War Is Obsolete - So Are Trump, Putin and Netanyahu

Learning a Lesson from Iran, Ukraine, and Lebanon

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In the early hours of the current Iran war, the images looked familiar: precision strikes lighting up the night sky, command centers reduced to rubble, military spokespeople promising that decisive blows had been struck. It was the kind of spectacle that has defined modern warfare for decades: overwhelming force, technological superiority, and the visible choreography of dominance.

Despite the schoolyard bravado and bloviating by Secretary of Holy War, Pete Hegseth, Iran has not been obliterated nor totally defeated. In fact, the geopolitical situation is worse operationally now than it was before the bombing began.

The essential question lingers then, unanswered: what, exactly, has been accomplished or decided?

Iran’s regime still stands. Its regional network remains intact. Its capacity to retaliate, if not symmetrically, then persistently asymmetrically, continues. The battlefield has delivered destruction, but not resolution.

President Trump is operating under a false assumption: that overwhelming US military might can accomplish political goals. Now, after months of conflict, the reality is beginning to sink in…we are in a quagmire.

The Unique But Non-Replicable Model: World War II

Trump’s framework, if he has one, is World War II. Early in the Iran conflict, Trump spoke triumphantly about “complete victory” and “unconditional surrender.” These are terms that are clearly associated with that earlier war. As Trump has discovered, that model is completely insufficient and doesn’t fit this situation.

The WW II model is obsolete, no longer replicable, and hasn’t been since 1945.

However, we are still informed in our collective memory by the grand consensus of World War II, when more rational minds created a whole new world order in the aftermath of an irrational military conflict that killed millions of human beings. We look to the post-war settlement as a justification for the utility of war in settling political disputes and conflicts.

The World War II experience seems like an emotionally satisfying framework to try to emulate. World War II ostensibly had clear winners and clear losers. The victors dictated the peace agreements and then set out to rebuild what had been destroyed.

World War II appeared to validate a clean, compelling logic: the use of overwhelming military force, total defeat of an enemy, and clear political transformation. Nazi Germany collapsed. Imperial Japan surrendered. Occupation leads to reconstruction. Voila! Former enemies become stable allies. The United States prospered like never before.

It is hard to overstate how powerful this example became. It suggested that war, if fought decisively enough, could not only defeat an enemy but also reshape entire societies, if not the world, to the United States’ liking.

But this outcome was historically unusual, even exceptional, due to the highly unique nature of the combatants. Germany and Japan were highly centralized states. They were industrial societies vulnerable to destruction, and they were defeated so completely using weapons and tactics that are today immoral and unthinkable, that no organized resistance could continue.

Just as important, the United States emerged with unmatched economic dominance, allowing it to rebuild what it had destroyed, a step that is rarely replicable today.

What looked like a general rule was, in reality, a very specific set of circumstances only applicable in that moment. But the lesson stuck; unfortunately, it was an illusion.

Cold War Realities

Never mind that the post-war settlement inaugurated 50 years of Cold War tensions and regional wars; the US reveled in the illusion of a grand victory based on military superiority.

During the Cold War, direct great-power warfare became too dangerous in the nuclear age. But the underlying assumption about military power did not disappear; it adapted.

Instead of total war, we were given polemics about limited wars and proxy conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and multiple Central American states. But the theory remained intact: apply controlled military force to achieve political ends, contain communism, support allies, impose economic colonialism, and reshape regimes.

What has been gained? Very little of anything enduring or worthwhile. Many of these regions remain unstable to this day, causing massive migrations, and millions of innocent lives have been lost.

Reality refused to cooperate in the Cold War militarism. In Vietnam, overwhelming U.S. firepower failed to produce a stable, pro-American political outcome. In Afghanistan (for both the Soviet Union and later the United States), military intervention could not sustain a durable state. In countless Central American proxy conflicts, an external prolonged war ensued without resolving any political issues. The only outcomes were continued political strife, poverty, local violence between competing factions, and migration by those trying to escape the consequences. Those consequences persist.

The Model Is Broken - War is Futile

These “limited wars” were often treated as failures of execution, such as bad strategy, insufficient commitment, or flawed leadership. But taken together, they point to something deeper:

The World War II model was not being poorly applied. It was being applied to conditions where it simply did not hold. War has become futile if not obsolete.

This type of warfare has continued in countless places under the assumption that somehow, military intervention can yield substantial political outcomes. And in countless instances, that assumption has been proven wrong.

The only “winners” in these post-World War II conflicts have been the massive military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned us about. These merchants of death have reaped billions, if not trillions, of dollars by encouraging the false World War II framework of warfare.

What we are seeing now—in Iran, Ukraine, and Lebanon—is the full unraveling of that inherited assumption. We will have to wait to see if Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu will learn the lesson…I am doubtful.

