The Dangerous Illusion of a Short War
From Ukraine to Iran, leaders keep mistaking military power for strategic success. The conflicts they cannot end threaten to be worse than the “forever wars” they vowed to avoid. A commentary by Nathalie Tocci.
We know how wars begin, but not how they end. From the forgotten lessons of September 11 and the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the wars in the Middle East, history is not repeating itself. It is getting worse.
Sometimes, events can be anticipated. When one country, Russia, deploys 200,000 troops on the border of another, Ukraine, an invasion is anything but unforeseeable, although far too many refused to see it coming.
Likewise, when a superpower, the United States, moves an aircraft carrier from the Pacific to the Gulf, peace talks are likely to be a façade, and the die may already have been cast for a military attack on Iran.
Rewind a quarter of a century: when al-Qaeda attacked America on September 11 2001, a US military response was inevitable. An Israeli military response in the Gaza Strip was equally inevitable 22 years later, following the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023.
But while the beginning of a war can be predicted, or is at least foreseeable, the same cannot be said of its course, let alone its end.
After the September 11 attacks, the United States did not respond immediately: it spent weeks building international consensus.
Donald Trump does not like to recall this, but the only time Nato’s Article 5 was invoked, it was Washington that asked its allies for help, which they did not hesitate to provide.
That consensus subsequently unravelled when the war in Afghanistan was followed by the war in Iraq, justified by the lie about weapons of mass destruction. Initially, however, US action was far more multilateral and grounded in consensus than is remembered today.
Israel’s response to October 7 was very different. Joe Biden’s warning went unheeded. One of the most sincerely, if not blindly, pro-Israel US presidents, he urged Israel not to repeat America’s mistakes in the war on terror.
In Iraq, America made the mistake of unilateralism, launching an illegal invasion without the support of many allies: a war that fractured both the transatlantic relationship and Europe itself.
America committed war crimes, with images of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib etched into the memory of an entire generation, dealing a devastating blow to its international standing.
Finally, it confused short-term operational results with strategic outcomes: the former were impressive, given America’s unrivalled military capabilities; the latter were catastrophic.
Israel has disregarded these lessons, becoming increasingly isolated and convinced, in defiance of history, that it can survive in the long term as a small Sparta in the Middle East.
Many regard Israel as guilty of genocide in Gaza, a finding the International Court of Justice may eventually reach as well. It invades, razes and occupies, yet fails to achieve its stated objectives: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime are still there.
Israel is not alone in refusing to listen. Vladimir Putin has learnt nothing either. Convinced that he would win the war in Ukraine within days, he now finds himself, almost five years later, with a little more Ukrainian territory but more than 1.5 million Russian soldiers killed or wounded.
Perhaps, for Putin, this is no bad thing: a long war was not his initial intention, but the continuation of the conflict, not only against Ukraine but against Europe, has become the cornerstone of his repressive regime.
His regime might survive the end of the hot phase of the war in Ukraine by turning into a gigantic North Korea. But it would not survive a genuine end to the war against Europe, on which its very existence now depends.
Most surprising, however, is that America itself refuses to heed its own lessons. When Washington embarked on the war in Vietnam, it did not believe it would become so long and bloody.
The US evacuation from Saigon in 1975 was echoed 46 years later in the flight from Kabul, abandoned to the Taliban.
After that humiliation, it seemed that the lesson had at least been learnt once and for all: we know how wars begin, but not how they end, and they can rarely be brought to a swift conclusion with a wave of a magic wand. Opposition to “forever wars” has been a cornerstone of MAGA, embodied by Trump.
The war against Iran was supposed to be different: a swift, powerful blow, and the regime would implode.
For a while, some believed it, financial markets foremost among them, which partly explains why oil prices remained relatively contained.
As the months passed, we began to take Trump’s announcements of an imminent end to the war with a pinch of salt.
Then he stopped believing them himself. He now says the war in the Middle East will end after the midterm elections. It may not. When America attacked first Afghanistan and then Iraq, it did not expect to remain militarily entangled for 20 years.
Today, likewise, we refuse to see that the wars in Europe and the Middle East do not merely bear the tragic resemblance of the forever wars of the past. They are far worse.
A previous version of this article was published by the Italian daily La Stampa
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
