Line #44 WonTheWarLostThePeace/RealLife


1	WonTheWarLostThePeace in RealLife.
2
3	'''No examples should be added until [[Administrivia/NoRecentExamplesPlease 20 years after]] the end of the relevant war'''. Please also try to keep examples as straight and civil as you can.
4	----
5	!!Classical Times
6	* Many historians speculate that UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat would have fallen victim to this trope if he ever stopped [[MyopicConqueror his eternal campaigning]] and actually tried to ''govern'' the lands he conquered. The fact that his empire fell apart almost immediately after his death seems to support this speculation. Although some historians have leveled the failure of Alexander's empire on the inadequate charisma and leadership of his subordinates, only Alexander's cult of personality could keep his empire together. Even if he managed to govern well for the remainder of his life, it would all be for naught if he could not transfer his authority to a successor. Since Alexander the Great died at 32, way before his time, there is no way of knowing if Alexander himself could have prevented the fall of his empire.
7	* [[http://www.historynet.com/sparta-the-fall-of-the-empire.htm This]] article goes into extensive detail about how this happened to ancient Sparta; while their [[TheSpartanWay rigid social castes and harsh internal pressures produced the peerless military elite of their era]], it also meant that they were utterly unable to adapt and maintain a stable empire -- after their overwhelming victory over Athens in 404 BC, they wasted their strength on internal political struggles, offended literally everyone in the region with their arrogance, and ultimately set themselves up for total defeat from which they never recovered mere decades later.
8	** It is also worth noting that Sparta's inward-looking culture caused it to miss several opportunities that rivals seized. Sparta's hyper-religious and xenophobic attitudes worked great for maintaining their social order and scaring off potential invaders, but more than once neighboring states went to Sparta for help, only to get a lame excuse about needing to stay home for a religious festival, or else just being ignored. Athens, on the other hand, had a somewhat flexible social order and was filled with ambitious politicians who jumped at a chance to look like a hero. Sparta's same lack of flexibility ultimately undermined even their military power; the rest of the Greek cities slowly developed more advanced phalanx tactics to the point that Spartan techniques were outdated and overshadowed, and they had no chance at all against Roman legions. After the Roman conquest, their culture continued... as a quaint tourist attraction.
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10	!!Middle Ages
11	* In 535 CE, Byzantine Emperor Justinian I sought to retake Italy from the Ostrogoths, triggering a 20-year-long war that actually did more harm than good to the former Western Empire (who did enjoy some stability with Ostrogothic King Theodoric). The Byzantines won in the end, but the war left their empire broke, left Italy [[DepopulationBomb utterly ravaged and depopulated]], and also ThePlague made things even worse. The Byzantines found out Italy cost too much to keep, and when the Lombards marched into Italy to conquer it ten years after the war was won, they barely met resistance.
12	* How the First Fitna ended: the reigning Caliph Ali won all military engagements, but on the verge of destroying the army of his last enemy Muawiya he saw the latter send out ambassadors asking for an arbitration based on the Quran, and the majority of his soldiers, tired of fighting fellow Muslims, forced him to accept and name a popular but politically naive man as his representative in the arbitration over his own better judgement and the objections of some of his other soldiers, who felt the correct way would have been to fight and let Allah pick the righteous side by granting them victory and for this act formed the Kharijite movement, that believed both Ali and Muawiya were unworthy of rulership. As a result, the arbitration ended up declaring him deposed and naming Muawiya as the legitimate Caliph, depleting his power base, his initial attempt at defeating Muawiya before he could raise a new army had to be diverted to fight a Kharijite insurrection, and before he could try again a Kharijite assassin killed him while he was leading the prayer, paving the way for Muawiya's rise after escaping another Kharijite assassin. Islam has been divided into Sunni and Shia since.
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14	!!Renaissance
15	* The UsefulNotes/WarsOfTheRoses kept restarting all the time because no one faction was able to build a lasting peace.
