One could argue that the United States lost to itself in that war by withdrawing support stupidly.

Wars are often just dumb luck and bad decisions compiled into a random outcome. Most of the bad decisions come under the category of "starting a war in the first place".

The United States could also be said to have lost the Russian Revolution by picking the wrong side (from a democracy perspective).

As for globalized economics, the whole pursuit of so-called "wealth" is backward. Human civilization itself is a cheat: it isolates humans from the environment that spawned us, and that isolation is allowing people to believe we can have Smith's perpetual growth and Invisible Hand of fanatical competition forever without caring for our places.

Every war is a war on the soil of a place, and every attack on the soil is an attack on humanity's future.