Three of the world's most powerful militaries are simultaneously stuck in conflicts they cannot win.
The three failing wars — and what each one proves:
- Russia invaded Ukraine and expected victory in days and got years of war, catastrophic casualties, massive equipment losses, and an economy permanently distorted, with Ukraine still undefeated.
- The USA attacked Iran to supposedly eliminate its nuclear capability on 28 February 2026; three months later, Iran's government is intact, its military is intact, its population has not surrendered, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
- Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, genocide and ethnic cleansing have happened, and yet Hamas is not destroyed, there is no functioning administration, and there is no peace, nor any sign of when it might be achieved.
What the pattern tells us:
- Military superiority no longer translates into political victory.
- The post-war military-industrial complex that was built on the assumption that overwhelming force would produce military resolutions to conflict is failing in real time.
- Every one of these conflicts has increased instability, and not reducing it.
- The UK is now committed to spending 3% of GDP on defence, with no coherent explanation of what political outcomes that spending is supposed to achieve.
What actually works and what the UK should be promoting is something quite different:
- Diplomacy, international law, and multilateral institutions have delivered durable peace where military force has not.
- The post-war European settlement, built on economic integration and institution building, not rearmament, is the model that worked
- Patient negotiation and the politics of care are not weaknesses; they are now the only approaches to conflict resolution with an evidence base.
The UK is sleepwalking into a 3% GDP defence commitment at the precise moment three superpower militaries are demonstrating that military spending does not win wars. This video asks the question Westminster refuses to ask: what is it actually for?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
UK politics is distracting us right now, but the world beyond our borders is not waiting for us to catch up, and we should be paying attention still.
And maybe the biggest issue we should be looking at is the fact that three major military powers are stuck in conflicts right now, and they cannot win them. That fact carries enormous lessons for all of us. But those lessons are being ignored by the people making decisions right now. This video is about what those lessons actually are.
Russia, the United States and Israel are all trapped in military impasses at this moment. None of them can convert their military superiority into political victory. And I'm suggesting that this is not a coincidence; it is a pattern.
The pattern is consistent, repeated, and damning. At its most basic level, the military-industrial complex of the post-war era is failing. It promised to impose power by threat, and now its threat is shown to be hollow, and almost nobody in mainstream politics is drawing the obvious conclusions from that.
Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. He expected a rapid victory. Russian doctrine, propaganda and intelligence all assumed that Ukraine would collapse quickly. More than four years later, Ukraine has not been defeated. It has lost some territory, but the war is now a stalemate. And in the meantime, Russia has suffered catastrophic casualties and equipment losses. Its economy is becoming totally distorted by a permanent war footing, with this war now having lasted longer than the Second World War did with regard to Russia, and the outcome, at enormous human cost, remains a stalemate, and Russia increasingly looks to be on the back foot.
Trump launched his war on Iran on 28th February this year, 2026. The stated objective, as much as there ever was one, was to eliminate Iran's nuclear capability. Nearly three months later, there is no surrender, no settlement, and no stable outcome, and no sign that anything of that sort will be achieved in the foreseeable future.
Iran's government remains intact despite all the casualties imposed upon it by Israel and the USA. Its military is not broken and still appears to be well equipped, and its population has not capitulated.
Military strikes have produced danger and uncertainty; there's no doubt about that, but there has been no resolution. For Trump, the situation in the Gulf is now worse than when he started. When he started, the Strait of Hormuz was open; now it isn't, and the world is in crisis as a consequence.
And then let's look at Israel. Israel launched its Gaza offensive in October 2023 after the attack by Hamas on its territory, and it did so with overwhelming force. By May 2026, it has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, has committed a genocide and an ethnic cleansing, but Hamas has not been destroyed as a political or military force, and there is no functioning administration in Gaza to replace it.
That's a critical point. There is no peace, no security, and no credible end state, whatever Trump, Tony Blair, and anybody else might like to say. Military superiority has produced trouble in Gaza, but it has not produced a resolution, and yet again, there is none in sight.
What does it mean then when the most powerful military states cannot win wars anymore?
Is the question that should be dominating political debate right now, but it isn't, and yet the answer has profound implications for how we organise our security.