16	** By 1461, the Lancastrians were a spent force. Their king was captured, their queen was in hiding, and their generals were dead or captured. London was firmly in Yorkist hands and [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfPlantagenet Edward of York]] had been crowned UsefulNotes/EdwardIV. Unfortunately for him, he inherited a country run by a DysfunctionJunction of noblemen who represented the worst of feudalism. His main benefactor, the Earl of Warwick, was alienated by the King's refusal to allow the king's younger to brothers marry Warwick's daughters and raised a rebellion. Warwick first conspired with Edward's brother George, who defied Edward and married Warwick's daughter Isabel, to put George on the throne. When that didn't work, Warwick married his younger daughter Anne to the Lancastrian heir and briefly put Henry VI's back on the throne. Edward fled to the continent, raised an army and got the throne back, in battle, but he could never quite achieve enough political control to ensure [[TheFateOfThePrincesInTheTower a smooth succession]].
17	** The principal reason was the constant redistribution of land between various lords, barons, and magnates after the defeat of their faction in one rebellion or another. UsefulNotes/RichardIII on his accession had hoped to avoid this but even he had to transfer Northern magnates in Southern lands after ousting the Woodville faction. The end result ironically was that the constant land exchanges over time made the Royal Crown the biggest landowner (since they claimed land for which no dispute could be resolved and with the constant deaths and in-fighting this was easy enough). [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfTudor Henry Tudor]], reclaimed the throne and established the House of Tudor and he put a stop to all the land-exchanges and used his old base to build a solid centralized monarchy.
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19	!! 18th Century
20	* The 18th-century wars would end up exhausting the European powers and bringing an end to their colonial ambitions in North America.
21	** The British victory in the UsefulNotes/SevenYearsWar. Although the British successfully forced the French to secede the Great Lakes and northern territories, it also became saddled with debt that lead to the British government imposing taxes on its subjects. Some of these colonists in America would then revolt to protest the taxation, leading to another war for Britain to fight.
22	** UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution would become this for the French. During the American Revolutionary War, France decided to back the colonists in seceding from the British as revenge for their humiliating defeat in the Seven Years War. However, while the American revolution succeeded, France was left in crippling debt that led to the country undergoing [[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution its own revolution]] a few years later.
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24	!!19th Century
25	* The Haitian Revolution, which ended in 1804, ended with the former Black slaves overthrowing their French colonial masters and creating their own independent country. Unfortunately, the country was plagued with a wrecked economy, infighting between rival governments, bloody massacres of the remaining French colonists, and a vengeful France [[ShameIfSomethingHappened "persuading" the newly independent country to repay the French colonists for the loss of their "property"]], leaving it with crippling debts. Since then, Haiti has been plagued by [[TheCoup regular coups]], leaders who often acted as TheCaligula, PerpetualPoverty and occupations by the United States.
26	* This was the common opinion of the Congress of Vienna, which ended UsefulNotes/TheNapoleonicWars and established a new status quo for Europe. Justified or not, virtually every party felt betrayed by some portion of the outcome. [[note]]Russia's ambitions for a united Poland and dual monarchy were quashed, as were Prussian goals to absorb all of Saxony. The Bourbon French and Hapsburg Austria were annoyed that Murat was to be tolerated in "their" Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (until his sudden betrayal in the Hundred Days gave them an excuse to depose and shoot him anyway). Denmark's loss of Norway to Sweden was confirmed to compensate the Swedes for their own loss of Finland to Russia. Austria ceded the Austrian Netherlands to the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which was content with that until they eventually rebelled to form Belgium. France was on the verge of coming out ahead in spite of losing the war after Talleyrand successfully divided the Allies against each other and set himself up as a kingmaker player between the two alliances, but the SpannerInTheWorks -- Napoleon's Hundred Days -- overturned Talleyrand's designs and cost France all their gains from 1790-1792, 700 million francs in indemnities, although to the dismay of German nationalists it was allowed to keep Alsace and Lorraine. German patriots also were disappointed that Germany became nothing more than a fairly loose confederation of 38 mostly small states. The only major powers to come out in front across the board was Britain, who still had to admit defeat in convincing the other powers to accept anything stronger than a StronglyWordedLetter-style condemnation of the slave trade; the new Kingdoms of Bavaria and Wurtemburg, who had their borders confirmed; and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, which regained their old borders with the addition of the Republic of Genoa, but still had to tolerate Hapsburg statelets throughout Italy in addition to Austrian Lombardy and Venetia.[[/note]] On the other hand, the system established in Vienna proved able to preserve peace in Europe for a long time, at least until the UsefulNotes/RevolutionsOf1848. In particular it is notable that the Vienna system managed to avoid a major European war over the revolutions of 1830 and 1831 and after the Oriental Crisis of 1840 when the government of France was itching to compensate for its loss of face in Egypt by starting a war to "regain the natural frontier" on the Rhine.
