But those may not always be options. Look at where we have ended up in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afganistan. By any stretch of the imagination, we have not sunk to the level of the opposition in those places. And we can reasonably claim to have done better on the way we treated civilian populations and soldiers there than we did in WWII. Yet we can't claim to have won either. Fortunately the cost of defeat in those places has been affordable (if you can call the amount of blood and treasure spent affordable - at least we aren't under foreign rule). But if it really came down to a must win slugfest with Russia or China (or both), would we really have the luxury of sticking to our high ground?