No presidential decision is as politically hazardous as the war decision. That’s because voters are quicker and more ferocious in turning on their chief executives when wars go awry than when events become troublesome in other areas of governance. Woe be to the president who finds himself in a war he can’t win and can’t get out of, or finds that the price of war far outweighs the promised benefits, or learns that the rationale for war doesn’t hold up.

Herewith, then, a catalogue of the country’s five  worst wartime presidents, men who took their country to war, or continued an inherited war, but couldn’t bring success to the war effort. In four instances, we can see what kind of price they paid, or their parties paid, for their lack of success. In the fifth instance, the case of Barack Obama’s war decisions in Iraq, Afghanistan and surrounding Mideast lands, it’s still an open question what kind of price will be paid.

Of the country’s forty-four chief executives, thirteen were serious war presidents, four through inheritance and the rest through initiation. They are: Madison, Polk, Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman (by inheritance and initiation), Eisenhower (by inheritance), Lyndon Johnson, Nixon (by inheritance), George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Obama (by inheritance). Of these, the clear failures were Wilson, Truman, Johnson, and George W. Bush. Obama occupies a kind of middle territory, but ultimately he must be placed in the circle of those who couldn’t bring success to their wartime management. (Madison is the subject of ongoing historical debate as to his success or failure as a wartime president, but I consider him, on balance, more of a success than a failure, for reasons outlined in my book, Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.)

Wilson and World War I:

The lesson of Wilson and World War I is that when presidents take the country to war, they must protect the home front as far as possible. Wilson’s war devastated the American home front while also contributing to European chaos that helped spawn World War II.

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In standing for reelection in 1916, Wilson took credit for keeping his country out of the European war. Then, immediately upon winning the election, he sought to get his country into the war. In fairness, he faced a fearsome challenge of neutrality with the British blockade against the Central Powers—designed, as the pugnacious Winston Churchill put it, “to starve the whole population [of Germany]—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound, into submission.” To counter that serious threat, the Germans initiated submarine attacks to stop munitions shipments to Britain and counteract the blockade. Facing this thicket, Wilson unwisely violated the principle of neutrality by observing the British blockade while allowing British merchant ships access to U.S. ports, thus making America complicit in armament shipments to Britain. He also declared that Germany would be held accountable for any U.S. loss of life or property from German submarine attacks as the Germans desperately sought some relief from the blockade and arms shipments to Britain.

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Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, saw that this lopsided approach would lead to war. He warned Wilson, then resigned in protest. But Wilson continued his policy until he got the war he wanted. Events then made a mockery of his gauzy notions about America being “the light which will shine unto all generations and guide the feet of mankind to the goal of justice and liberty and peace.”

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Instead, once he broke the military stalemate on the Continent and fostered the Versailles peace conference, he came up against some powerful nationalist forces, personified by France’s relentless Georges Clemenceau and Britain’s David Lloyd George. Inevitably, his idealism was mocked by the realities of geography, power differentials, cultural passions, and national interest. Many scholars have argued that Germany was crushed under the Allied boot with such harshness that a subsequent war became inevitable. In his book The Kings Depart, historian Richard Watt wrote, “The single name most inextricably bound up with the Treaty of Versailles, and consequently with its failure, was that of Thomas Woodrow Wilson. The dream of a world of happy peoples, each assembled into an entity of its own nationality and living in its own historical geographic location, were now seen to have been imbecilic wishes which could not and would not come true.”

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But in the meantime, the war crushed America’s domestic front. The national economy flipped out of control. Inflation surged into double digits. Gross Domestic Product turned downward, with no growth in 1919, a 2.24 percent decline in 1920, and a further 4.16 decline in Wilson’s final budget year of 1921. Civil liberties were trampled by the notorious attorney general, Mitchell Palmer. Labor upheaval also ensued. Contributing to his appearance of haplessness was a series of strokes that sent him into White House seclusion. By Election Day of 1920, Wilson’s party was so discredited that it lost the White House in a GOP landslide, as well as sixty-three House seats and eleven in the Senate. The country has seen few political repudiations of such magnitude.

Johnson and Vietnam:

LBJ, upon becoming president at the death of John Kennedy, instantly saw the fateful implications in the “damn mess,” as he called Vietnam. He even asked his friend and mentor, Georgia’s Democratic senator Richard Russell, to attack the Vietnam commitment on the Senate floor so he could use the speech as cover for withdrawal. But Russell declined, and Johnson plunged ahead with a policy that took the country’s military commitment from 16,700 military advisers to a full-flung expeditionary force of nearly 540,000 troops in an anti-guerrilla effort that seemed to have no end in sight.

Many historians have argued that this adventure was doomed from the start because even a superpower such as the United States couldn’t hold sway over events in an exotic, far-off land such as Vietnam. Perhaps. But Johnson’s greatest mistake was accepting the military strategy developed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his Vietnam commander, General William Westmoreland. They rejected the idea of taking the war to the enemy and embraced a war of attrition, a resolve to kill so many Vietnamese communist that the sponsoring regime in North Vietnam would “cry uncle” and negotiate a settlement. This was folly. In the end, it was America’s “body count” that obliterated domestic support for the war.

This strategic illusion hit the American consciousness with a shattering force with the communist Tet offensive of January 1968, which unleashed 70,000 troops on American command posts and other strategic targets. The American counteroffensive proved devastating, killing some 37,000 communists to just 2,500 Americans killed. But the display of communist capability and resolve after four years of war destroyed America’s appetite for a conflict that now looked hopeless. Johnson, seeing his own presidency also devastated, announced his retirement two months after Tet.

