The Strong Suffer What They Must
Foolish military interventions driven by outdated calculations of economic power have thoroughly discredited the old big powers. Thucydides might well have appreciated the irony of a world in which smaller, weaker countries like Ukraine and Iran can expose Russia and the United States, respectively, as paper tigers.
PRINCETON—World politics has gone topsy-turvy. No longer do the old great powers seem to control everyone’s destiny. They have been weakened and discredited: Russia is steadily disintegrating, and Donald Trump’s presidency has diminished America’s international standing. The old powers may still have golden heads, but their feet of clay have been exposed.
Assessments about what matters are shifting, too. Recall that in the era of high globalization—the decade between the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks—power did not seem to matter anymore. Small, open, reform-minded countries like New Zealand, Chile, Ireland, Israel, and the Baltic States were big winners. But with the 2003 Iraq War, and especially with the 2008 financial crisis, size suddenly mattered again. China and the United States could deliver hefty fiscal stimulus packages and manage financial-sector shocks, whereas Europeans were wracked by a deepening debt crisis.
The 2010s thus lent new support to classical realism in international relations. Thucydides’s famous observation—“the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”—was recycled endlessly, harkening back not just to ancient Greece but to the 20th century, when economic power determined the outcomes of two world wars. The Soviet Union and the US defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan because they could mobilize resources in a larger, more coordinated manner. Estimating power in the world amounted to tallying steel and coal production, manpower, or GDP (which had emerged primarily as a tool of wartime economic planning).
These 20th-century lessons themselves drew on the transformation wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Steel and coal production generated a capacity to replace human and animal muscle with carbon energy—a profound source of strength. But now, this focus on industrial capacity is increasingly misplaced. A new kind of industrial revolution is upsetting the old realist calculation. In the new world of AI-enhanced coordination, a strong centralized command structure becomes a source of inflexibility, rather than a strategic tool.
This new technological order is evident in the two asymmetric wars of the 2020s: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the US attack on Iran this year. In both cases, a larger state took it for granted that old-fashioned forms of power would deliver a quick victory, only to prove itself vulnerable to asymmetric warfare.
In each case, the big power suffered because its strategic choices depended too much on the whims of one obviously fallible man. The small power, by contrast, quickly developed strategies to manage coordination in a decentralized way. Iran had long prepared for scenarios in which the regime was decapitated, and Ukraine quickly managed to coordinate information on troop movements supplied by thousands of citizens. Both worked with highly educated populations that were mobilized to counter an external threat.
The two sides also had contrasting cost structures. The small states relied on relatively cheap weapons, namely drones (often produced with imported plastic parts), while the big states were still using extremely costly military systems. One Iranian Shahed-136 drone is estimated to cost around $35,000, while two Patriot missiles used to intercept it come in at $8 million. Moreover, these expensive interceptors cannot be replaced at the same pace as the lower-cost drones. When these differences grow large enough, the weak look much stronger.
There are also increasingly obvious limits on the big powers’ ability to mobilize effectively. Russia still refuses to call its war a war, but it cannot extend conscription to sustain a mere “special military operation.” Because the regime is unwilling to antagonize the population of its major cities, it has relied on the rural poor and prisoners who want to reduce their sentences. Equally, the US knows that it cannot risk the large-scale military casualties that could follow from a “boots on the ground” strategy in Iran. Lacking congressional approval, as required by federal law, the operation was initially called an “excursion”—his own “special military operation.”
Taken together, these differences between big and small states suggest that the conventional wisdom on international politics is obsolete. For example, the international relations scholar John Mearsheimer has consistently emphasized Russian advantages in manpower, artillery, and production capabilities. Since the Kremlin has maintained a substantial armaments industry designed to fight something “like World War I,” and since the Ukraine war resembled that conflict at the outset, Mearsheimer suggested that a Russian victory was inevitable.
The same doctrine of “offensive realism” shaped the US administration’s approach to the war. As US Vice President JD Vance writes in his new book, “The gap between Ukraine’s and Russia’s abilities to project military power was vast, and we lacked the capacity to enable the Ukrainians to close that gap—and keep it closed—all by ourselves.” It was that calculation that led Vance and Trump to ambush Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in 2025, announcing to the world that Zelensky did not “have the cards.”
It turns out that Trump, Vance, and “offensive realists” like Mearsheimer were the ones holding a weak hand. Foolish military interventions driven by outdated calculations of economic power have thoroughly discredited the old big powers. Thucydides might well have appreciated the irony of a world in which the weak do what they can, and the strong suffer what they must. And if they continue on their current path, they will suffer still more.