It turns out that the great powers don’t have as much power as they thought.
After taking office last year, President Trump advanced a potentially far-right approach to remaking the international order around a U.S. sphere of influence, a worldview. not that different From Russia or China. The future seems to be shaped by the oft-repeated line of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides: “The strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they wish.”
The saying, originally uttered by the invading Athenian forces to the doomed islanders of Melos in 416 BC, featured prominently in a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that caused a stir during the international conference in Davos in January, at the height of Europe’s dispute with Trump over his plan to seize the Danish island of Greenland.
Yet it now seems that the weak are not as weak as many believed. Even the powerful can’t really do what they want.
Despite expending a significant portion of its long-range weapons and killing a large portion of the Iranian leadership, US forces have not been able to achieve a strategic victory over a middle power like Iran. Tehran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz. Its religious system is still under solid control and maintains the ability to throw missiles at Israel and the Gulf countries with the latest. exchange of salvos This week.
Ukraine is also not broken. Trump cut US aid more than a year ago and put diplomatic pressure on Kiev to surrender its territory east of Donetsk as part of his understanding with Russia at an August summit in Alaska. Despite this, Ukraine has managed to turn the tide of war against Russia, remaining on the front lines and carrying out increasingly painful attacks on the Russian heartland.
These developments showed that technological advances – such as drones and much cheaper precision missiles – have leveled the playing field between small states and great powers that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on their armed forces. “Ukraine is in a much stronger position due to technological superiority,” said Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Brez. As power differentials narrow around the world, what military power alone can achieve is limited. China is watching these trends closely as it considers whether it could or should annex Taiwan.
Of course, ongoing conflicts around the world differ in many ways. Ukraine is a democracy fighting a war of self-defense against unprovoked Russian aggression. Iran’s repressive regime killed thousands of its own citizens before the US and Israel began bombing in February, and it has supported terrorist proxy groups that have destabilized the Middle East for decades.
Still, all these wars bring similar lessons, Italy’s Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview. He said, “The kind of war we were used to, the kind of war Russia had in mind in Ukraine – invading and occupying a nation – can no longer be imagined.” “Wars last only as long as a nation has the resilience and will to resist. It is impossible to conquer a nation even if its citizens are willing to fight, even if there is a disparity in strength, as there was between Russia and Ukraine, or even more so between the US and Iran. It is even harder for Israel, which has not yet succeeded against Hamas in practically just one city.”
Regime change – the goal of Russia in Ukraine, and, initially at least, of the US in Iran – can no longer be achieved by force of arms alone in the modern world, agreed General Onno Eichelsheim, the Netherlands’ defense chief.
“It is almost impossible to overcome such countries with all our capabilities, whether it is the United States against Iran or Russia against Ukraine,” Echelsheim said. “And if you don’t succeed within the first two weeks, you get into an impasse that is very difficult to get out of. If you want to achieve something, you have to achieve it very, very fast.”
Limits on great-power capabilities are not new. In the past, both Washington and Moscow had suffered defeats in foreign wars. America had to retreat from Vietnam. Both were ultimately defeated in Afghanistan. America’s record on the occupation of Iraq is mixed at best.
Yet, in these cases, conventional military victories were followed by long, painful rebellions that caused the great powers to concede defeat and ultimately ended domestic support for the war. That is no longer the case. Over more than four years of war, Russian tanks have been unable to reach Kiev, and Russian advances on the battlefield have virtually halted. America did not even attempt ground action in Iran, even though it knew very well how many American casualties it would cause.
with drone warfare revolution The U.S. military’s overwhelming advantage in air power and intelligence and reconnaissance has been partially offset by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and Iran’s ability to develop a vast arsenal of long-range precision ballistic missiles. This has made a conventional armored attack on Tehran along the lines of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 unthinkable. The swift ouster of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro in January—which at the time seemed like a harbinger of things to come, whetting Trump’s appetite for Greenland and Iran—now appears as a rare exception rather than a harbinger of future exercises of American power.
China is paying a lot of attention to all this. “Before the war in Ukraine, people believed that Russia had the second-strongest army in the world. Now the strongest and second-strongest armies are all involved in wars, and these wars are not going so smoothly,” said retired senior colonel Zhou Bo, former director of the Center for Security Cooperation at China’s Defense Ministry, now a senior fellow at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
China’s main goal should be to invite Russian experts to share their skills in modern drone warfare, he said: “China is the largest producer of drones, but we don’t know how to use them militarily. Only these countries that have used drones on the battlefield can tell you how effective they really are.”
Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean academic who serves as the island nation’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Thucydides’ phrase, which has long been a tenet of the so-called realist school of international relations, is an expression of crude fatalism rather than a guide to the world’s much more complex reality. If this were true, he quipped, a small country like Singapore would have been swallowed by its neighbors long ago.
Kausikan said, “All countries have agency, even if they are in dire situations. But whether you have the wisdom to recognize your agency and the ability to implement it or not, those are different matters.”
He said that unlike Ukraine and Iran, Taiwan may not have the will to exercise that agency as China increasingly succeeds in eroding the population’s determination to resist a potential future Chinese military campaign. Rejecting the government’s rearmament proposal, Taiwan’s opposition-dominated parliament in May passed a much smaller $25 billion special military spending package that, among other things, cut funding for domestically designed drones and asymmetric-warfare capabilities. New opposition leader Cheng Li-wun has met Chinese leader Xi Jinping and taken a more cordial stance towards Beijing.
“I tell my Taiwanese friends, without much success, that you got the wrong lesson from Ukraine,” Kausikan said. “The lesson is not that democracies help other democracies. The lesson is that Ukrainians helped themselves, and then other people were willing to help them.”
The Philippines is also locked in a dispute with Beijing, and may face a similar problem with its determination to resist if war breaks out. Philippines Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. lamented, “Our population has been kept far out of touch with the reality of the conflict. What is being taught is a passive Gandhi-style culture of peace.” “But to do this, you need a strong security and defense shield to ensure a political environment that can guarantee the safety of all those who wish to be nonviolent.”
In his Davos speech, Carney – whose country Trump sometimes refers to as the 51st state of the future – argued that middle powers like Canada have no choice but to cooperate with similar countries to avoid global hegemony. Since then, European nations, Asian democracies and Canada have all moved to strengthen military, economic and security ties – in part to reduce their dependence on the US and China.
French political scientist Nicolas Tanzer said, “If they unite, the middle powers can counter the great powers.” “None of them can do it alone, but together they have ways to impose decisions, whether militarily, or in terms of international law. There is a margin for action – although that does not mean it will be easy.”
History is a guide to the dangers of great-power arrogance. In 416 BC, their refusal to submit to Athens, the superpower of antiquity, ended badly for the islanders of Melos. As Thucydides noted, all their men were massacred and children and women were enslaved. Yet, at the end of the day, such imperial arbitrariness backfired on Athens: it lost the broader war for dominance over Greece.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov yaroslov.trofimov@wsj.com