27	** Before 1814, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France proved itself incapable of concluding a lasting peace, which led Prince Metternich to tell UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte during his negotiations in Dresden in the Summer of 1813 that all his peace treaties had just been armistices.
28	* UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar was only really a victory for the Union in the most basic sense of 'nobody's claiming Richmond is the capital anymore'. Lincoln's assassination and replacement with Andrew Johnson (whose Congress, in turn, hated his guts and often forced laws through his veto) led to an unstable Reconstruction in which nobody really got what they wanted; blacks were no longer enslaved (ratifying the 13th amendment was, among other things, a requirement for former Confederate states to be restored to statehood), but bitter former slave-owners immediately set about passing laws to reverse it as much as they could without ''technically'' violating the new amendment- for example, laws were passed requiring literacy tests for voting (most former slaves were poor and illiterate), but if your grandfather could vote (the original grandfather clause) then so could you (meaning illiterate whites could still vote). Meanwhile, the planter aristocracy bore the brunt of war damage (Sherman's March to the Sea, for example, crippled farming in the vicinity even post-war) and the abolition of slavery without compensation (since they'd decided to go to war instead of taking Lincoln's offer), which utterly devastated the economies of southern states.
29	** The post-1877 compromises between the Federal government and the South [[PragmaticVillainy actually paid off in the long run]]. What the USA needed to raise themselves to superpower status was ''naval power'' -- the only form of power which decided superiority between nations at the height of the Victorian Age.
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31	!!20th Century
32	* This was how the Japanese saw the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War. Despite Japan winning almost every major battle against Russia including the decisive Battle of Tsushima, the resulting peace treaty ended up with Japan receiving far less than they were expecting. While Japan was allowed to annex Korea, Manchuria, Port Arthur, and half of Sakhalin Island, they were barred from taking any Russian territory and Russia was not required to pay any war damages to Japan. This infuriated the Japanese public who felt that they were cheated by the West and led to violent riots across Japan. While the riots were quelled, the Japanese government was forced to resign and the Japanese people would hold a deep resentment which would ultimately contribute to them starting the UsefulNotes/SecondSinoJapaneseWar and joining World War II.
33	* Italy's conquest of Libya in 1912. The actual invasion and defeat of the Ottoman forces was relatively easy, given the difference in firepower between the Italian invaders and the Ottoman Army, supported by the local tribes. Then corruption and incompetence among the bureaucracy prevented the defeat of a revolt in southern Fezzan when it was still small, the attempt at defeating it in open field ended in [[CurbStompBattle defeat]] due to a combination of incompetence on the part of the Royal Army's upper echelons (who failed to provide the Italian or colonial Eritrean troops needed to do the job) and arrogance of the field commander (who could have still won the day or limit the damage had he not brought too many supplies with him) -- therefore, by the time Italy entered UsefulNotes/WorldWarI the Italians had been forced to the coast. They eventually managed to "pacify" the colony, but only in the early '30s and after a long, bloody, and expensive war of reconquest.
34	* The Paris Peace Conference that ended UsefulNotes/WorldWarI is commonly regarded as this, though ''why'' it was lost and ''who'' is to blame is a subject of debate.
35	** In the end, what the Allies produced was, to paraphrase the prescient words of Ferdinand Foch, "Not a peace treaty, but an armistice for 20 years." When it was all said and done, everyone on both sides had reasons to be resentful of the treaty; some were ignored entirely (Russia, China), some gained something from the war but not all they wanted (Italy, Japan, France) and some believed they lost everything (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey), and thus, instead of making peace, the treaty merely sowed the seeds for more conflict. Not to mention that the various governments' reasons for going to war and stifling internal dissent, cracked with the rise of UsefulNotes/RedOctober and greater demand for democracy at home and in the colonies.
