Deadlocked Wars: How Major Powers Misread the Regions They Attacked
Russia and the United States projected their own centralized views onto Ukraine and Iran, analysts said. As a result, the smaller countries trapped larger ones in a costly confrontation.
President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, both resist the idea that ostensibly weaker powers fought them to a stalemate, with the two leaders leaning on negotiations to win the capitulation that they failed to secure in battle.
Iran and Ukraine have pushed back robustly against this “might makes right” mentality, with top officials adopting an even more defiant tone in recent days.
In an open letter to Mr. Putin this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine derided Mr. Putin for clinging to power as he aged. “You did not expect full-scale resistance from Ukraine, and you did not foresee that things would go this far,” Mr. Zelensky wrote.
After Iran unleashed a missile barrage against Israel last week in retaliation for attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament and Iran’s top negotiator, threatened more. “Until there is a sincere commitment to restoring trust, Iran’s response will not change,” he wrote on X.
Their recalcitrance reflects the reality of two wars in stasis, with a profound lack of trust all around stymying progress.
Talks to find peace in Ukraine hit an impasse right before the Iran war started, with Ukraine demanding more robust security guarantees for ceding territory than Russia was willing to accept. Diplomacy has mostly produced prisoner swaps between the sides. The United States, once trying to play the main mediator, has shifted its focus to Iran.
American and Iranian officials now say a peace deal with Iran could be at hand. But it appears that it will initially consist of a framework for negotiations that will push the thorniest issues, like Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief, down the road. It is expected to allow for at least the temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.
“Both conflicts have produced a similar outcome: a weaker power has trapped a stronger one in a costly confrontation,” Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, wrote in a policy paper for the Brookings Institution this week. “Like Putin, Trump did not have a plan for what would happen next.”
The root of the issue is that both presidents sparked wars with limited understanding of the opposing side, Ms. Hill said in an interview. “Both projected their own centralized views of their own roles onto Iran and Ukraine, so they thought if they could decapitate the system it would fall,” she said.
Mr. Putin did not anticipate fierce Ukrainian resistance, for example; Mr. Trump ignored admonitions that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz, and appeared to underestimate Iran’s capacity to retaliate and inflict damage on America’s allies in the region. Nor did the Iranian people rise up against their authoritarian leaders, as Israel and the United States had urged them to do.
While the bombing campaigns of the United States and Russia have had devastating effects, analysts noted, air power alone has not proved decisive.
“Although Russia’s aggressive invasion of its neighbor differs from Washington’s goal of reining in Iran’s expansionist threat, both states are finding it equally hard to align their end goals with the means available to achieve them,” James F. Jeffrey, a fellow at the Washington Institute and a former Middle East envoy, wrote in Foreign Affairs.
Ukraine managed to halt Russian troop advances in part by producing next-generation drones, changing the face of modern warfare, while the United States has shown no desire to deploy troops inside Iran.
Lack of compromise has prolonged both wars. The United States and Russia have presented extensive demands to the other side, but the list of what their adversaries get in return is short. Mr. Putin, in particular, has not budged from his maximalist demands, which include taking land his army has been unable to capture.
Mr. Trump has also repeatedly revised terms already agreed with the mediators, frustrating the Iranians.
The United States harmed the process “with contradictory messages, frequent changes in positions and demands, as well as repeated violations of the cease-fire,” Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said last week after fighting sputtered back to life.
Each revision erodes a little more of Iran’s confidence that Mr. Trump will stick to an eventual deal, analysts said.
Yet Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared that a resolution is just around the corner, as he did Thursday after calling off yet another offensive.
None of the shifting set of goals that he predicted at the beginning of the conflict — which he said would take only a few weeks to achieve — has been realized.
The same is true for Mr. Putin. Invading Ukraine, the Kremlin had expected it would quickly seize Kyiv, install a pliant regime and be welcomed by the Ukrainian people. That was more than four years ago. Despite a death toll estimated at more than 350,000 soldiers, Moscow has not fully occupied three of the four Ukrainian provinces that it now claims.
Asked last week about Mr. Zelensky’s latest overture for peace, Mr. Putin declared that “military operations” — he still avoids calling it a war — “will end when we achieve our goals.”
In reality, both Washington and Moscow “have been defeated in the pursuit of the goals that they had,” Ms. Hill said.
The circumstances of the two wars do not entirely match. Ukraine had not threatened Russia, while Iran had confronted the United States ever since its 1979 Islamic revolution through terrorist attacks, proxy wars and other assaults on American interests.
The United States did not have territorial designs on Iran, while Mr. Putin has occupied almost 20 percent of Ukraine. Militarily, Russia began destabilizing Ukraine by annexing Crimea and fueling a separatist movement starting in 2014. United States largely avoided a war with Iran until its 12-day bombing campaign last June undertaken with Israel.
Iran is more inclined than Ukraine to make a deal because it faces more dire economic conditions and receives almost no outside support, said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
At the same time, he added, the United States and Israel failed in their strategic objectives in two consecutive wars, in June and February. “So the Iranians want the United States, basically, to come to the table with the realization that they’re not defeated, and the military conquest of Iran is not in the cards,” he said.
The main American and Israeli priority is for Iran to abandon its nuclear program, including surrendering its highly enriched uranium, so it can never develop a nuclear weapon.
Iran has resisted making those concessions, and any resolution on that issue could come months or years down the road. Iran is also asking for longtime American economic sanctions lifted, along with the current naval blockade, and the release of $24 billion in frozen assets.
Iran wants to use the framework under discussion to test whether Mr. Trump will really implement an accord, Mr. Nasr said.
“They want to see whether he actually will lift the blockade,” he said. “They want to see whether he can maintain cease-fire in Lebanon, and they want see whether he will deliver some of their money.” If all that happens, they would be willing to negotiate something bigger, he added.
In Ukraine, Russia wants at a minimum that Ukraine withdraw from the strategically important sliver of Donetsk province from which it has been unable to dislodge them, with Russia even losing some ground in recent weeks.
In both wars, Mr. Trump has dented American credibility, Ms. Hill said. He failed to fulfill his vow to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine while undermining NATO in the process, and he did not achieve his main goals in Iran, or protect Gulf allies from Iranian retaliation.
Moscow and Kyiv had each hoped that Mr. Trump might persuade the other to agree to terms, but now both sides know that they need to look elsewhere for a solution, she said. Mr. Zelensky wrote as much in his letter to Mr. Putin.
Ultimately, analysts said, the lack of a resolution makes both the United States and Russia appear weak, and could hasten a more decentralized international order.
“Deadlock in Ukraine discredits Russia as a global military force,” Ms. Hill wrote in her policy paper. “It corrodes Putin’s patina of indestructibility, in the same way that the stalemate in the Persian Gulf undermines the United States and Trump.”
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Sheelagh McNeill and Shirin Hakim contributed research.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.