Lecture
Sarah Paine — Why wars are so difficult to end
- The Russo-Japanese War is predicted to serve as a "model war termination" from Japan's perspective, where Japan's post-Battle of Mukden financial capacity allowed it to sustain the conflict despite manpower shortages, whereas Russia's "broke" status and Nicholas II's exhausted finances forced the cessation of hostilities.
- The speaker warns that the Ukraine-Russian conflict could "spike up" into a global war, highlighting the risk of regional wars escalating due to third-party intervention, which acts as a key indicator that a belligerent has exceeded the "culminating point of victory."
- A "culminating point of attack" is identified where the scale of operations turns against the aggressor, potentially leading to a "victory denial strategy" insurgency that is "incredibly costly" for the intervening power, often resulting in the intervening force never stabilizing anything and "eventually call[s] it a day" in conflicts like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
- Historical precedents for exceeding the culminating point of victory include the US advancing to the Chinese border in the Korean War, which triggered Chinese intervention and a "world of hurt," and the second Iraq War, where regime change was "easy" but state-building in "mosaic societies" failed due to weak national identity and difficulties managing borders over 2000 miles long with ambitious neighbors.
- The speaker anticipates that "unlimited wars" against enemies on "death ground" transform failed states into "lethal adversaries" due to the aggressor's "incredible desperation" and refusal to compromise as losses rack up, contrasting this with the "victory denial" tactics used by George Washington, who counted on the intervening power assigning a lower value to the object of conflict.
- Financial and human costs are expected to be high in conflicts where the intervening power lacks local buy-in or faces "big buddies on both sides" pouring in aid, as seen in the Korean War's prolonged devastation, whereas the Gulf War incurred minimal US casualties (estimated under 500) with allies paying over $50 billion to the US and an additional $14 billion to other coalition partners.
- Strategic errors involving "waffling between limited and unlimited objectives" in Korea are deemed "really costly," and the speaker suggests that Kim Il-sung might have succeeded better via a "slow insurgency" rather than triggering third-party intervention.
- The speaker predicts that Nicholas II would eventually die in a "Siberian basement" a decade later after losing World War I, a potential outcome linked to the territorial loss of Sakhalin Island and the anticipated total loss of Russia's fleet at the Battle of Tsushima.
- It is asserted that the value of a political object is "very high" for those living in the theater but "probably lower" for intervening powers at a distance, leading to a scenario where the speaker wagers that "what happens in Ukraine is of much more interest to Ukrainians than it is to Russians."