36	** Italy's case is particularly notable because the lack of some gains (namely Istria, Dalmatia, and some of Germany's African colonies) was caused by both the incompetence of the Italian delegation ''and'' UsefulNotes/WoodrowWilson's stubborn refusal to award them the former two regions. The diplomats walked out in protest when the American president tried to stop the acquisition of these Austro-Hungarian territories and did not rejoin until he had failed, by which point the German colonies had already been assigned. That (along with the appalling economic situation) nearly caused a three-way civil war between the Italian government, war veterans on the anarchist side, and war veterans on the far-right side (with at least one incident where far-right activists and Royal troops nearly fired on each other), and paved the way for the rise of Fascism.
37	** The underlying problem here was that many of the victors immediately and frequently got into conflicts over territories and spheres of influence with each other, e. g. Italy and Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, France and Britain (over parts of the former Ottoman Empire and also over the policy towards the new Turkish state). Another problem was that the League of Nations, and its European system of defense treaties, was irreparably weakened by President Wilson losing his domestic support, which led to the United States refusing to ratify the peace treaties or to join the League.
38	** The case of Germany was long argued by John M. Keynes who felt the treaty was overly punitive to Germany and unfairly targeted their economy and held them guilty for the war. This argument was rebutted by Etienne Mantoux, a liberal French economist who died in LaResistance. Mantoux pointed out that the reason the peace failed was because other governments were ''too lenient'' on Germany, which had an economy that could have easily paid the reparations to no point. Mantoux also noted that Keynes' beliefs of the war hurting Germany's resources and economy is not borne out by statistical examinations of their output in TheRoaringTwenties. Later German historians such as Hans Mommsen have admitted that the Treaty of Versailles became a rallying cry among Nazis and other nationalists and internalized by leftists and liberals, because it never categorically and fully extracted responsibility for the war from Germany. Also, historians like Gerhard Weinberg have pointed out that from a strategic point of view, the treaty actually made Germany even ''stronger'' than before the war. While its army was largely disbanded and they lost some territory, they kept pretty much all of their industrially-viable territories and workforce population, so they could easily rebuild it. Geopolitically, their entire eastern frontier was no longer covered by two huge empires that could keep it in check, replaced by several, smaller, weaker states with their own internal and external feuds.
39	** Japan was looking to leverage their contributions to the Entente during the war to establish themselves as an Asian power with equal standing to Britain, France, the United States, and Australia. However, all of their requests for racial equality for Japanese as well as recognition of a wider Japanese sphere of influence in Asia were outright turned down by the Entente powers. The lack of any meaningful gains through the Treaty of Versailles was one of the major factors that stoked [[UsefulNotes/KatanasOfTheRisingSun Japan's militarism]] and decision to withdraw from the League of Nations and invade China.
40	* The peace treaty ending the UsefulNotes/PolishSovietWar. The Polish government was dominated by the Nationalists, who wanted only as much territory as it could be [[YouWillBeAssimilated assimilated]] into Poland, as opposed to commander-in-chief Piłsudski, who wanted as much ground as he could to make it allied buffer states. So, the Poles took less than the Reds were willing to offer.
41	** The main problem was that both Germany and the Soviet Union felt that Poland had taken too much and wanted "their" territories back, so there was a strong possibility of another Russo-Polish war in any case, no matter how many territorial gains the Poles were able to enforce with French support.
42	* {{UsefulNotes/Ethiopia}}'s victory over {{UsefulNotes/Italy}} in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Italo-Ethiopian_War First Italo-Ethiopian War]] was an utter humiliation for Italy. Forty years later, when UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini was in power in Italy, he proved to be a SoreLoser by starting the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Italo-Ethiopian_War Second Italo-Ethiopian War]]. The Italians won the rematch, in no small part due to their massive technological advantage, and drove Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie into a GovernmentInExile. Unfortunately for Italy, an Ethiopian LaResistance formed in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbegnoch Arbegnoch]]. The Arbegnoch constantly harassed the Italian occupation into UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo. They received aid from UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire, {{UsefulNotes/France}}, {{UsefulNotes/Belgium}} and their colonies in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_campaign_(World_War_II) East African Campaign]], which finally broke Italy's hold over Ethiopia. Emperor Selassie eventually [[RightfulKingReturns returned to Ethiopia's capital of Addis Ababa]] five years to the day he was forced to flee.
