Politics
While Xi Jinping gets smart, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin show the world what stupid power can do
Notice
The wars in Ukraine and Iran are different in many ways, but they are essentially united. Not just because both are illegal. But because both are wars of pride.
Vladimir Putin and then Donald Trump did not launch their invasions because there was a real threat to their nations. Putin had to invent “Nazis” running Ukraine to make it seem scary. He said Ukraine had “gone so far as to aspire to acquire nuclear weapons”, knowing full well that kyiv had returned all its nuclear weapons to Russia in the 1990s under the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for a supposed security guarantee from Moscow.
As for Iran’s alleged nuclear threat against America, the International Atomic Energy Agency declared early March that “there is no evidence that Iran built a nuclear bomb.” Trump’s own intelligence chief agreed.
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in late March written testimony to the Senate – which she refused to read aloud for fear of angering her boss – that “as a result of Operation Midnight Hammer” last June, “Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was destroyed. There has been (sic) no effort since then to attempt to rebuild its enrichment capacity.”
Putin and Trump have launched these wars of choice, full of the hubris, hubris and hubris that the ancient Greeks so feared as harbingers of disaster.
We shouldn’t be too shocked. Remember Putin posing shirtless on horseback in the mountains? And Trump’s boast that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any votes? And both post images of themselves grappling with opponents on the ground.
“How much stupider will it get?” » Hillary Clinton wanted to know early last year. Trump, unable to learn from Putin’s disastrous misjudgment in Ukraine, has now given the world a solid clue. Both men expected their wars to end within days or weeks.
They declared maximalist demands from the start of their wars. Putin insisted on “denazification,” the total disarmament of kyiv and the installation of a neutral government. Trump stipulated an “unconditional surrender” from Tehran.
Instead, they are humiliated by much smaller nations. Their grand visions of crushing victory turned out to be fantasy. In reality, they are at an impasse. Neither Russia nor the United States seems capable of winning, but they seem unable to escape. These great powers are reminiscent of the impetuous rabbit in the famous African-American popular story of the tar baby published in 1881.
In the story told by fictional narrator Uncle Remus, the fox decides to trap the rabbit by dressing a piece of pine tar with clothing. B’rer Rabbit talks to the tar-baby and gets offended when he doesn’t respond. The rabbit hits him, but discovers that his paw is firmly stuck to the tar. The more he fights it, the more he gets entangled.
Both Putin and Trump bragged about their military might, and in each case they had plenty to brag about. Each vastly outnumbers its victim in terms of firepower. But their fetishization of armed force over strategy was a costly mistake.
In 2009, well before the current wars began, two British psychiatrists wrote an influential article postulating something called “Pride syndrome: an acquired personality disorder?” The subtitle was “A study of American presidents and British prime ministers over the past 100 years.” This also served as a premonition.
David Owen and Jonathan Davidson described its characteristics as “impetuosity, a refusal to listen or follow advice, and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness, and frequent inattention to detail predominate. This can result in disastrous leadership and cause large-scale damage.”
Deafness to expert advice is a characteristic of both wars. Putin refused to listen to his military strategists. The guardian At the start of the war, this headline read: “Putin involved in war “at colonel or brigadier level,” Western sources say. » In other words, micromanagement.
Around the same time, Britain’s Royal United Services Institute pointed out that Putin had invaded despite “the existence of warnings from senior army officers before the invasion.”
As for Trump, he sidelined his top military officer, Gen. Dan Caine, when he repeatedly warned the president about the risk of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Experts like to classify national power into different types: hard power, soft power, sharp power, smart power. These two presidents provide us with case studies in stupid power. It’s like a bag of hammers. No amount of power can succeed if misused.
It is striking that Trump expressed admiration for China’s strategic genius. “Isn’t it amazing,” he told a British interlocutor during his first presidency, “they became so powerful without firing a single shot.”
Even today, as Russia and the United States pay a high price for their clumsy warmongering, China continues to quietly seize its neighbors’ maritime territories without a single shot being fired.
Xi Jinping’s current goal is to build an artificial island at Antelope Reef, also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan, in the Paracel island group. The goal is to turn it into a military base, as it has done with other reefs in the South China Sea, straddling the world’s most valuable trade artery.
He is building a low-key, low-cost empire while Putin and Trump bleed lives, money, weapons, credibility and national economic vitality to achieve, so far, very little lasting value.
Trump sees Xi’s success and appreciates it, but seems unable to learn from it. Putin too.
Much has been written about how the two wars illustrate the centrality of rapid technological adaptation. The lesson of endurance is much neglected. The short, sharp wars of the 21st century exist primarily in the imaginations of impatient warmongers, not on the battlefields.
“Even if the early phases of a high-intensity conflict are critical, they are rarely decisive,” writes French-British academic Iskander Rehman in his 2023 monograph: Extension planning.
“Equal, if not greater, attention should therefore be given to the study of… the outcome of a grueling marathon rather than an intense opening sprint. » Or, preferably, avoid war altogether.
Peter Hartcher is both an international and political editor. His political column appears on Saturdays.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Log in by email.From our partners
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