Gideon Rose

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Ukrainian soldiers, Blahodatne, Ukraine, June 2023. 68th Separate Hunting Brigade 'Oleksy Dovbusha' / Reuters

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In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an attempt to conquer the country and erase the independence it had gained after the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades earlier. Given the vast disparities in size and strength between the belligerents, almost nobody gave the defenders much of a chance. Pessimists thought Kyiv would succumb in days or weeks. Optimists thought it might take months. Few believed Ukraine could ever beat back its attacker.

“A satisfying victory is likely out of reach”, wrote the Russia experts Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon in Foreign Affairs a month after the invasion began. “Ukraine and its Western backers are in no position to defeat Russia on any reasonable timescale”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian recruits in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, October 2022. Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded to recent military setbacks with defiance. After Ukrainian military successes this fall, Putin has ordered the hasty mobilization of several hundred thousand more troops, orchestrated sham referendums in occupied areas to formally incorporate them into Russia, issued increasingly explicit nuclear threats, and launched a wave of missile strikes across Ukraine. Many attribute this behavior to uniquely terrifying characteristics of Putin and his regime and argue that the West should force Ukraine to give in, lest the war escalate to terrifying new levels of carnage and destruction.

That would be a mistake. Early in the war, Moscow’s effort was plagued by ignorance, overconfidence, and bad planning.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pro-Russian troops near Mariupol, Ukraine, April 2022. Chingis Kondarov / Reuters

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Early analyses of the war in Ukraine emphasized several unique, case-specific factors such as the region’s complex history, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s complex psychology, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s charismatic leadership. The conflict seemed shockingly new and scarily unpredictable, the end of one era and the start of another, with contours yet unknown.

As the fighting grinds on, however, the war is looking more familiar and increasingly resembles many other conflicts over the last seven decades. This suggests that general, structural features of the situation are imposing themselves on the belligerents, guiding their choices into surprisingly well-worn grooves. Ukraine, in short, is following the pattern of limited war in the nuclear age, echoing a script written in Korea and copied many times since.…  Seguir leyendo »

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With his death, the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is once again in the news. Detractors rage about his supply of fabricated intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly tricked Washington into war. Supporters claim he was a heroic dissident who was never given the chance to transform his troubled country into paradise.

Both miss the real story, which is that Mr. Chalabi was less a cause of the Iraq war than a convenient enabler of it. He was an answer to America’s problems, not Iraq’s, and if he had never existed, his backers would probably have conjured up a replacement to serve the same function.…  Seguir leyendo »