43	* Post-UsefulNotes/WW2 Britain lost its Empire and was forced to surrender its status as a world Superpower to America. The economic problems caused by the War are more in the realm of PyrrhicVictory, though.
44	** France found herself in a similar position to Britain after the war. Having suffered through Nazi occupation, a weakened France tried to reassert herself after the war and hold onto her colonial empire, including colonies that she had lost such as French Indochina. This ended very badly for France. First, France lost her possessions in Indochina following a humiliating defeat in the First Indochina War. Then, France fought through the long and brutal Algerian War, leading to the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the birth of the Fifth Republic (the current one) before President Charles De Gaulle was forced to grant Algeria its independence. At this point, France was forced to accept the decolonization of the rest of her empire and, like Britain, settle into her role as a supporting player on the world stage.
45	** For the Western Allies as a whole, there was some bitterness over the European situation after the war. The UsefulNotes/ColdWar was obviously oncoming, and absolutely nothing could be done to prevent Stalin from assembling the Eastern Bloc given the world has just exhausted itself defeating the Axis.
46	** In the case of Germany and Japan, who lost WWII utterly and completely but became stable, functional democracies with incredibly powerful economies, you could argue that they [[InvertedTrope Lost the War, Won the Peace]]. German and Japanese leaders were flabbergasted when the Americans offered to open up their massive domestic market and to keep the sea-lanes safe for world trade effectively for free, which nullified the entire reason they started the war to begin with (to establish their own autarky in Europe and Asia). Some of their former opponents thought that the opposite, i.e. this trope played straight, applied to themselves.
47	** The USSR won the war -- and certainly gained influence and superpower status -- but lost the peace in the long run. The country had suffered such horrendous losses economically, materially and in manpower that it took her decades to recover, and that's not even getting into the burden of reconstruction in various Warsaw Pact countries (and then supplying them with subsidized energy to keep them on the USSR's side). The start of the nuclear arms race also made them invest in military expenditure, which despite being cut back by Khruschev in TheFifties, eventually ballooned out of control under Brezhnev and his successors, becoming one of the factors behind the eventual downfall and dissolution of the USSR.
48	** Arguably, the Eastern European nations suffered this trope the hardest. Despite resisting German occupation for the entire war and being briefly liberated upon Germany's collapse and surrender, the postwar peace process would have the Western Allies leaving all of Eastern Europe, including Poland, under Russia's sphere of influence. Russia wasted no time in installing puppet governments in all of these countries and forcibly inducting them into the Warsaw Pact, meaning in effect Eastern Europe fought WWII only to trade their German oppressors for Russian ones.
49	** [[UsefulNotes/NoMoreEmperors Nationalist China]] regained control of its territories from UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan following the latter's defeat in 1945. However, Kuomintang leader UsefulNotes/ChiangKaiShek was forced to deal with hyperinflation, rampant corruption, food shortages, ravaged infrastructure, the loss of American trust, and a resurgent Chinese Communist Party. Chiang's paranoia following numerous assassination attempts on him didn't help, which made it difficult for him to delegate authority. What followed was 3 years of [[UsefulNotes/ChineseCivilWar civil war]], ending in CCP leader UsefulNotes/MaoZedong's victory and Chiang's retreat to UsefulNotes/{{Taiwan}}.
50	* Despite the numerous claims that they "won" the UsefulNotes/KoreanWar due to successfully preventing occupation of the northern half of the country by UN forces, UsefulNotes/NorthKorea ultimately ended up being the biggest loser of the conflict. Pre-war, the north was actually more industrialized and developed than [[UsefulNotes/SouthKorea the south]] but all of that infrastructure was destroyed during the course of the war. After the cease fire that ended open hostilities was signed, South Korea received massive economic support and investment from the West, propelling it into one of the most developed countries in the world in less than half a century. North Korea, meanwhile, only received token postwar support from the USSR and China and never recovered from the massive losses it suffered to its population and industry. Even today, North Korea remains an isolated hermit state that largely only serves as a buffer state for China.
