Wikipedia has a page showing all (or at least many) of America’s military engagements at home and abroad in two timelines, 1770 to 1900 and 1900 to present (h/t Juan Cole).

The first thing you might note is that we have gone to war a lot. Most of the 19th-century campaigns were against this or that Indian nation—manifest destiny stuff, mostly—but there are also lesser-known foreign engagements like the Philippine-American War (1898-1902), which resulted in more than 4,000 American deaths, mostly from disease, and as many as 1.5 million Filipino civilian deaths. We also seemed to like to do some occupying back in the day, including Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34), the Dominican Republic (i.e. the other half of the island with Haiti) (1916-24), and the Dominican Republic again (1965-66).

The timelines color-code each war or conflict to indicate whether the conflict is ongoing or whether the U.S. was the winner, loser, or neither. It identifies seven “ongoing” conflicts:

• Afghanistan (2011-present)
• Operation Enduring Freedom – Philippines (2002-present)
• Operation Enduring Freedom – Horn of Africa (2002-present)
• War in North-West Pakistan (2004-present)
• Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans Sahara (2007-present)
• Al-Qaeda Insurgency in Yemen (2010-present)
• LRA Insurgency in Uganda (2011-present)

How many of these do you ever hear about on the news?

Out of all the conflicts identified, only four are marked as neither a “win” nor a “loss”: the War of 1812 (1812-15), the Russian Civil War (1917-23), the Korean War (1950-53), and the Korean DMZ Conflict (1966-69).

I only saw two that were identified as “losses” for the U.S.:

• Red Cloud’s War (1866-68): Fought in the Wyoming and Montana territories between the U.S. and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho nations. Resulted in a treaty granting the Indians control of the Powder River Country in Wyoming, although they would lose it after the Great Sioux War of 1876.
• Formosa Expedition (1867): “[A] punitive expedition launched by the United States against Formosa. The expedition was undertaken in retaliation for the destruction of the Rover, an American bark which had been wrecked and its crew massacred by native warriors in March 1867. A United States Navy and marine company landed in southern Formosa and skirmished with the Paiwan aboriginals until the Americans withdrew without completing their objective of decisively defeating the natives in battle. The event is regarded as a failure in United States Naval history.”

The two defeats are therefore a war that the U.S. only temporarily “lost,” and an expedition that failed to “decisively defeat” the enemy. Both of these occurred in the immediate aftermath of the bloodiest war in the nation’s history. And those are the only “defeats” listed.

Under “wins,” we have fairly obvious ones like the Spanish-American War of 1898 and World War II, but we also have the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

This is perhaps one of those examples of Wikipedia not being perfectly reliable.

Also, America fuck yeah.

Photo credit: By Lordkinbote at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons