Trump and Putin are killing people and calling it strategy. The Wall Street Journal, surveying the wreckage of two great-power wars, concludes that the strong are learning they have limits. What the piece actually documents is something older and uglier: imperial powers that cannot win, know they cannot win, and keep killing anyway because the alternative is admitting the entire framework was fraudulent.
The Melian Dialogue—that Thucydidean chestnut the Journal leans on—is not a warning about the strong doing what they will. It is a record of what happens when a great power mistakes force for purpose. Athens massacred the men of Melos and enslaved the rest because the islanders refused to submit. Two decades later, Athens lay in ruins. The lesson Thucydides actually offers is that imperial overreach is a suicide pact dressed as strength. The United States is now living that pact in real time. Russia is living it in Ukraine. The trap is inverted: the overreach of the hegemon is what breaks its own back, while a determined population that refuses to capitulate can negate the technological edge of its adversary.
The Iran war, now months old, has killed a large portion of the Iranian leadership and consumed a significant share of this country’s long-range precision munitions. And what has it achieved? Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Its theocratic regime still fires missiles at Israel and the Gulf states. The strategic objective—regime change, regional dominance, whatever the latest talking point is—remains as distant as it was when the first bombs fell. This is not a temporary setback. It is the shape of modern conflict, and the people who launched this war should have known it.
Andrew Bacevich, whose Washington Rules traced the permanent-war consensus that has governed American foreign policy since the Cold War ended, diagnosed the condition: a conviction that the United States possesses a unique mandate to remake the world through military force, and that any problem can be solved with enough firepower. That conviction survives every failure because it was never about winning; it is a product of a domestic political economy that demands weaponized spending as an end in itself. Washington mistakes firepower for strategy because our institutions are designed to generate expenditure, not victory. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—each one was supposed to be the last. Each one became a reason to build a new arms package. Now it is Iran’s turn, and the result is already clear from the pattern. The great-power playbook does not work against a middle power that has drones, ballistic missiles, and a population willing to absorb punishment.
Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” within the military-industrial complex—an influence that could endanger the republic’s liberties. He was speaking about domestic corruption, but there is a military consequence too: domestic capture breeds tactical blindness. A force optimized for congressional appropriations cannot pivot to a battlefield where $500 consumer drones neutralize $100 million platforms. Lockheed and Raytheon see their quarterly earnings swell with each missile fired, and the profits flow regardless of whether the target is a military installation or a city block. The Ukrainians, holding the line and turning the tide after the United States cut off aid, proved that technology has leveled the field. The Iranians had the same capability waiting. The democratization of lethal technology has stripped the great powers of their monopoly on violence.
The Italian and Dutch defense chiefs tell the Journal that conventional conquest is no longer possible. Regime change by force of arms is finished. This is not a new insight. Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, listed a reasonable chance of success among the prerequisites for a just war. But the Iran campaign was never designed to meet that standard. The United States began bombing Iran knowing it could not occupy the country, could not topple the regime from the air, and could not prevent Iranian retaliation against regional allies. Walzer’s criterion wasn’t just flunked—it was structurally irrelevant from the start, because the administration’s political objectives were explicitly incompatible with the military means available on any honest assessment. A war designed to fail is not merely unjust. It is a deliberate fraud.
And it cannot be separated from the same fraud playing out in Ukraine. The Russian war machine has ground to a halt against a neighbor that refuses to yield. Despite the diplomatic squeezes and the aid cuts, Kyiv holds the line. The populations of Iran and Ukraine exercise agency by refusing to capitulate, and that refusal negates the technological edge of their adversaries. You can drop billions of dollars in ordnance, but you cannot bomb a people into accepting subjugation. When the will to resist outlasts the political will to attack, the occupation—or the bombing campaign—collapses under its own weight. The so-called realists who cling to Thucydidean fatalism miss that the weak have finally found a way to make the strong suffer.
Beijing is watching these failures closely, calculating whether it can seize Taiwan before the island’s own parliament slashes the funding for asymmetric warfare. As I noted when the administration was diverting carrier groups from the Pacific to the Arabian Sea, the real cost of these Middle Eastern wars is the capacity to defend interests elsewhere. If the United States cannot finish a war against Iran, what makes anyone believe it could fight one across the Taiwan Strait? The Chinese know the answer. So do the Taiwanese opposition lawmakers who voted to cut their own defense. They are betting on submission, not resistance, and the evidence from the Strait of Hormuz supports their bet.
Congress never declared this war. The Constitution’s requirement, designed to prevent exactly this kind of executive adventurism, has been ignored with the same indifference that has marked every American war of the last three decades. The great-power limitation the Journal describes is not a discovery. It is a confession, delivered in the bland language of strategy, that the United States and Russia are killing people in pursuit of goals they cannot define and cannot achieve. These empires have mastered only one art: that of their own exhaustion.