It challenges all the assumptions that have driven Western policy for decades. Those assumptions are now demonstrably and repeatedly wrong. That model of military power assumes conventional superiority would produce geopolitical control, and yet it isn't. The evidence of that is now overwhelming.
You can destroy infrastructure and still not subdue a population. That is what we have now learned.
You can launch precision strikes and still not achieve your political objectives, even if you can take out a head of state.
Vietnam provided us with lessons like this more than 50 years ago. I remember it, and Afghanistan has done so over many years since then. Continuing not to learn now is a choice and not an oversight.
And yet, despite all this, the UK is committed to raising defence spending at this time, hoping to increase it to 3% of GDP without ever explaining why that is a magic number or what goal will be achieved as a result.
At the same time, Germany is re-arming, and Europe's entire political conversation has shifted towards defence expenditure, but nobody knows why or what they're going to buy.
The premise is that more military capacity will produce more security, and yet that premise is exactly what the evidence of recent decades completely refutes. Those demanding more spending owe us a clear answer, is my point. How precisely does this spending produce the outcomes being promised when the evidence says it can't?
If military force cannot deliver political outcomes, the point I'm now making is that we need to look for other solutions. Doing so is practical and not soft-headed.
Diplomacy, international law and multilateral institutions, as well as patient negotiations, have actually produced peace in recent decades.
The post-war European settlement was built on economic integration. It was built on institution building, and it was built upon sustained political work. The evidence that it worked is there for all to see. We have moved away from military solutions to disputes inside Europe, and that model has delivered decades of stability. The EU is, in many ways, the extraordinary everyday legacy of that for all its faults; and yes, it's got them.
So what we have are two things. Evidence of models that work, which are peaceful, and evidence of models that don't work, which are violent. But despite that, calling for more weapon spending is the easy course of action. It is the default political move still. It is what the political class does when it has no idea what else to do, but it won't work because it hasn't worked.
In this situation, then, real courage would represent calling for fundamentally different ways of organising the world. The current approach is failing visibly, repeatedly, at catastrophic human cost; we should be honest about that.
But let's also be clear, being stuck is not only a crisis, it is also an opening. Russia, America, Israel, and maybe China, let's not forget them; they might also reach an impasse if they tried to do something stupid, are not omnipotent then, whatever their rhetoric suggests. Their failure to win creates space for a different kind of politics. The argument for diplomacy and multilateral solutions now has the evidence behind it, and they are, of course, key to our politics of care.
I keep on talking about care, but I mean that it's important. What we are seeing is that the lack of care in the military sphere and a belief in the power of violence is failing us. I'm now saying it's time to believe in people, in talk, in negotiation and peace, and that way we could deliver a politics that really works and a politics that really cares.
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Maybe we need 3% defence spending to defend against the USA?
The best way to deal with modern conflicts is through diplomacy and cooperation is what I would say.
Um, where do I start…..
The Countries on Russia’s border – including the UK face a fairly straightforward conventional military threat.
The capacity to be able to ‘deter and prevent’ things like Russian ships interfering with cables and pipelines or a conventional military assault has some logic.
Where things do fall down though is dealing with a different culture on its home patch. Nations may hate the regime they live under but hate outside interference more and as happened in Vietnam wont stop fighting an invader.
There are clearly major issues about the competence of the Russian armed forces and I suggest some doubts about the US as well. Also I suggest that there is a limit to the loss’s that all three nations are willing to suffer unlike in two World Wars
John, there might be a conventional threat from Russia to those countries bordering it, although all in NATO (excepting of course Ukraine). Definitely not a conventional threat to the UK – a trivial look at any atlas will tell you that. Where are the invasion barges? How will they cross intensely hostile waters to land on our beaches, and then keep them supplied? It is also suggested that our Constant At Sea deterrence checks if BBC Radio 4 is still broadcasting, and if not opens the famous PM letter, so if Russia cuts off our energy…
As Richard points out, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, a country much smaller with fewer resources.
Even if you want to believe there is a conventional threat, you then need to come up with a reason why Russia would want to invade our sceptred isles? In case you are not following the news, we don’t really produce much, we have a bit of coal, oil and gas left but compared to the needs of a large country like Russia, rather trivial amounts, and most of our “wealth” seems to be in the City of London in paper and electronic form, which would instantly disappear if Russia captured the capital. Maybe Putin covets Buck House, and the crown jewels?
