WW3 Might Be A Snoozefest
At least in comparison.
Trump appears to have lost control of the situation in Iran. He hoped for an easy victory. Instead, the Strait of Hormuz is shut to all but Iranian oil (carried on Chinese tankers), the Iranian people are rallying around their previously unpopular government, and Russia is apparently providing Iran with critical intel (Russia denies this) despite Trump's attempts to appease them with sanctions reductions. So as traditional alliances and rivalries strengthen, many are asking if the world is shaping up for a new World War.
Just like in the runup to the first two, an unstable global order is leading to increased conflict between security alliances while Great Powers are increasingly ran by incompetent leadership. Whereas Trump tried to align the US with Russia and India initially, reshaping 80 years of foreign policy to align the US with his political allies, the logic of Great Power politics appears to have prevailed - especially as Russia loses faith that Trump is either able or willing to meet their needs. Maybe Putin remains convinced that the US will remain his enemy as Trump loses power, maybe Putin hopes to tie up oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf and earning enmity from the United States is a cost worth it to him. Either way the result is the same - the Russia-Iran axis remains strong. Surprisingly, most of Europe backs Trump's war of aggression, revealing that despite Trump's threats against them the US-Europe alliance remains in place.
A whole book could be written on why the Trump-Putin relationship appears to be breaking down - from the influence of Israel which appears to have deeper connections inside the Trump Administration and access to much of the same dirt that Russia does to the weakness of Trump and the divergent long-term interests of the two nations should Trump's regime fall. But today I'm going to look at a single aspect of the emerging geopolitical landscape - the primacy of defensive warfare.
Why The Aggressor Loses in Modern Warfare
Germany and Japan showed in the runup to World War II that tanks and planes enabled quick offensive action, allowing a bold country to seize large amounts of territory. This was substantially different from World War I, where defensive warfare generally held the edge on the Western Front and any gains were at the expense of vast quantities of men. The current paradigm looks even more defense-biased than WWI.
Drones are not very good offensive weapons. They need to maintain contact with the crews that man them, which means either wireless signal (can be jammed and gets laggy farther from base) or in rare cases a wire connection. Neither solution is very good for long distances, which is alright because most drones are also not capable of flying very far.
However, bring your enemies' billion-dollar carrier into range and cheap drones can start causing serious problems. Any moderately-sized nation, even a poor one, is able to fly suicide drones into weak points on planes, tanks, and ships. Unless a Great Power is willing to put boots on the ground there isn't much they can do to stop this - but as Ukraine shows, infantry can also be torn to shreds by drone attacks. It's simply very difficult to take territory in the modern era.
Just about the only weapon that does have a significant offensive advantage and cannot be struck by drones is ballistic missiles. If the launch site is outside the reach of enemy strikes, the missiles require expensive interceptor missiles to stop. But unless the warheads are nuclear they won't do much to turn the tide in a drawn-out war.
This is a serious problem for both Trump and Putin, and it's one reason both have refused to rule out using nuclear weapons. Threatening to use them is one of their few remaining advantages.
Few Opportunities For Gain
This takes the wind out of the sails of much of the WW3 discourse. Everyone is seeing that you can't even invade a flat country like Ukraine unless you're ten times stronger in every way. China might be able to take Taiwan simply because they are 60 times bigger, although if Japan and Korea join the fray (as they likely would) even that becomes difficult.
Of course the wars in Ukraine and Iran might drag on with neither Putin nor Trump able to admit defeat politically, and this will create serious problems for years. Xi might use the distraction of his rivals to seize historical territory. But there isn't the grounds for mass deployments of troops from Great Powers against each other, as each is already learning via proxy wars that all their technical superiority is useless against any enemy with the sympathy of their population.
So if more wars break out, they will likely be the result of unpopular leaders trying to change the news cycle, just like Ukraine and Iran. But those two examples might deter others from hoping for military victory.
