130 International Relations Theory of War
in which it saw the occurrences and unilaterally withdraw its military
forces from that small country.^153
Harry Summers, who served as an American colonel in the Vietnam
War, argues that the United States won the war tactically but lost stra-
tegically.^154 Like earlier and later militarists, Summers bases his work
on Clausewitz’s book, which emphasized the importance of balancing
out “the trinity of war”: civilians, government, and military.^155 Based on
this distinction, Summers points out two factors that led to the Ameri-
can failure: the environment—the relations between the U.S. military and
the American people, the importance of American public support for the
military actions, and the institutional responsibility that Congress had in
giving that support legitimacy—and the failure of the U.S. military strat-
egy.^156 Unlike Summers, the theory cited here claims that the reason that
the United States failed to win the war was systemic.
The Gulf War (1991)The Gulf War marked the transition from the bipolar system to the uni-
polar system that was formed after it.^157 Upon its conclusion, the United
States expanded its foothold in the Persian Gulf region, an area of great
strategic importance.
The great importance of that region is supported by the fact that the
United States spent $60 billion a year to ensure the free flow of oil from the
Gulf States worth $30 billion—oil that would also have flowed without
its protection.^158 The U.S. involvement in the war and the expansion of its
presence in the region, along with the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from
its protégé countries, led to the significant systemic change: the transition
from the bipolar system to the unipolar system.
TERRITORIAL OUTCOMES IN UNIPOLAR SYSTEMS
In the current subchapter, I assess whether the territorial outcomes of
the wars in which the United States participated as a sole hyperpower
correspond with the hypothesis of the international relations theory of war
concerning the degree of territorial expansion of polar powers at the end
of wars in which they have participated. The current subchapter shows
that in unipolar systems one main result may occur: territorial expansion
of the sole hyperpower because any other result would undermine its sta-
bility as the sole hyperpower in the system and might lead to collapse of
the system—a result that the homeostasis principle dictates to the players
to act to prevent.
In the only unipolar system that has occurred since 1816, in 1992–2016,
all the minor wars in which the United States was involved as the sole
hyperpower ended with that territorial result. In other words, the unipo-
lar system dictated to the sole hyperpower, the United States, to expand