It is often discounted in the MSM, but a look at the history of WW2 (Operation Barbarossa) shows how important the chunk of land that is now Ukraine would be for an invader to already start from. Paranoid history buff Putin, I suggest, can well imagine how his ancestors would have fared if Germany could have started from the Eastern border of Ukraine. And there are significant material resources and agricultural land in Ukraine to covet indeed.
Ukraine has smaller resources but its successful resistance is not just due to their own resources. The West had given almost $120 billion to Ukraine.
That’s worrying! Has anyone told the Royal Navy that the Radio 4 Long Wave service is being shut down on June 27th this year?
Hi Richard, it seem to be increasingly obvious that the conflict in ideas, largely communism v capitalism, is at a critical point in history. Since before the world wars the American model has dominated but like all great empires of the past they exhausts themselves and collapse, often through greed. The Chinese have developed a hybrid model controlled by the communist party but using both effective socialist ideas, for the good of it’s people, and an economic model of capitalism for growth. It has surpassed the west massively over the last few decades on both counts. We are witnessing the new model emerging from Chinese success at home being adopted by the Asian countries. In the past military power succeeded largely through it’s propaganda machine, America has not really won any of it wars, it no longer causes the fear it once had. Multipolar cooperation is needed to replace monopolar dominance. We can only hope the Americans decide to take part in this new world model rather than escalate aggressive militarily to hold on to their failing dominance.
The Chinese model is also destructive.
We need something else altogether.
Could you enlarge on this a bit please. The Chinese have taken vast numbers out of poverty in a very short time and are evolving in how they change their system, they seem not to be moving towards war but rather negotiations. NATO and America are currently in wars and militarising further against Russia while attempting, and failing to control the world’s energy. Realistically the continued threat is from the western powers not China. And our own Neoliberal system is failing all of its citizens. I don’t like authoritarianism in any form but given time and negotiated treaties perhaps we can learn something from china for the benefit of us all?
Here is a poll where I wanted to vote for “all of the above”. Many recent polls have been like this, where the alternatives overlap.
The destruction of property – homes, factories, schools, business premises … in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia …
Nature – our environment is so vulnerable. It needs nurture and care.
People’s life’s work. Our children’s future – destroyed, damaged curtailed. ‘Enemy’ nations suffer … but so do the aggressors and so many others.
How do the war-mongers separate themselves from the realities?
With greed
And believing their own propaganda. Hollywood and US popular culture has played such an enormous role seeping into the lives of most people in the whole world keeping populations in thrall to glamour of wealth. Alongside the Mafia, both literal and as a model of coercion of those who stray from the path of ‘normal’ and conformity.
Unfortunately, it’s very evident in talking to some people locally about the coming oil shock e.g. “The Americans will open the Strait of Hormuz and sort it all out.” “They use any excuse to put up prices.”
What these conflicts are telling us is that, at least currently, offensive military operations don’t work. I’m afraid that, given the world as it is, we do need to spend quite a lot on defence. But, as you have already argued, it needs to be a comprehensive defence strategy that protects all our essential services, health, supply chains, communications etc, and not just the military stuff (and we’ve learned that much of this can be low cost, not high tech). Doing this can also give us a better peacetime way of life, if we think it through properly.
Your thesis underlines the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare. Defence spending simply fuels the arms trade in very expensive weapons which can be defeated by cheaper ones imposing an economic cost that the aggressor cannot bear.
I am struck by the analogy with extreme wealth inequality in society where poor people have little to lose by disrupting the lives of the rich at considerable cost to them. That the state seems to side with the rich and wages lawfare on the poor is one consequence. Eventually, though, the poor could win or achieve an uneasy truce. In the meantime they can certainly defend themselves.
The great sadness of all this is the waste. The waste of human lives, the waste of effort in building yet more destructive devices and the waste of all those resources; what could they have been used for instead?
It is clear that in a world granting scarcely regulated power to the likes of Putin, Trump and Xi that we have failed as a human race organisationally. It is not about waiting for an Attlee or and FDR, we need to figure out how to organise ourselves to ensure these grotesque leaders never again darken our doors.