51	* The Suez Crisis was a military victory but political failure for Britain and France. When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain and France sought to retake the canal by having Israel capture it and then the two European nations intervened under the guise of peacekeeping. While the British, French and Israeli military forces soundly defeated Egyptian military forces, the ruse was revealed to the public and they subsequently lost the political goodwill of the international community. US President UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower angrily condemned the invasion as he feared it would drag [=NATO=] into a costly war, and USSR Premier UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev even threatened to deploy nukes in the Middle East. Rather than reassert British and French dominance, the Suez Crisis only weakened their international standing and hastened the end of European colonialism while Nasser became a hero amongst Third World nations.
52	* UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar is a complicated matter to be certain. While it should be noted that the American Military won the majority ([[http://www.g2mil.com/lost_vietnam.htm though not all]]) of individual ''battles'' they were involved in, they never achieved a decisive victory. The Americans underestimated how durable the spirit of their Vietnamese enemy was: they wanted to win far more than the Americans wanted them to lose, meaning that a prolonged war and large casualties were not enough to stop them. The Americans eventually headed back home, [[PyrrhicVictory the cost of victory being too high]] and substantial political pressure building against the war. However, even with the opposing force out of their hair, governing the new Communist Vietnam was not easy for the victors. There were rebels to quell, and even a war or two with its neighbors to the West and an invasion from China before things became truly stable. After all that fighting with the Americans, peace did not come easy for the Vietnamese.
53	** Americans themselves were left pretty bad off. The war brought distrust of the government, a generation of young men dead, wounded, or [[ShellShockedVeteran mentally scared for life]]. Even their main objective, stopping the spread of communism south, was only delayed for a few years, and eventually [[DisasterDominoes the theory]] behind that intervention was discredited when Communist Vietnam's invasion of Communist Cambodia uncovered and ended the Khmer Rouge's genocide.[[note]]The underlying assumption behind American foreign policy at the time was that Communists worldwide were a united front against the US and its allies.[[/note]] At the same time, Vietnam successfully fought off Cambodia's main backer, Communist China (allied with America and Cambodia at one point) in a bloody border war.
54	** Ironically enough, after the fall of the USSR (Vietnam's main ally) and with the rise of China as a world power, Vietnam has become a close partner with the United States due to them realizing that they're more likely to be invaded by China than the United States.
55	* The Persian UsefulNotes/GulfWar was pretty much this. Other than liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, it did nothing meaningful and only worsened the already growing anti-American sentiment of the Middle East, leading to UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror. On a smaller scale, America went into an economic recession in the aftermath of the war, causing approval ratings for President UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush to plummet, leading him in turn to lose his re-election bid in 1992 to UsefulNotes/BillClinton.
56	** That said, the outcome of the Gulf War could've been worse. During the war, some politicians wanted to go further by invading Iraq and disposing of Saddam Hussein. President George H. W. Bush rejected this option, arguing that it would lead to political destabilization and create a [[EvilPowerVacuum power vacuum for terrorists]]. In hindsight given the War on Terror, an invasion of Iraq during the Gulf War would've resulted in a bigger military win but a worse political defeat.
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58	%%!!21st Century
59	%%NOTE - as per the note at the top of the page, Administrivia/NoRecentExamplesPlease applies until 20 years after the END of the war.
60	%% Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine are not yet at that point.
61	%% See the NoRecentExamples cleanup thread for any specific queries on this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15523303630A12937700
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65	!!Multiple Periods & Specific Nations
66	* This is a popular stereotype of how Bulgaria's wars end.
67	** The rule of Simeon the Great of the First Bulgarian Empire (the one who actually made it into an empire) is hailed in historiography as Bulgaria's golden age. Simeon waged many wars of expansion and beat enemies such as Croatia and the Byzantine Empire into submission, turning Bulgaria into the sole major power in the region. This, however, only lasted until his death. Between a populace exhausted by wars, huge expenditures on culture and prestige, a greedy clergy causing heresy and dissent among the peasants, vengeful neighbors, and HordesFromTheEast taking lands too far away to guard, his son Peter I, even if he had 40 years of nominal peace (absence of open war but not rebellions and incursions), ushered in the empire's downfall.
68	** From modern history: the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 (when Russia assembled a vast alliance of Balkan states to fight against Turkish control of the Balkans and independence for Bulgaria and managed to do the nearly unthinkable by pushing into the very suburbs of Constantinople... [[YourPrincessIsInAnotherCastle right before the Congress of Berlin forced the allies to yield most of their gains back to Turkey]]) and the First Balkan war, in which Bulgaria shouldered some of the heaviest burdens, but its allies got most of the territory, causing them to fall out over the spoils. Then things went FromBadToWorse.
69	** Between the two wars, Bulgarians staged the bloodless reunion of the country with its southern half, which had been left as an autonomous region within the Ottoman empire. This went without the approval of the Great Powers and Russia prompted Serbia to attack Bulgaria as punishment. Bulgaria won the war but lost Russia's geopolitical support, which resulted in three of its surrounding countries (Greece, Serbia, and Romania) forming a long-term alliance against it with Russian blessing.
70	** The other half of the stereotype, of course, is the inversion. Bulgaria was the only Axis power to come out with territorial gains[[note]]regaining land previously annexed in a surprise invasion[[/note]] from the Second World War, regaining the ethnically Bulgarian [=Quadrilater/South Dobruja=][[note]]It was ceded peacefully while both countries were Axis members, then the change was approved after they both had switched sides to USSR[[/note]] and winning the peace despite losing the war. Bulgaria still [[AwakeningTheSleepingGiant declared token war on the US and UK]] and [[BrokeYourArmPunchingOutCthulhu got bombed for it]], and also got invaded by the USSR and [[DayOfTheJackboot underwent a coup assisted by the Soviet army]], turning into a [[CommieLand dictatorship]]. It also didn't keep Macedonia, which was why it joined the Nazis in the first place.
71	* Any war in Afghanistan becomes an empty victory. While it's possible to conquer Afghanistan, holding onto it and forming a centralized government is next to impossible given the mountainous terrain and tribalism of ethnic groups. [[UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire No]] [[UsefulNotes/SovietRussiaUkraineAndSoOn foreign]] [[UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror invaders]] since UsefulNotes/TimurTheLame has actually managed to take ''and'' hold Afghanistan.
72	** Though none of those empires were defeated by failing in Afghanistan, so perhaps a better term is that it is the [[https://acoup.blog/2021/08/27/fireside-friday-august-27-2021/ midlife-crisis-car of empires]]. It is something that prosperous empires get drawn into before eventually coming to realize that it just isn't worth the cost.
73	* This seems to be the case for a lot of modern-day coups and revolutions. Hoping (perhaps) to emulate other successful revolutions, the two major ones that stand out are the [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution American]] and [[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French]] as a source of inspiration, many of these countries [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized fall into relative disarray]] shortly afterwards. But perhaps a cause why many of these revolutions fail is because they [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeBureaucratized weren't led by people who actually know how to run a country]] (or any large body of people). As one historian put it "They win, have a big party, wake up with a hangover, and ask 'Now what?'" The Libyan civil war may be given as an example. Although the anti-Gaddafi forces had won, and UsefulNotes/MuammarGaddafi was dead, the country is left in disarray with the new government now trying to restore proper order while fighting rival militias.
74	** Philippines' peaceful EDSA Revolution did overthrow then President UsefulNotes/FerdinandMarcos for abusing his power during the Martial Law era. But over 36 years, the country has suffered from continued corruption and decadency, half the wealth Marcos embezzled from the government has not been recovered, and Marcos' family have been elected to several government positions. The final straw has been Ferdinand Marcos Junior ''winning'' the 2022 presidential election[[note]]He ran for vice-president in 2016, but ''barely'' lost.[[/note]]. Several political analysts [[http://opinion.inquirer.net/93539/the-millennials noted]] that incompetence and the lack of political will in the previous administrations resulted the current state of the country, and people who were born after the EDSA Revolution became cynical and disillusioned about the consequences of the revolution, and are prone to propaganda.
75	* This tends to happen a lot in [[MobWar conflicts between criminal cartels (or sections of said cartels)]]. They'll often got to extreme lengths to rid of the other guys, no matter what; the winning side will often be left with far less gangsters than when they started. And that can leave an EvilPowerVacuum that other gangs and criminals can maneuver to fill in the fallout. And then you have different factions who may want to continue the war for their own petty reasons, and it goes on until mobster higher ups like the Commission intervene, or until the police and/or feds get involved and either arrest or shoot everyone.

Context WonTheWarLostThePeace / RealLife