Deadlocked wars: How major powers misread the regions they attacked
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, both resist the idea that ostensibly weaker powers fought them to a stalemate, with the two leaders leaning on negotiations to win the capitulation that they failed to secure in battle.
Iran and Ukraine have pushed back robustly against this “might makes right” mentality, with top officials adopting an even more defiant tone in recent days.
In an open letter to Putin this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy derided Putin for clinging to power as he aged. “You did not expect full-scale resistance from Ukraine, and you did not foresee that things would go this far,” Zelenskyy wrote.
After Iran unleashed a missile barrage against Israel last week in retaliation for attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and top negotiator, threatened more. “Until there is a sincere commitment to restoring trust, Iran’s response will not change,” he wrote on the social platform X.
Their recalcitrance reflects the reality of two wars in stasis, with a profound lack of trust all around stymieing progress.
Talks to find peace in Ukraine hit an impasse right before the Iran war started, with Ukraine demanding more robust security guarantees for ceding territory than Russia was willing to accept. Diplomacy has mostly produced prisoner swaps between the sides. The United States, which once tried to play the main mediator, has shifted its focus to Iran.
U.S. and Iranian officials now say a peace deal with Iran could be at hand. But it appears that it will initially consist of a framework for negotiations that will push the thorniest issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief, down the road. It is expected to allow for at least the temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.
“Both conflicts have produced a similar outcome: a weaker power has trapped a stronger one in a costly confrontation,” Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, wrote in a policy paper for the Brookings Institution last week. “Like Putin, Trump did not have a plan for what would happen next.”
The root of the issue is that both presidents started wars with limited understanding of the opposing side, Hill said in an interview. “Both projected their own centralized views of their own roles onto Iran and Ukraine, so they thought if they could decapitate the system it would fall,” she said.
Putin did not anticipate fierce Ukrainian resistance, for example; Trump ignored admonitions that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz, and appeared to underestimate Iran’s capacity to retaliate and inflict damage on America’s allies in the region. Nor did the Iranian people rise up against their authoritarian leaders, as Israel and the United States had urged them to do.
Lack of compromise has prolonged both wars. The United States and Russia have presented extensive demands to the other side, but the list of what their adversaries get in return is short. Putin, in particular, has not budged from his maximalist demands, which include taking land his army has been unable to capture.
Trump has also repeatedly revised terms already agreed to with the mediators, frustrating Iranians.
The United States harmed the process “with contradictory messages, frequent changes in positions and demands, as well as repeated violations of the ceasefire,” Esmail Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said last week after fighting sputtered back to life.
Each revision erodes a little more of Iran’s confidence that Trump will stick to an eventual deal, analysts said.
Yet Trump has repeatedly declared that a resolution is just around the corner, as he did Thursday after calling off yet another offensive.
None of the shifting set of goals that he predicted at the beginning of the conflict — which he said would take only a few weeks to achieve — has been realized.
The same is true for Putin. Invading Ukraine, the Kremlin had expected it would quickly seize Kyiv, install a pliant regime and be welcomed by the Ukrainian people. That was more than four years ago. Despite a death toll estimated at more than 350,000 soldiers, Moscow has not fully occupied three of the four Ukrainian provinces that it now claims.
Asked this month about Zelenskyy’s latest overture for peace, Putin declared that “military operations” — he still avoids calling it a war — “will end when we achieve our goals.”
In reality, both Washington and Moscow “have been defeated in the pursuit of the goals that they had,” Hill said.
The circumstances of the two wars do not entirely match. Ukraine had not threatened Russia, while Iran had confronted the United States ever since its 1979 Islamic Revolution through terrorist attacks, proxy wars and other assaults on U.S. interests.
The United States did not have territorial designs on Iran, while Putin has occupied almost 20% of Ukraine. Militarily, Russia began destabilizing Ukraine by annexing Crimea and fueling a separatist movement starting in 2014. The United States largely avoided a war with Iran until its 12-day bombing campaign last June undertaken with Israel.
Iran is more inclined than Ukraine to make a deal because it faces more dire economic conditions and receives almost no outside support, said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
At the same time, he added, the United States and Israel failed in their strategic objectives in two consecutive wars, in June and February. “So the Iranians want the United States, basically, to come to the table with the realization that they’re not defeated, and the military conquest of Iran is not in the cards,” he said.
In Ukraine, Russia wants at a minimum that Ukraine withdraw from the strategically important sliver of Donetsk province from which it has been unable to dislodge them, with Russia even losing some ground in recent weeks.
In both wars, Trump has dented U.S. credibility, Hill said. He failed to fulfill his vow to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine while undermining NATO in the process, and he did not achieve his main goals in Iran, or protect Gulf allies from Iranian retaliation.
Moscow and Kyiv had each hoped that Trump might persuade the other to agree to terms, but now both sides know that they need to look elsewhere for a solution, she said. Zelenskyy wrote as much in his letter to Putin.
Ultimately, analysts said, the lack of a resolution makes both the United States and Russia appear weak, and could hasten a more decentralized international order.
“Deadlock in Ukraine discredits Russia as a global military force,” Hill wrote in her policy paper. “It corrodes Putin’s patina of indestructibility, in the same way that the stalemate in the Persian Gulf undermines the United States and Trump.”