Large nations don’t win small wars

Large, powerful nations have not found the way to fight small wars without taking a heavy toll on innocent civilians

In the article today, I will offer a view of small wars fought by large and powerful states which departs from conventional thinking of historians who study conflicts. I will place greater emphasis on the role that race plays and has played in several conflicts. I will also put emphasis on the lack of interest in protecting the people not directly involved in the conflict but are mere bystanders. The disregard of civilian losses is motivated by the desire to inflict pain on those who are unable to defend themselves so that the leaders of the nation that was under attack would take notice of what the much larger state was fighting to achieve.

Large and powerful nations have not found the way to fight small wars without taking a heavy toll on innocent civilians. This is the lesson I would draw from the several wars that have been fought by the United States and what was once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR is now Russia which was at the core of the great Communist state created by Lenin and then consolidated by Stalin. These conflicts were waged after the end of the Second World War.

In World War II, the then USSR and USA were on the same side of the conflict. It was waged to overpower the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler who had used the gas chamber to kill the people he and his party considered inferior to the German race. Those targeted were not only the Jewish people but also gypsies and other indigenous groups. The Nazi philosophy, simply stated, was that those who had white skins and were blue-eyed were created to rule the world. That description of race and its global role was also accepted by the white people in the United States who, early on in its history, managed to kill hundreds of thousands of indigenous people. However, while the white race was prominent in both places, they had significant number of people of colour who were their citizens. This racial view of world rule also shaped the Japanese way of thinking about their global role. They launched their own war in Asia aimed at killing a large number of Chinese, who were regarded as belonging to an inferior race.

But the belief in the superiority of the white race was not the only reason why the Second World War was fought. The other was the approach towards governance. Both the Germans and the Japanese believed in authoritarianism. The way they defined it was to place all power in the hands of the state. The citizenry had little say in the way it wished to be governed. The state was the dictator and people were expected to follow what it laid down. These beliefs in the superiority of the white race constrained space in which ordinary citizens were allowed to operate. These approaches were behind the conflicts waged by both the United States and Russia. The list is long and includes Vietnam, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Syria but not Ukraine. The Russians and Ukrainians are both Slavs.

There is a growing consensus among those who watch the evolution of Vladimir Putin as a war leader who has used open and bloody conflicts to advance his career and what he believes to be Russian interests. Historians believe that much of what he is doing now in Ukraine was shaped by his experience in Chechnya. Both race and the use of pain as a weapon at the heart of Putin’s second effort to subdue the break-away republic. The Chechens are Muslims and Caucasians, very different from the Russian Slavs who follow the orthodox version of Christianity. The Chechens were attempting to create a state of their own when they were brutally suppressed. Heavy bombing of civilian areas and the almost total destruction of Grozny, their capital city, were the weapons Putin used to bring them in line. The pain that was inflicted on the Chechens was recalled in a recent article by Milana Mazaeva who left Chechnya to study journalism in the United States and was hoping to practise her profession in Russia.

“We know about living through a war,” she wrote in an article titled ‘Memories of bombings in Chechnya’. Her mother and several other members of her family are still in Grozny. “The prime years of my youth were spent under the thunder of heavy guns during the Russian wars against separatists in Chechnya. The capital, Grozny, was invaded twice, in relentless Russian bombing campaigns that killed many thousands of civilians. I know what it is to be constantly afraid, to have no home. My other brother is in a shared grave in Chechnya, killed by Russian bombs.” The war in Ukraine is following the same strategy of inflicting a great deal of pain on the citizenry even though racially as well as religion followed the Ukrainians are not different from the Russians.

Large powers when fighting small wars pay no attention to how they would affect the people living in the war zone. The war in Ukraine has produced millions of refugees and internally displaced people, many of whom fled to neighbouring countries to save their lives. This happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan and is happening again in Ukraine. The cost of the war is borne not only by the targeted countries but also by their neighbours. Pakistan and Iran provided home to 5 to 6 million people in the first Afghan war when the Soviet Union invaded the country. During the 20-year involvement of the US in Afghanistan, millions were displaced internally. Once again race enters the picture when those seeking refuge have to be accommodated. In the Afghan case, Pakistan became the destination since twice as many Pashtuns live in that country than in the country they were running from. Iran was the destination for the Afghan Shiites. However, neither country provided well-paying jobs to the escapees. These were available in Europe and the United States, but the two regions were not prepared to accept a large number since those leaving were not white and blue-eyed and also practised a different faith. The millions leaving Ukraine are different. Countries of Eastern Europe have willingly accepted the refugees since they belong to the same race and religion.

If I were to make a prediction it would be the following: in the future we will see many more conflicts between large and small states, which will be largely defined in terms of economic size rather than geographic space. This will be the case for reasons of demography. All large countries are seeing sharp declines in the rates of population growth. Some have begun to see declines in population size. Declining and aging population cannot be economically productive but to achieve balance they will need to bring in young people. These are available in the crowded countries of Africa and West and South Asia. Migrants from these places will press upon both Europe and the United States where they will not be easily accepted. There are already mini wars being fought along the United States’ southern border to keep out the people in distress in Central America. Former president Donald Trump wanted to build a wall to keep out the asylum seekers. This was his kind of war against small people.