The United States and Russia, despite commanding military budgets that dwarf those of their adversaries, have been unable to translate conventional superiority into strategic victories against Iran and Ukraine, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis based on interviews with senior defense officials and foreign policy experts.
The pattern marks a departure from earlier eras where great powers could impose their will through force of arms. In the current conflicts, technological advances — particularly the proliferation of drones and cheap precision missiles — have partially offset the advantages of larger militaries, officials said.
Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže said Ukraine was on “a much more solid footing because of the technological superiority that they’ve got,” referring to Kyiv’s use of drones and other systems to hold off Russian forces and strike deep inside Russian territory. Ukraine has managed to turn the tide of the war since the Trump administration cut off American aid more than a year ago and pressed Kyiv to surrender the eastern Donetsk region, according to the Journal’s reporting.
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said the conflicts carry a similar lesson: “The kind of war to which we were used, the kind of war that Russia had in mind in Ukraine — to invade and occupy a nation — is no longer conceivable,” he told the Journal. “Conquering a nation when its citizens are ready to fight is impossible even when there is disparity in strength, as there was between Russia and Ukraine, or even more so between the U.S. and Iran.”
Gen. Onno Eichelsheim, the Netherlands’ chief of defense, said regime change — Russia’s goal in Ukraine and initially America’s goal in Iran — can no longer be achieved by force of arms alone. “It is almost impossible to conquer such nations with all the capability that you have, be it the U.S. against Iran or Russia against Ukraine,” Eichelsheim said. He added that if a military does not succeed within the first two weeks, it faces a “stalemate position, which is very hard to break through.”
The U.S. military has deployed significant firepower against Iran since February, including strikes that killed large portions of the Iranian leadership. Yet Tehran continues to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, its theocratic system remains in control, and it maintains the ability to fire missiles at Israel and Gulf states, according to the Journal. The U.S. did not attempt ground operations in Iran, in part due to the expected casualty levels.
China is paying close attention to these conflicts as it considers its own options regarding Taiwan. Retired Senior Col. Zhou Bo, a former director at the Center for Security Cooperation in China’s Ministry of Defense, told the Journal that before the Ukraine war, “people believed that Russia is the world’s second-strongest military. Now the strongest and the second-strongest militaries are all involved in wars, and these wars aren’t going that smoothly.”
Zhou argued that China’s main takeaway should be to learn from Russian and Ukrainian experience in drone warfare. “China is the largest producer of drones, but we don’t know how to use them, militarily, really,” he said.
Taiwan’s opposition-dominated parliament in May passed a reduced $25 billion military spending package that cut funding for domestically designed drone and asymmetric-warfare capabilities, signaling a potential shift in the island’s willingness to prepare for conflict. The new opposition leader, Cheng Li-wun, has visited Chinese President Xi Jinping and adopted a more conciliatory posture.
Singaporean academic Bilahari Kausikan, a former ambassador to the United Nations, said Taiwan may be drawing the wrong lesson from Ukraine. “The lesson is not that democracies help other democracies,” he said. “The lesson is that Ukrainians helped themselves, and other people were then willing to aid them.”
The Philippines Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. expressed concern that his own country’s population has been “so shielded from the reality of conflict” that it lacks the determination to fight if a dispute with Beijing over territorial claims escalates.
The limits of great-power capability are prompting middle powers to strengthen cooperation. In a January speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued that countries like Canada must cooperate to avoid “subordination” to global hegemons. French political scientist Nicolas Tenzer said that if united, middle powers “can counter the great powers,” through military, economic, and legal means. “None of them can do it alone, but together they have ways of imposing decisions,” Tenzer said.