a soft, boggy area of ground, or a difficult or complex situation with no easy solution.
From 'quag' (to shake or quake, from Old English) + 'mire' (swamp). The word first appeared in the 1500s and metaphorically described any sticky problem by the 1800s.
The Vietnam War made 'quagmire' the go-to metaphor for foreign policy disasters—before that, it mostly meant a literal swamp, but President Nixon used it to describe Vietnam, and now it's permanently installed in political language as a warning about getting stuck.
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