I don’t think ‘existing state’ and ‘wins the occupation’ are concepts that fit together. The existing state is not (at least, primarily) fighting a recalcitrant populace that wants them out. They are fighting an outside enemy that wants to destroy their military capabilities and neutralize them as a threat. This is very different from a war to, say, make Afghanistan into a U.S. - friendly liberal democracy.
In Iran, while initial narratives about regime change were posted, arguably with the intent of convincing the U.S. government to commit to a conflict it would otherwise have avoided, the Israeli[1] intention now seems to be doing maximum damage to the long-term capabilities of Iran.
In Eastern Europe, nobody serious has claimed that Russia intended to conquer all of Ukraine. Their territorial claims amount to “give us the parts that voted for detente with us to begin with, plus whatever else we incidentally capture before a treaty is signed because it’d be bad PR to spend blood capturing something and then sign it away”. Even that is mostly for domestic PR—the practical goal is to make it impossible to host organized military buildup near Russia’s border.
In Syria, the new government certainly does not satisfy the lofty goals about human rights that were ostensibly the point of U.S. involvement there. Moreover, despite the new government’s very deferential initial behavior towards the U.S. / Israel, Israel has already started referring to its leader as “the head of the snake”—they’re not even particularly friendly with it now. This does not mean the war was ‘lost’ by anti-Assad countries—Syria used to be a formidable proxy, and now it is essentially powerless.
In all cases, more broadly, the war goal amounts to “this country cannot maintain a coherent air defense network, and our missiles and bombers give us permanent veto power on efforts to ever re-establish one”. If the resolution to Iran was that the Iranian government still existed but could never again commission a SAM site, Israel would be happy with that outcome. Likewise in EE and Syria—there isn’t really a meaningful distinction between “Assad is in power but he can’t shoot down our helicopters anymore” and “the new guy is in power and Syria can’t shoot down our helicopters anymore”.
You also can’t dismiss protests. They can force you to fight an occupation whether you want to or not.
I think this is an outdated claim. Color Revolutions were very effective during the early 2010′s, but aren’t anymore.
I don’t know that there is an American intention, at this point—there’s no resolution to this that benefits any element of America. Much of the administration seems to want out of this conflict, but are resigned to the fact that they have no means of unilaterally leaving without a confrontation with Israel.
The ability of either (the guerilla successors/stay-behind forces of the government) or (the government against an anti-war revolution) to win an occupation are exactly the structural forces that constrain the opposition from attempting state destruction.
In Iran, the reason why they stepped back from attempting regime change (which is absolutely worse for Iran than just losing air defenses) is that they realized that there was not enough support to win an occupation with boots on the ground, and the antigovernment protestors now have the initiative to push for that or not.
In Ukraine, Russia definitely tried regime change, and lost. This is what the 3 mile long tank columns at Kyiv were about, why it was a 3-day special military operation. You can’t occupy territory in 3 days, (because Ukraine can just counter-attack) the only possible war aim is regime change as a fait-accompli. The fact that Ukraine did not collapse as a government is determined by basically the same factors as civil war.
In Syria, they achieved one maximalist war aim, (the destruction of the Assad regime), because it lost the hybrid (regular civil)/(guerilla) war with the Islamist rebels mostly. They were not the US preferred faction, but neither Israel nor the US are willing to uproot them, so they will stay, and have to deal with sectarian violence by themselves.
There was basically a Color Revolution in Nepal in 2025. There was an attempt at protests to overthrow the Iranian government about 3 months ago, and they failed. Those protests are a large shaping factor of the current war. That is to say, the constraining factor preventing people from “just shooting protestors”, is that it leads to fighting an occupation, which governments lose somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the time, which is a lot. In the absence of the willingness to use violence, the best tools at disrupting protests involve willingness to give concessions, that is, they give protestors political power. If you are not willing to either give concessions or use violence, your options are worse, and generally involve letting the protestors set up a pseudo-government for as long as they are willing to, which can become exactly as dangerous and disruptive as it sounds.
I do think that these factors means that interstate conflict between rational actors will mostly push wars to have limited objectives. The problem is that negotiated settlements strictly dominate those wars, and so truly rational actors should always find a settlement for at least those issues.
that constrain the opposition from attempting state destruction.
The point of modern war is not to destroy the ephemeral concept of the enemy state, such that, say, America, could claim to have won out against an invasion successfully if all of its nuclear weapons were destroyed, all of its air defenses were neutralized, all of its shipbuilding facilities were gone, and the engineers who could rebuild them were all dead, so long as a few guys in Iowa still declared loyalty to the stars and stripes.