It fell to Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, to extricate America from this quagmire while also trying to preserve America’s ability to sway events in Asia at a time of profound regional change and challenge. It’s a testament to his vision and skill that he managed to lure China out of its angry isolation at the same time he was executing a delicate and dangerous Vietnam retreat amid fearsome political agitations at home.

George W. Bush and Iraq:

Bush encountered just about every trap in the path of presidents who take their country to war. First, he embraced a preventive-war doctrine, which heightened all the other dangers since such a war is more difficult to justify in philosophical terms. Dwight Eisenhower summarily rejected the concept of preventive war and said he would kick out of his office anybody who suggested such a thing.

Next, Bush crafted a war rationale—Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist groups—that didn’t hold up once it became possible to test the thesis. This gave war critics at home stores of rhetorical ammunition with which to attack his policies. Additionally, like Wilson, he offered a picture of what his war would accomplish that also proved wispy and chimerical. He sold the war as an initiative to establish a democratic beachhead in the heartland of Islam, thus paving the way for an era of progress and stability in the region. With the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, no president ever encased his war effort in a cocoon of idealism as frivolous as that.

Eventually, he did manage to bring about a modicum of stability with the so-called Surge, but that consisted in negotiating accommodations with Sunni forces far more than in any serious military success. In the end, he simply announced a timetable for withdrawal with the hope that things would remain relatively stable in the land he had totally upended. Of course, they didn’t. More than that, his destabilization of Iraq proved contagious in the region, and Bush’s war contributed to the rise of passions and conflicts that have unleashed further sectarian turmoil and fostered the rise of the kind of Islamist radicalism that was the true U.S. enemy after 9/11. Like Wilson and Johnson, Bush’s failure devastated his party in subsequent elections as the American people expressed their anger at his folly.

Truman and Korea:

Truman’s inherited term was truly heroic, with policies and initiatives that brought about a smooth transition from war to peace and set the stage for a successful effort to parry Soviet ambitions, particularly in Western Europe. But he struggled in his second term, and particularly with his Korean war. It’s difficult to question Truman’s rationale for entering the war, conducted officially under United Nations auspices, and it appeared he was heading for success after General Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant Inchon landing split the communist forces and paved the way for America’s northward advance toward the Korean-Chinese border.

But it all turned sour when China sent 300,000 battle-tested troops against the American and South Korean armies. That led to a protracted, painful stalemate, and for the next two years Truman struggled with a war he could not win, could not walk away from, and could not afford to lose. During that time, Washington faced the dual prospect of a devastating strategic defeat or a world war. By the time Truman entered the campaign year of 1952, his approval rating hovered around 23 percent—still the benchmark low for all presidents since polling began—and it was clear he had no prospect of running successfully for a second full term. His successor, Eisenhower, quickly reached a negotiated settlement by renouncing an all-out victory and accepting a communist North Korea. But U.S. troops remain in South Korea to this day as a testament to the mixed outcome of a sad military episode in U.S. history.

Obama and Iraq/Afghanistan:

In one sense, it may seem unfair to place Obama in company with these other wartime presidents. For one thing, he didn’t initiate these wars but rather inherited them from George W. Bush. For another, the situation he inherited didn’t deteriorate into the kinds of messes characterized by these other tales of presidential failure. Third, it probably says something about America’s wartime history that an effort to list the five most hapless wartime presidents pulls into the mix a man such as Obama, whose wartime record only slightly places him in the category of failure.

On the other hand, presidents don’t get to make excuses based on what they inherit in taking office, nor do they get to trim on defining their success in relation to the performance of their predecessors. Obama inherited a mess; his job was to clean it up; on balance the situation got worse on his watch—not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in the surrounding region.

Remember how Nixon extricated the United States from Vietnam while ending Chinese isolation and bolstering the democratic capitalism then stirring in Asia. He succeeded because he had a grand strategy for the region. Obama never developed a coherent strategy for the Middle East. He embraced the idea of building democracy in Afghanistan but placed a time limit on his involvement there. Building democracy was never going to work, but particularly was it going to fail when the forces of old—Taliban chieftains and other sectarian leaders—knew that all they had to do was wait out the intervention. The policy made no sense, and there’s little in the country to show for it.

As for Iraq, there’s some truth in the argument of the American right that Obama inherited a relatively stable situation that turned unstable on his watch. It may not be entirely fair, given that it was George W. Bush who unleashed the regional whirlwind with his Iraq invasion. But politics isn’t always fair, geopolitics even less so. And it was Obama’s responsibility to maintain the stability level he inherited. It may be an open question whether leaving a military force in Iraq as a show of U.S. resolve would have ensured such stability. But he needed to pursue whatever policies could have built on what he inherited. That he didn’t manage that is probably related to his apparent confusion about just what his policy philosophy should be in the region.

He helped destabilize Libya when Muammar Qaddafi came under internal pressure, but stood back when Syria’s Bashar al-Assad encountered a similar revolt. He piled on when the longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak ran into trouble in Egypt, then remained largely mute when Egypt came under the control first of the Muslim Brotherhood and then of the old military oligarchy. He mocked the significance of the ISIS menace in Syria and Iraq, then committed America to degrading and destroying that truly ominous force once it had gained a major foothold in both countries, much to his surprise.

In the end, he inherited a bad situation, and it got worse during his presidency. That is not a wartime success story. Thus does he fall into the category of the country’s five worst wartime presidents.

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington political reporter and publishing executive, is the author of books on American history and foreign policy.

Image: White House/Flickr