If Ukraine Becomes Another Forever War, Russia Is the Loser
Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian theorist of warfare, recognized that wars usually take on their own momentum, proceeding along trajectories that surprise the experts as well as the participants. This seems especially true of irregular conflicts, where so often the seemingly weak defeat the strong. Look at the recent military history of the United States, the country with the most formidable military establishment in history. Since the great victory of World War II, America has lost three grueling insurgency wars, fought to a draw in Korea, and achieved a dramatic and rapid victory in the First Gulf War that did little more than set the stage for the disaster of the Iraq War of 2003-2014. The Persian Gulf War looks like a hollow victory these days.
Russia, America’s archrival in the Cold War, was forced into an ignominious retreat in its war in Afghanistan by Islamic tribal warriors supported by the United States and Pakistan, and proved unable to defeat the Chechens in a brutal insurgency war in the mid-1990s.
A month into Russia’s stalled war of conquest in Ukraine, no military expert can say with any degree of certainty what the conflict will look like in even a month, let alone a year from now. One scenario that has been very much on the minds of the experts as well as the adversaries has it that Russia will succeed in occupying most of the country’s south and east, and that Volodymyr Zelensky’s government will take up residence in Lviv, from where it will orchestrate a protracted insurgency against a Russian-appointed administration and its military forces.