You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

War reshapes, not wins

There's something genuinely unsettling about this comparison because it forces you to see war not as something you can "solve" through superior strategy or willpower, but as a destructive force that happens to you. Even when one side technically claims victory, the earthquake has already leveled the buildings. The survivors still have to rebuild in rubble, and the trauma doesn't care who won on paper.

This matters now because we live in a culture obsessed with winning, with decisive outcomes and clear scorecards. We talk about "winning" arguments, "winning" fights against disease, "winning" our way out of problems. But some situations—like war, like earthquakes, like grief or addiction—aren't contests with finish lines. They're forces that reshape everything they touch. The real question isn't how to win, but how to survive them with as little devastation as possible, and what we actually want to build in the aftermath.

What makes Rankin's observation quietly radical is that it suggests the only genuine victory against war is prevention in the first place. You can't outfight an earthquake, but you can build differently. The same applies to conflict: the win you're really after is the one that never requires the battle to happen at all.