There is a revolution going on in how to fight wars. Putin is fighting the old way with tanks and troops while Biden is fighting the new way with economic pressure and weapons sent to his proxy war against Russia. That means Putin’s old war can occupy territory and even decapitate Ukraine’s government but at such a cost to the Russian economy that Russia will be either permanently enfeebled or require an internal revolution to make it right, and that might finally put an end to the schloratic Russian Empire, which would be an improvement on the geopolitical map. But first step back before rushing to the future.
The way of war until it changed right now lasted for 250 years, ever since the American Revolution, when a people (really, the historians say, about a third of the American colonists) supported a military effort which waged armies against armies each one using the latest technologies available at the time, those evolving in organization, weaponry and transportation and increasing to the point where the United States in World War II had eight million men (and women) in the armed forces, were active all over the world, and culminated in nuclear weapons. These wars were popular because they had to be so as to muster the soldiery and to pay the ever increasing costs. Napoleon saw the levee en masse and railroads dominated from the American Civil War through the Franco-German War and into the two world wars. Germany’s population supported the Second World War until Stalingrad and was pulverized afterwards, the German people hating Hitler for having lost the war and therefore for having started it, not because the Germans opposed his war aims. Before that, before the American Revolution, under a prior dispensation, wars had been about territorial expropriation and dynastic conflicts and consolidations, though it is possible to move our popular wars to the wars of religion in that Cromwell could get his troops to reassemble rather than raid the baggage and so continue the fight because they thought their cause was just. In this case, religion rather than nationalism was the motive.
The escalation of technology and amobilization reached a dead end with Hiroshima. These forces had gone as far as they could go. There was no military benefit in waging nuclear war because there was mutual assured destruction if even minor parties like North Korea engaged in it, China feeding North Korea just to make it a buffer power with South Korea. Nuclear war was obsolete because both sides would be obliterated while j gas warfare was obsolete because there was no depending on whether the winds would send gas clouds over the enemy or onto themselves. It just took a long generation to get through the agony of creating mutual assurances that the USSR and the United States would not engage in nuclear warfare and the world sweated it out until that happened.
The recognition that large scale and potentially nuclear warfare are impossible except by accident was obscured by the waging of proxy wars whereby the United States and the Soviet Union contested one another in a third country. The United States had to manage Korea and Vietnam and the Soviet Union had to manage Afghanistan. Moreover, for the most part, and especially after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union having collapsed, wars in the last decade of the Twentieth Century and in the generation after that, also engaged in what was called asymmetric warfare, whereby a first class, technologically and organizationally advanced army, might win an initial battle and find itself pinned down with small bore weapons as is happening in Ukraine, where anti-tank Stingers and small action tactics, such as the ambush of Russian convoys, might lead the larger power to terminate military activities as happened with both the Soviet and the Americans with Afghanistan. That also happened in Kuwait, where Bush 41 saw no point in going to Baghdad after having recaptured Kuwait and in the Iraq War, where Bush 43 went to Baghdad, captured it and then was unsuccessful at occupying it, which is what the Americans now say would happen if even the Russians these days are able to decapitate the Zelensky regime. There is just no future for Putin occupying Ukraine.
It would be a mistake, however, to regard the proxy war that Putin deliberately walked into despite Biden’s warnings concerning it as an example of asymmetric warfare. The United States and NATO have provided first class armaments to Ukraine, and its organizational flexibility has far outshone the Russian military in organizational capacity. Apparently, the Russians have not learned what Germans and Americans did in previous wars, which is to rely on non-commissioned officers to provide cohesion and initiative and get the job done, the Russians preferring a top down command structure that makes columns slow and cumbersome and very unadventurous. The Russians had not kept up with the limits of conventional military organizations.
Putin, given the prior American administration, had not expected the NATO allies to be so cooperative in ramping up to deal with a Putin move to displace one of them-- perhaps Estonia-- and provide so much military aid so quickly to the Ukranians, who have so effectively deployed their Stinger and Javelin missiles. But even more surprising was the economic warfare that Putin accurately calls that the western countries will coordinate against Putin. They cut off credit, do not send exports to Russia and now prevent the export of Russian oil. Add to that the independent efforts of American companies like McDonalds and Starbucks to close its franchises in Russia. The impact of this economic war is to degrade Russia from being a second class economic power to becoming a third class one and there is no end to it. Sanctions can continue even if Ukraine capitulates and lingering guerilla resistance will bolster western powers to keep up their economic warfare. Even if Russia gives up its fight with Ukraine, there would have to be a peace treaty whereby the West withdrew sanctions and that would require conditions that would amount to Russia having in effect surrendering to the West so as to regain its country as part of the international economic order, something that is recognized as essential for a nation to operate. In effect, a war against the consensus of the international order is no longer possible, cannot be sustained. You can only fight a war if you are permitted to by the international order, let us say against a primitive or underdeveloped state, like Uganda or Afghanistan, but not between an economically important country with other economically developed countries. They depend too much on one another.
This is a very optimistic reading of the events in the Twenty First Century especially in light of the baleful events in the Twentieth Century when people waged major wars and were just short of waging a thermonuclear war. Economic war replaces military force for most nations and, moreover, economic forces guide political ones as well. Putin wanted to recapture Ukraine because it had been part of the Russian Empire even if Ukraine had declared its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. But Ukraine had led an independent course in that the percentage of its trade to the west had become more important than its purchase of Russian goods, not surprising since Russia has no consumer export market. You can buy a car from Germany or France or Japan or the United States. Has anyone bought a Russian car? Putin, like Hitler, was so preoccupied with military power that he forgot how powerful Germany had been and would have continued to be as an economic power, and Russia is losing what it has of economic wealth in an old fashioned military operation. He should have had other fish to fry.
Other nations might take heed. Some people suggest that China will become belligerent and try to take over Formosa with military force. That would be similar with Russia taking over what it considers its ancestral home of Ukraine. A reunification has been delayed only by the military circumstances at the time in 1949 when the American Sixth Fleet was stationed in the Formosa Straits and so kept Red China from taking over the last vestiges of the Chinese Nationalist regime. But the usually circumspect Chinese might think anew about a contemplation of any military adventurism after considering what is happening in the Russia-Ukraine War. The Chinese would have to fight an economic war rather than only a military war. While China is the second largest economic power, it does not match up to the combined Western powers that reach from Japan to the easstern boundary of Poland. Just adding up their people, the West, including Europe and Canada and Australia and New Zealand, add up to more people than China, more than its 1.2 billion people, and far, far greater than the Chinese gross domestic product. Moreover, China’s economy depends on exporting to the West because its does not have a domestic consumer inclination to spend, and so would be much more hurt by an embargo on selling goods abroad than would be the case with the Western world. The result is that both sides would deteriorate but the Chinese more so. Better to delay the eventual evolution of geopolitics to a time when China could absorb Formosa. In that case, we can look forward, what with the unwillingness of nations to engage in economic warfare, to a relatively peaceful Twenty First Century, far different from the horrors that took place in the previous century.