Putin and Trump can’t win their wars. The rest of the world will suffer
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin embarked on a military campaign against Ukraine he expected to last ten days. Four years later, Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, which he also believed would last a mere ten days.
Both are now stuck in wars where success continues to elude them. Neither can claim to be winning – which for many means they’re losing. On Saturday, Trump said that an Iran peace deal was “largely negotiated”, with “final aspects and details” still being discussed, but it’s hard to envisage a deal that would look like a win for him.
Both leaders have fallen victim to their own delusions about the nature of modern warfare, particularly the kind they have unleashed. There is also a real prospect that both Putin and Trump face defeat, which will impact much of the world, the struggling south and Europe especially.
No wonder they are looking for distractions.
Putin’s war has already cost at least 1.2 million dead and wounded on the battlefield. Vital infrastructure, oil storage, pipelines and refineries are being hit nightly by Ukrainian missile and drone attacks, up to 1200 miles inside Russia.
Trump’s plans to decapitate the Iranian regime, encourage a popular uprising, deprive it of uranium and write down its arsenal of ballistic missiles and long-range drones has also been a failure.
Despite the huge expenditure of US and Israeli weaponry and ordnance – including the latest precision-guided missiles and bombs – Iran’s forces are estimated to have more than 70 per cent of the missile and drone stocks they had in February, before the war started.
There has also been no sign of a popular insurrection – if anything, the crackdowns and executions are worse than in the period immediately before Israel and America launched their attacks.
The Israelis managed to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several military commanders. They also killed Ali Larijani, who had directed the crackdown against the latest wave of domestic protests. But this did not amount to regime change in any meaningful sense.
The new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is the son of the old one, and is now running an even tougher dictatorship in an alliance with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the IRGC, is supported by Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC commander who is now the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, taking over the post from the deceased Larijani. Negotiations with the US, which seem to have gone nowhere, have been led by Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, a former IRGC commander and now speaker of Iran’s parliament.
On all four of Trump’s declared Iran war aims, the verdict must be qualified failure. The crisis has also thrown an extraordinary bonus to Iran that was barely contemplated before the end of February: the use of the Strait of Hormuz as a bargaining chip and source of perpetual diplomatic blackmail. Just this week, Tehran claimed that the Persian Gulf and the strait is “Iranian sovereign water.”
A striking aspect of the approach of both Trump and Putin is their seeming addiction to violence for its own sake.
The language of the Trump White House is the language of videogaming. “Kinetic,” “lethality” and “destruct” are Pentagon favourites. Pete Hegseth, the “Secretary of War”, has referred to “lethalitymaxxing” and has also talked about victims being “unalive”.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s new expansionist policy, told CNN recently: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by power.”
The kinetic might of the lethalitymaxxing new empire may sadly prevail.
Reviewing the botched Iran attack, veteran New York Times correspondent and commentator Lydia Polgreen recalled the bullying of Athens towards the islanders of Milos over two thousand years ago. “The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak accept what they have to accept,” the Athenians said.
Athens ultimately opened a war with Sparta, from which they would find no off-ramp.
Both Trump and Putin are looking for diversions. Trump’s threat of renewed bombing – and a possible land invasion – of Iran isn’t working.
Putin and his commander, Valery Gerasimov, have boasted that the summer campaign in Ukraine is going well – but satellite verification by the Institute for the Study of War shows stalemate and retreat across the front. For the first time in two years, Ukraine forces are advancing.
Focus is now switching to Estonia and Latvia in the Baltics – the real seat of Europe’s major drone and missile offensive on Russia, according to latest Kremlin fake news. Air-raid sirens against impending drone attacks have been sounding across Latvia this week.
Russian submarine activity across the North Atlantic is also intensifying. Cyberattacks and surveillance of vital underwater cables and pipelines continues.
Compared to Russia, the Trump diversions are cruder. An arrest warrant for Cuba’s elderly former president Raul Castro is likely to lead to an attack on Havana similar to the seizing of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The Caracas operation had been meticulously prepared for years – nothing of similar quality appears to have been drawn up for Havana.
Meanwhile, we hear that the US now plans to claim three large sovereign bases in Greenland to be complemented by rights to natural resources in perpetuity.
These are all worrying developments for the stability of a world already looking shaky.
Also, none of it can hide the fact that Russia is losing more soldiers than it can recruit in Ukraine, nor that Trump’s team is unable to win out over negotiators from Iran, a culture that invented chess.
The mess in Europe and the Middle East is widening, and it affects us all. European leaders, including those from the UK, will have to come up with a coherent stabilisation strategy for both regions.
Maybe we should like to lessons from the Melians in facing down Athens and its belief in blunt-force and self-interest. They argued for fair play and “just dealing” – though it didn’t save their island from the inevitable.
What is increasingly clear is that Putin and Trump can’t win the wars they launched to try to show the world their strength – and the rest of us will continue to suffer.
المصدر: iNews
