Khaberni - The most prominent feature of the 21st century so far is not the rise of a particular power or the collapse of an international system, but rather the diminishing effectiveness of war as a decisive tool for achieving political goals, as from Ukraine to Iraq to Afghanistan a repeated scenario unfolds; major powers possessing overwhelming military superiority, yet failing to translate this superiority into sustainable political victory.
This sentence nearly summarizes the article by writer Janan Ganesh in his column in the Financial Times, as it starts with the symbolism of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, where large American military equipment, which failed to decide the Vietnam War, is displayed, sending a clear implicit message that "technological power alone is not enough".
The writer believes that one day Kyiv might establish a similar museum for the Russian equipment that failed to subjugate Ukraine, and the Taliban might display the arsenal of equipment left by the United States after their withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The writer wonders when was the last clear land victory for a major country? Pointing to the Gulf War in 1991, while reminding us that it was largely decided by air power, subsequent wars were characterized by failure or ambiguous results.
Even the non-Western powers - as Ganesh says - were no luckier, where the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, Russia finds itself stuck in Ukraine, and France ended its mission in the African Sahel without a decisive achievement.
The writer confirms that this pattern is not limited to a particular political system, including both democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, as well as wars against states and non-state groups, meaning that what was a shocking exception in the Vietnam War has now become more the rule, as the writer sees it.
Higher Costs and Lesser Outcomes
Although limited airstrikes may achieve tactical goals - as happened in Serbia or in the face of the Islamic State organization - they often fail to manage the aftermath of regime change, as was the case in Libya, where the power may defeat the opponent but it does not build a stable alternative system in its place.
According to Ganesh, reasons for the decline in the effectiveness of war are mainly two:
Firstly, the proliferation of tools of violence, where military superiority is no longer exclusive to the large states because drones, unconventional warfare, and autonomous systems, give smaller entities an asymmetrical deterrence capability, making weak states capable of adopting a "porcupine strategy," making the cost of invading them high enough to deter the aggressor.
Secondly, nuclear deterrence that restricts the major powers with the fear of escalation, thereby preventing them from going to the fullest extent to achieve victory even in non-nuclear conflicts, because the specter of a broader confrontation remains present and imposes a ceiling on military decisiveness.
The article warns against rushing to conclude that the world is automatically moving towards peace, since while the declining utility of war logically could deter states from engaging in it when they see it entails exorbitant costs compared to meager gains, the repeated military frustrations could lead to eroding public trust in the military within democracies.
The writer recalls the warning of American President Dwight Eisenhower of the military establishment's influence on civilian life, comparing the past and present, where the problem is no longer the military's overreach but the alienation of civil society from them due to accumulating failures, turning the old saying "no victors in war" from a moral statement into a realistic description of an era where the capability of armed force to produce a clear victory diminishes.
The writer concludes that the world may be on the brink of a profound historical shift, in which war no longer remains the decisive tool it was in the 20th century, although at the same time it does not disappear, but becomes more costly and less effective in achieving the anticipated outcomes, opening the door to an international system characterized by ongoing struggle rather than final decisiveness.
