Can’t the really rotten results of their three recent wars convince military superpowers Russia, Israel and the United States that determined opponents are not worth invading?
Israel at least has the excuse that the neighbors like to shoot at it, too.
Whereas Ukraine wasn’t shooting at Russia, and Iran wasn’t shooting at the U.S., except in that Spy vs. Spy way of targeting our national security advisers after we assassinate their generals with a drone.
And whereas Russia after four years and the deaths of about 500,000 soldiers — a number not widely reported when it was estimated by UK spy services last month — has achieved bupkis in its war of choice on Ukraine, excepting the increasing animus of the non-autocratic world. We don’t think about it, as they know only repression, but the Russian people must be seething underneath after the deaths of so many young men, and the economic and social havoc the war has wreaked, and as the world learned 110 years ago, they are a people capable of modern revolution.
And whereas the United States, or its president, who makes these decisions unilaterally, has achieved bupkis in his war of choice on Iran, a country that after three and a half months since the initial bombardment of Tehran has schooled the president, scamming the old scammer, so severely that war colleges will study the imams’ strategy for centuries to come. After all that it has cost Americans, 15 service members dead and hundreds of billions of our dollars spent, the war resulted in the pre-war status quo, plus a little bonus for their troubles, for Iran: Religious autocrats and the Revolutionary Guard still in charge. Strait of Hormuz open to shipping. Promises not to build nuclear bombs.
And unfreezing of billions in assets and lifting of oil-sale sanctions against Iran, combined with help from us in rebuilding after the war, which Iran won.
Iran won, but has Russia lost? If you’re Vladimir Putin, which I am awfully glad you are not, you crow about territories taken in eastern Ukraine, about Crimea entirely back in the Russian empire’s fold, about Russian pride restored after some infidels stubbornly continue to believe they really are a separate nation, and were, before and after the rise and demise of the Soviet Union.
If Trump radically underestimated the time in which it would take him to get, well, nothing from a war of choice, imagine what Putin feels after what in 2022 he predicted would be a blitzkrieg and a simple victory. You’re right, he probably doesn’t feel anything at all.
Turning to the other at least would-be autocrat, except that he’s one who’s actually in electoral danger just now, and is the only one of the three under indictment for actually rather low-rent cigar-and-Champagne bribery, it’s just really hard to figure how a man who had the sympathy of the free world after the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, with 1,200 Israelis murdered and hundreds taken captive could turn that sympathy into near-universal enmity,
Few would have begrudged Bibi Netanyahu the right to strike back, and few doubted that he would, hard. But no one wants what it turns out he wants, which is scorched-earth war until Gaza was not just dead but gone, and wars with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with the Tehran regime until it is no longer is in his electoral interest to wage them.
“On balance, the memorandum appears to favor Iran,” Nicole Grajewski, who teaches at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in France and studies Iran’s foreign policy, told The New York Times. “Tehran secures movement toward sanctions relief, a pathway for the restoration of oil exports, access to economic benefits and a reduction in military pressure while making relatively limited new nuclear commitments.”
Iran won, Ukraine is holding its own, Israel is a pariah. What’s the point of being a military superpower when you can’t win?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.