Yaroslav Trofimov of the WSJ has an interesting article out today suggesting that the realist assumption that small states must submit to the will of the geopolitical giants is false. Consider Ukraine and Iran.
Yet, all these wars carry a similar lesson, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview. “The kind of war to which we were used, the kind of war that Russia had in mind in Ukraine—to invade and occupy a nation—is no longer conceivable,” he said. “Wars run as long as a nation has the resilience and a will to resist. Conquering a nation when its citizens are ready to fight is impossible even when there is disparity in strength…
I think this analysis is largely correct. We are living not in the age of empires but in the age of resistance, driven by resurgent nationalism and a technological development that, paradoxically, has made warfare more primitive again.
The playbook for civil resistance was of course written during the Cold War, b…
