Ukraine in much the same way.

Third, the Ukraine war is unlikely to affect the decline of international war, one of the greatest achievements in modern history.

Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe had lived free from substantial international war for the longest period of time since the word “Europe” was invented some 2500 years ago. For the most part, the rest of the world has followed suit, and the use of war to settle international differences has almost completely vanished—although measures short of direct warfare continue to be employed including interventions in civil wars, applying economic sanctions, attempting covert regime change, poaching fish, and waging armed border disputes in remote areas.

Some are concerned that the Ukraine war might shatter this remarkable development. But it is far more likely that the aversion to such wars will continue, something strongly suggested by the facts that the war has almost universally been condemned and that other countries are unlikely to be inspired by the costly and messy example no matter how the war comes out

America’s wars mostly generated a strong public reluctance to repeating the experience. There were no repeats of the Korea or Vietnam wars, and the country seems to have embraced a kind of Iraq/​Afghanistan syndrome after its massive overreactions to 9/11. This phenomenon suggests that the Russian venture into Ukraine may well prove to be a one-off rather than a harbinger. As in the United States, the primary response will likely be: “let’s not do that again.”

A Potentially Important Difference: Direct Pain to the Public

Beyond those who fought the American wars and those close to them, the public never really had to pay a punishing price or tax for their wars. In contrast, Russians may well face severe economic pain and perhaps even collapse as a result of their invasion of Ukraine.

The chief architect of the war, President Vladimir Putin, argues that Russia will be able to suck up any economic hit. However, things were not looking that good for the Russian economy even before the war. A lengthy period of growth during this century was halted in 2014 and growth has been stagnant ever since. Some of this was caused by the reaction to Putin’s annexation of portions of Ukraine in 2014 which set off something like an economic doomsday machine. Because of its antics, Russia suffered a decline in the value of its currency, capital flight, a drop in its stock market, and a decline in foreign investment. And, perhaps most importantly, there was a very substantial drop in confidence by investors, buyers, and sellers throughout the world, alienating, in particular, the European Union which had long been Russia’s largest trading partner and direct investor. In addition, economic sanctions were visited on Russia by other states, and unrelated to the crisis, there was a severe drop in prices for oil on the international market, a development that was especially harmful to Russia: oil and gas sales fund about 36 percent of its annual budget. As a result, real disposable income fell by 15 percent between 2014 and 2017. while aspirational purchases like for homes and cars shifted to ones devoted to daily needs.

Because of this, economists, even before the Ukraine crisis, were suggesting that Russia’s prospect for growth over the next decade were “dim,” and the war there is likely to considerably exacerbate this situation, particularly if oil prices descend from their current highs. European customers have greatly increased their efforts to wean themselves from dependence on Russian natural gas and oil, and there has been a determined effort to apply punishing economic sanctions. Moreover, a great number of foreign, and particularly western, firms have abruptly withdrawn the Russian economy, and, as a simple matter of business, few are likely to return any time soon, particularly as long a Putin remains in office. This could be particularly costly because, as Barack Obama pointed out derisively, if undiplomatically, in his final news conference as president in 2016, “Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate.”

Although nothing like this happened in any of the four American wars, the economic damage for Russia’s war is likely to be felt directly by the Russian people as currency becomes insecure, travel is restricted, jobs are lost, incomes fall, opportunities are snuffed out, shortages erupt, the quality of life plunges, corruption becomes ever worse, businesses fail, government coffers become empty, and talent is hemorrhaged. Russia may be able to ride out the shock, but there is a special potential for disaster as well.