21st Century Realities

Here are the reasons why the World War II model no longer works in the 21st century:

Modern adversaries are not structured to collapse under pressure because they are decentralized, politically embedded throughout society, and are capable of long-term adaptation.

At the same time, the tools of warfare have shifted. Cheap drones, distributed networks, and information warfare allow weaker actors to impose ongoing costs without presenting a decisive target.

The result is a profound shift in what war actually does. It no longer functions as a mechanism for decision-making or score-settling, but rather as a mechanism for management and profit.

War can degrade capabilities, shape the environment, and impose costs, but it can’t “win” in the conventional sense. Moreover, it generates immense profits for those supplying the military hardware and now, software. But it cannot reliably deliver the political outcomes that leaders still invoke when they turn to force.

Warfare in the 21st century is a lose-lose scenario.

The Ukraine Stalemate

Consider Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin launched the invasion in 2022, the expectation, shared by many analysts, was that overwhelming force would produce a rapid political outcome: the collapse of the Ukrainian government, the installation of a compliant regime, and a decisive realignment of the region.

None of that happened.

Instead, the war settled into something far more revealing and devastating: a grinding equilibrium in which neither side can achieve its central political aims. Russia cannot fully subdue Ukraine. Ukraine cannot fully expel Russia. Military operations continue, territory shifts incrementally, losses mount, but the political settlement remains out of reach.

Victory, in any traditional sense, has disappeared. What remains is endurance and attrition. Lose-lose.

The Lebanon Debacle

Now look to Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates not as a conventional army but as a deeply embedded hybrid force, part militia, part political actor, part social infrastructure. Israel has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can inflict significant military damage. And yet Hezbollah persists. Rocket fire continues. The underlying political balance remains unresolved.

There is no surrender to compel, no capital to capture that would end the conflict, no clean transition from war to peace. Instead, there is a state of continuous, managed violence, punctuated by escalation, but never concluded. Civilians suffer, mostly children. Lose-lose!

Across these conflicts, a common reality is emerging that runs counter to centuries of strategic thought. Military conflict is obsolete.

Why We Are At A Turning Point In Human History

For most of human history, war was an effective mechanism for acquiring territory, resources, labor, prestige, and political control. States could conquer populations, extract wealth directly, and consolidate power through military victory.

But the conditions that once made war strategically useful have evaporated in the 21st century. If we can learn anything from the wars in Iran, Lebanon, and Ukraine, it is that these conflicts undermine the very rationale for which they were started.

Militarism as a tool of state policy now produces economic self-destruction, political instability, more insurgency, international isolation, technological vulnerability, and long-term strategic exhaustion.

Humankind is reaching a point of global transformation, and militarism will be the waste left behind. War no longer creates wealth…it destroys it. Today, wealth comes primarily from education, innovation, technological ecosystems, stable institutions, trade networks, financial systems, and most of all, human capital.

You cannot bomb your way into semiconductor dominance.

You cannot invade your way into a modern knowledge economy.

Modern civilization depends on globally interconnected systems: food supply chains, shipping routes, energy markets, digital infrastructure, and stable financial networks. However, war now creates cascading global instability, as we are experiencing in the wake of the Iran War.

Decision Time

We live in an era of global threats and problems such as climate change and massive economic inequality. Future wars in an era of climate stress could trigger mass migration, famine, economic collapse, and ecological devastation far beyond the battlefield itself.

This creates a profound contradiction: the problems most threatening modern societies in the 21st century cannot be solved militarily. No army can invade climate change; an army cannot end pandemics. War only accelerates demographic collapse, cyber instability and AI disruption, and ultimately, war will hasten ecological decline.

The tragedy of the modern age is not simply that war is horrific. Humans have always known that. The deeper tragedy is that war is increasingly incapable of achieving the political goals for which it is waged. Yet, political leaders seem unable to abandon a strategy that leads to nowhere.

Modern militaries possess unprecedented destructive power, yet nations remain unable to bomb their way to legitimacy, stability, or security. The central challenges of the 21st century, climate change, economic inequality, migration, pandemics, and technological disruption, do not yield to conquest.

War persists not because it remains effective, but because political systems, national myths, and institutions still operate under assumptions inherited from a different era. Trump, Putin and Netanyahu are captive to such a mindset.

Human survival increasingly depends on international cooperation, not conquest. Instead of the lose-lose outcome of warfare, human civilization needs to adopt a win-win framework of interdependence and cooperation.

Humanity has progressed well beyond the efficacy of warfare and entered a world where cooperation is no longer merely a moral aspiration; it has become a condition of survival.

Someone once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Sadly, that is where we find ourselves today… in insanity.

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