If I am China, and I’m at war with the U.S., my end goal is not to deploy an endless stream of peacekeepers into Indiana while random guys with rifles take potshots at them for the next couple of decades and former engineering students devote their lives to building FPV drones. My goal is simply to do enough damage to the minds and machines that make the U.S. carrier fleet possible that my control of the Pacific is no longer an open question. At no point is “occupation” at all relevant to this.
In Iran, the reason why they stepped back from attempting regime change (which is absolutely worse for Iran than just losing air defenses) is that they realized that there was not enough support to win an occupation with boots on the ground, and the antigovernment protestors now have the initiative to push for that or not.
I would bet a considerable amount of money that ‘protestors’ are not going to overthrow the Iranian government. Like i said, the age of the plausibly deniable color revolution is done, and the role of these protestors, at most, was to serve as a setpiece to try to convince the American government and public that the war was justified and easily winnable.
In Ukraine, Russia definitely tried regime change, and lost. This is what the 3 mile long tank columns at Kyiv were about, why it was a 3-day special military operation. You can’t occupy territory in 3 days, (because Ukraine can just counter-attack) the only possible war aim is regime change as a fait-accompli. The fact that Ukraine did not collapse as a government is determined by basically the same factors as civil war.
Disagree—this is effectively a propaganda piece. You could argue that Russia believed that Ukraine was acting alone, and that a hostile-but-self-interested government could be scared into backing off if the status quo was threatened, but it became pretty clear after that that London and Washington are pretty significant players in deciding what they are and aren’t allowed to do. The shenanigans around the death of Ukrainian peace negotiator Denis Kireev at the start of the war, as a treaty was beginning to take shape, speak to this.
In any case, even the most lopsided portrayal of this doesn’t look anything like an ‘occupation’. The Russians moved some forces in in a shock and awe campaign targeted at the minds of Ukrainian leadership. That’s something vastly different than trying to conquer and hold territory.
I realized we are in the weeds. Since we both agree that states will be humbled, not destroyed, we should not see survivorship bias shape what sorts of states remain.
I also realized something else. In my mind, if acting rationally the strategic framework for the government confronting protestors is coextensive with the dynamics of political violence and occupation. The governments strategy options, goals, and constraints are basically the same, and so they should be taking many of the same sorts of actions, and they are basically continuums of the same thing. The fact that protestors often settle for small concessions is a reflection of their real strategic situation, and is a success for the protestors (they get their object), and sometimes also the government (they still exist)
I don’t think ‘existing state’ and ‘wins the occupation’ are concepts that fit together. The existing state is not (at least, primarily) fighting a recalcitrant populace that wants them out. They are fighting an outside enemy that wants to destroy their military capabilities and neutralize them as a threat. This is very different from a war to, say, make Afghanistan into a U.S. - friendly liberal democracy.
In Iran, while initial narratives about regime change were posted, arguably with the intent of convincing the U.S. government to commit to a conflict it would otherwise have avoided, the Israeli[1] intention now seems to be doing maximum damage to the long-term capabilities of Iran.
In Eastern Europe, nobody serious has claimed that Russia intended to conquer all of Ukraine. Their territorial claims amount to “give us the parts that voted for detente with us to begin with, plus whatever else we incidentally capture before a treaty is signed because it’d be bad PR to spend blood capturing something and then sign it away”. Even that is mostly for domestic PR—the practical goal is to make it impossible to host organized military buildup near Russia’s border.
In Syria, the new government certainly does not satisfy the lofty goals about human rights that were ostensibly the point of U.S. involvement there. Moreover, despite the new government’s very deferential initial behavior towards the U.S. / Israel, Israel has already started referring to its leader as “the head of the snake”—they’re not even particularly friendly with it now. This does not mean the war was ‘lost’ by anti-Assad countries—Syria used to be a formidable proxy, and now it is essentially powerless.
In all cases, more broadly, the war goal amounts to “this country cannot maintain a coherent air defense network, and our missiles and bombers give us permanent veto power on efforts to ever re-establish one”. If the resolution to Iran was that the Iranian government still existed but could never again commission a SAM site, Israel would be happy with that outcome. Likewise in EE and Syria—there isn’t really a meaningful distinction between “Assad is in power but he can’t shoot down our helicopters anymore” and “the new guy is in power and Syria can’t shoot down our helicopters anymore”.
