Top 10 Wars That Never Should Have Happened

Created by Ruby Stewart Staff · May 2024 · Updated May 2026

Calling a war pointless is uncomfortable, because the people who died in it deserve more than that. But some wars really were unnecessary in the strict sense: the political objectives could have been achieved without the bodies, and contemporary observers said so at the time. This ranking sorts the conflicts where the gap between cause and consequence was widest. World War One leads, and the case is well-rehearsed: a continental order tripped into industrial slaughter by a chain of mobilisation timetables and alliance commitments that nobody really controlled, with sixteen million dead for territorial outcomes that mostly reverted within a decade. World War Two is the harder entry, because the war itself was necessary once the Axis had committed; the avoidable part was the failure to enforce the postwar settlement of 1919 with anything like the seriousness required. The Napoleonic Wars sit on the list because the second half could plausibly have been negotiated away, and were not. Vietnam is here for the well-documented gap between American policy assumptions and Vietnamese actuality, with the human cost falling overwhelmingly on Vietnamese civilians. The American Civil War is included because the underlying issue, slavery, could in theory have been resolved by the political process the country had spent eighty years building, and was not. The list rewards counterfactuals that are at least defensible. Vote based on which conflicts you think still get romanticised more than they should.

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