We continue to discuss politics largely within our existing framework of our existing societies. Leaders may be democratically elected, dictators or somewhere in between, but ultimately our government structures of ministers and bureaucrats within a hierarchy leading to an elite, or single leader, are universal. I would like to consider more radical alternatives, because for me, this just doesn’t work.
I have looked at things like direct democracy and even some anarchistic ideas, but I have yet to find anything compelling. I’m open to ideas, because our current system is not delivering for us.
I think we need to unpick what we really mean or want to achieve when we refer to military, defense and even war.
Some military capability is able to project power. For example, an aircraft carrier force can turn up somewhere and impose a lot of destruction somewhere. It is unlikely to be able to last a long time or “secure territory”. It needs a supply chain.
If a country want to secure its borders against an invading army (defend itself), we could argue that the Finnish model is effective and not costly. We design robust infrastructure which can become safe shelters against attack when required, with a well motivated, resourced and educated population that could cause havoc / not worth it to an unwelcome occupying force. Works better when people people have a vested interest in their society.
It’s worked where the status quo seems better than the invader. Defending for any length of time requires a diverse economy with an ability to develop and produce food and defensive materials. Flexible productive capacity, access to resources. Ideally home grown.
Securing territory is much harder. An occupying force is difficult to sustain. “Taking” territory is v much harder than creating rubble (even in Gaza).
Any and all of the above need an end point … Some agreement to stop the pain, destruction and cost of aggression. The agreements must be sustainable / enforceable / not worth breaking with another cycle of chaos.
Discussion about 1.67834%, or 5.2367% seem very much to miss the point.
Security seems broader still. Start with citizens who have an interest in society in the first place.
It was a pre WWII pacifist who suggested that if the old men who declared war were required to immediately commit suicide then all wars would cease.
The positive of all this is that it is evidence that an aggressor will find it hard to win even with vast military imbalance.
Note that this might get a response that Hamas attacked the festival and really triggered the situation with Israel, but by this point Israel has become the aggressor. They had support in their initial response, but something akin to ‘if you kill one of ours we will kill 50 of yours’ inherently looks excessive.
The US had hoped that it could bombard its way to a quick victory, and instead demonstrated that it’s apparent success in Venezuela was not a template for future activities, but rather a combination of luck, unusual willingness of remaining leadership to bend the knee, much greater relative military and economic weakness, the lack of international recognition of the existing leadership, and the world not at that point being ready for a major power suddenly invading another country. Even Cuba looks less likely to be able to be cowed as easily.
Sun Tzu said of military negotiation ‘Speak quietly. Whilst wielding a big stick’. The reason Neville Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler didn’t succeed was that he spoke quietly whilst wielding an umbrella.
If there is one lesson to be learnt from this observation, it is that after all the ultimate deterrent turns out to be be the ultimate sabre rattle.
I’m afraid you’re right. It appears that Trump and Xi have recently agreed to disagree and try to avoid too much future sabre rattling on the understanding that they both know that unleashing said sabre is suicide for either of them. Like it or not, ultimate deterrence is MAD and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
I personally canot think of a war that did not without negotiation.
Let’s cut out the middle men if future disputes arise.
There is absolutely nothing new here. Military might has never guaranteed political outcomes.
Just look at Edward I and Henry VIII (amongst others), who, despite vast military dominance, were never able to subdue Scotland politically. The union came about due to non-violent measures in the end (albeit with the threat of violence in the background).
I am sorry – but your claim is just wrong
Of course there is something new here – if assumptions have to change there is somethimg new happening – don’t pretend otherwise
But it is possible for assumptions to be wrong in the first place, is it not?
As you have amply demonstrated with regard to MMT & neoliberalism, it is possible for people to make the wrong assumptions.
WW2 is an example of a conflict where, in the main, victory was achieved through military might, resulting in the total surrender and occupation of the defeated parties. It is not difficult to see how, particularly for those who have grown up in its shadow, this has become the textbook example of how war works, such that many other examples (as cited by you above) become less obvious.
I’m not disputing that the mindsets & assumptions need to change, just that we have collectively learnt the wrong lessons and need to look at more evidence. Surely it can be more persuasive in changing minds if we can also cite lessons from further back in history.
My point is that there is no seismic shift in human civilisation here. The evidence has been there all along, but we have been led away from it by those who stand to make money. Plus ça change….
I am not sure what you are saying, except you appear to be agreeing with me after all.