I think this is an outdated claim. Color Revolutions were very effective during the early 2010′s, but aren’t anymore.
I don’t know that there is an American intention, at this point—there’s no resolution to this that benefits any element of America. Much of the administration seems to want out of this conflict, but are resigned to the fact that they have no means of unilaterally leaving without a confrontation with Israel.
The ability of either (the guerilla successors/stay-behind forces of the government) or (the government against an anti-war revolution) to win an occupation are exactly the structural forces that constrain the opposition from attempting state destruction.
In Iran, the reason why they stepped back from attempting regime change (which is absolutely worse for Iran than just losing air defenses) is that they realized that there was not enough support to win an occupation with boots on the ground, and the antigovernment protestors now have the initiative to push for that or not.
In Ukraine, Russia definitely tried regime change, and lost. This is what the 3 mile long tank columns at Kyiv were about, why it was a 3-day special military operation. You can’t occupy territory in 3 days, (because Ukraine can just counter-attack) the only possible war aim is regime change as a fait-accompli. The fact that Ukraine did not collapse as a government is determined by basically the same factors as civil war.
In Syria, they achieved one maximalist war aim, (the destruction of the Assad regime), because it lost the hybrid (regular civil)/(guerilla) war with the Islamist rebels mostly. They were not the US preferred faction, but neither Israel nor the US are willing to uproot them, so they will stay, and have to deal with sectarian violence by themselves.
There was basically a Color Revolution in Nepal in 2025. There was an attempt at protests to overthrow the Iranian government about 3 months ago, and they failed. Those protests are a large shaping factor of the current war. That is to say, the constraining factor preventing people from “just shooting protestors”, is that it leads to fighting an occupation, which governments lose somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the time, which is a lot. In the absence of the willingness to use violence, the best tools at disrupting protests involve willingness to give concessions, that is, they give protestors political power. If you are not willing to either give concessions or use violence, your options are worse, and generally involve letting the protestors set up a pseudo-government for as long as they are willing to, which can become exactly as dangerous and disruptive as it sounds.
I do think that these factors means that interstate conflict between rational actors will mostly push wars to have limited objectives. The problem is that negotiated settlements strictly dominate those wars, and so truly rational actors should always find a settlement for at least those issues.
The point of modern war is not to destroy the ephemeral concept of the enemy state, such that, say, America, could claim to have won out against an invasion successfully if all of its nuclear weapons were destroyed, all of its air defenses were neutralized, all of its shipbuilding facilities were gone, and the engineers who could rebuild them were all dead, so long as a few guys in Iowa still declared loyalty to the stars and stripes.
If I am China, and I’m at war with the U.S., my end goal is not to deploy an endless stream of peacekeepers into Indiana while random guys with rifles take potshots at them for the next couple of decades and former engineering students devote their lives to building FPV drones. My goal is simply to do enough damage to the minds and machines that make the U.S. carrier fleet possible that my control of the Pacific is no longer an open question. At no point is “occupation” at all relevant to this.
I would bet a considerable amount of money that ‘protestors’ are not going to overthrow the Iranian government. Like i said, the age of the plausibly deniable color revolution is done, and the role of these protestors, at most, was to serve as a setpiece to try to convince the American government and public that the war was justified and easily winnable.
Disagree—this is effectively a propaganda piece. You could argue that Russia believed that Ukraine was acting alone, and that a hostile-but-self-interested government could be scared into backing off if the status quo was threatened, but it became pretty clear after that that London and Washington are pretty significant players in deciding what they are and aren’t allowed to do. The shenanigans around the death of Ukrainian peace negotiator Denis Kireev at the start of the war, as a treaty was beginning to take shape, speak to this.
In any case, even the most lopsided portrayal of this doesn’t look anything like an ‘occupation’. The Russians moved some forces in in a shock and awe campaign targeted at the minds of Ukrainian leadership. That’s something vastly different than trying to conquer and hold territory.
I realized we are in the weeds. Since we both agree that states will be humbled, not destroyed, we should not see survivorship bias shape what sorts of states remain.
I also realized something else. In my mind, if acting rationally the strategic framework for the government confronting protestors is coextensive with the dynamics of political violence and occupation. The governments strategy options, goals, and constraints are basically the same, and so they should be taking many of the same sorts of actions, and they are basically continuums of the same thing. The fact that protestors often settle for small concessions is a reflection of their real strategic situation, and is a success for the protestors (they get their object), and sometimes also the government (they still exist)