The wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine are now in their second, third, and fourth years respectively with no obvious end in sight. And although the round of fighting over the past two weeks between Israel and Iran, which drew in the United States, ended relatively quickly, it remains unclear whether the issues underlying the conflict—particularly Iran’s nuclear program—have been settled.
In recent decades, many politicians and generals have planned for short wars but ended up getting long ones, the scholar Lawrence Freedman wrote this spring. Wars become intractable, he argued, when political and military objectives do not align. Combat rarely resolves the root causes of a dispute and cease-fires can become mere pauses that allow both sides to prepare for more fighting. “One of the great allures of military power is that it promises to bring conflicts to a quick and decisive conclusion,” Freedman wrote. Yet “in practice, it rarely does.”
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