The great powers, as it turns out, don’t have as much power as they thought.
After taking office last year, the president has openly promoted a “might makes right” concept to reshape the international order around a sphere of influence of , a worldview not too dissimilar to his or her own. The future seemed to be shaped by a phrase often attributed to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
The saying, originally uttered by invading Athenian forces to the doomed inhabitants of Milos in 416 BC, featured prominently in the Canadian prime minister’s sensational speech at the Davos international conference in January, which coincided with the height of Europe’s standoff with Trump over his plans to seize the Danish island of Greenland.
However, it now appears that the weak are not as weak as many thought. And the powerful can’t just do whatever they want, either.
How Iran and Ukraine refute Thucydides’ saying
Despite the fact that the US military has used a significant part of its long-range munitions and neutralized much of the Iranian leadership, it has not been able to secure a strategic victory against a middle power like Iran. Tehran continues its blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. Its theocratic system is still in full control and retains the ability to fire missiles at Israel and the Gulf states, with the most recent exchanges of fire occurring this week.
Ukraine has also not collapsed. Trump cut off US aid more than a year ago and put diplomatic pressure on Kiev to cede the eastern Donetsk region as part of his deal with Russia at an August summit in Alaska. Nevertheless, Ukraine managed to change the course of the war against Russia, holding the front and inflicting increasingly painful blows on Russian soil.
These developments demonstrate how technological advances—such as drones and much cheaper precision missiles—have somewhat leveled the playing field between smaller states and the great powers that spend hundreds of billions of dollars on their armed forces. “Ukraine is in a much more stable position because of its technological superiority,” noted Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze. This closing of the global power gap has limited the range of results that military power alone can achieve. China is watching these developments closely as it considers whether it can or should seize Taiwan.
The conflicts are different, the results are common
The conflicts raging in the world are, of course, different from each other in many ways. Ukraine is a republic waging a war of self-defense against an unprovoked Russian invasion. Iran’s repressive regime has killed thousands of its citizens before US and Israeli bombing began in February, and for decades it has supported armed proxy organizations that destabilize the Middle East.
However, all these wars teach us roughly the same lesson, as Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview: “The kind of war we were used to, the kind of war that Russia had in mind in Ukraine — the invasion and occupation of a nation — we can’t even imagine anymore. Wars last as long as a nation has the stamina and will to resist. Conquering a state when its citizens are ready to fight is impossible, even when there is an imbalance of power, such as between Russia and Ukraine or even more so between the US and Iran. It is difficult even for Israel, which has not yet succeeded against Hamas in what is practically a single city.”
Regime change — the goal of Russia in Ukraine and, at least initially, of America in Iran — can no longer be achieved by military might alone in the modern era, General Ono Eiselsheim agreed.
“It’s almost impossible to conquer such states despite all the capabilities you have, whether it’s the US against Iran or Russia against Ukraine,” he said. “And if you don’t do it within the first two weeks, then you end up in a stalemate, which is very difficult to change. If you want to achieve something, you have to achieve it very quickly.”
The limits of great power power are nothing new. Both Washington and Moscow have been humiliated in foreign wars in the past. The US was forced to withdraw from Vietnam. Both were eventually defeated in Afghanistan. The US record in the occupation of Iraq is, to say the least, controversial.
The differences compared to the past
But in these cases, the major powers were forced to retreat because of protracted, painful armed insurgencies that followed conventional military victories and ultimately reduced domestic support for the war. This is no longer the case. Russian tanks have not been able to reach Kiev after more than four years of war, while Russian advances in the field have almost stopped. The US did not even attempt ground operations in Iran, knowing full well how many casualties they would suffer.
With the revolution in drone warfare resulting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Iran’s ability to develop a massive arsenal of long-range precision ballistic missiles, the US military’s enormous advantage in air power, intelligence and reconnaissance has been partially offset. This has made a conventional armored attack – similar to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 – against Tehran unthinkable. The swift removal from power of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January—which at the time seemed like a harbinger of developments, and strengthened Trump’s desire for Greenland and Iran—now looks like a rare exception rather than an indication of how the U.S. will assert its power in the future.
China is closely monitoring these developments. “Before the war in Ukraine, people believed that Russia is the second strongest military power in the world. Now the first and second largest military powers are engaged in wars that are not going well,” said retired colonel Zhu Bo, a former director at China’s Defense Ministry’s Center for International Security and now a senior researcher at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
China’s bottom line, he said, is that it should invite Russian experts to share their knowledge of modern drone warfare: “China is the biggest producer of drones, but we don’t really know how to use them militarily. Only countries that have used them on the battlefield can tell you how effective they are.”
Thucydides’ phrase, which has long been a tenet of the so-called realist school of international relations, is more an expression of crude fatalism than a guide to the world’s much more complex reality, as argued by Singaporean academic Bilahari Kaushikan, a former ambassador of his country to the United Nations. If this were true, he commented, a small country like Singapore would have been “swallowed up” by its neighbors long ago.
“All countries do have capacity to act and options, even if they are in difficult circumstances. Whether they have the prudence to recognize that ability and the ability to exercise it is another matter,” he said.
What’s up with Taiwan?
Unlike Ukraine and Iran, he noted, Taiwan may not have the will to exercise this ability to act, as China continues to successfully reduce its population’s resolve to resist a possible future military operation. Rejecting the government’s rearmament proposal, Taiwan’s opposition-majority parliament approved a much smaller $25 billion special defense spending package in May, cutting funding for domestically designed drones and asymmetric warfare capabilities, among other things. The new opposition leader, Zheng Li-Wun, has met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and has adopted a more conciliatory stance towards Beijing.
“I tell my Taiwanese friends — without much success — that they have drawn the wrong conclusions from Ukraine,” Kausican said. “The lesson is not that democracies help other democracies. The lesson is that Ukrainians helped themselves first, and then others were willing to help them.”
The Philippines is also at loggerheads with Beijing and could face a similar problem of will to resist in the event of war. “Our populations have been cut off from the reality of the conflict. What is being taught is a passive, Gandhian culture of peace,” Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said. “But for that to exist, there must be a strong defense to ensure a political environment that guarantees the safety of those who want to be nonviolent.”
The Carney speech and the lesson from Milos
In his Davos speech, Carney — whose country is sometimes referred to by Trump as a future 51st state — argued that middle powers like Canada have no choice but to work together to avoid “subjugation” to global rulers. Since then, European countries, Asian republics and Canada have strengthened their military, economic and defense ties, in part to reduce their dependence on the US and China.
“If they are united, the middle powers can counterbalance the great powers,” argued the French political scientist Nicolas Tenzer. “None of them can do it alone, but together they can enforce decisions, either militarily or through international law. There is room for action — although that doesn’t mean it will be easy.”
History is a guide to the dangers of great power hubris. In 416 BC, their refusal to submit to Athens, the superpower of antiquity, ended badly for the Melians. All the men, as Thucydides notes, were slaughtered and the women and children enslaved. However, in the end, this imperialist arrogance backfired on Athens: it lost the wider war for dominance in Greece.
