A lot of important lessons are being learned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “relearned” from the current war in Ukraine. But, as Anarchonomicon observes, a number of the various elements of this war are unique and unlikely to be repeated:
You have the resources of dozens of nations representing over half the world’s economy being poured into a country that can neither win nor negotiate, to fight its similar neighbor that also has to fight it out despite the cost due to the international strategic implications, both of whom are Slavic-white countries who both had strong reserves of nationalism and patriotism and avoided the kind of multi-culti mass-immigration that has zapped the willingness to fight for their country right out of every white man in the west, and because of a series of geostrategic accidents they spontaneously agreed to limit the fighting to stretch of land as narrow as that between the Swiss Border and the English Channel.
That’s a whole lot of conditions that will probably never hold again. Or at least certainly not for the next hundred years given the demographic crises everywhere and the pending death of the nation state.
- If the smaller state doesn’t have allies who can fund it to the tune 50+% its annual GDP it can’t happen.
- If either country has endured mass immigration/multiculturalism and doesn’t have an eastern european level paradoxical ultra-nationalism for their decaying shithole country…it can’t happen.
- If either country isn’t being bribed/backed into a corner to refuse all negotiation, it can’t happen.
- And if either country would rather just expand the war geographically and not fight an attritional trench war, it can’t happen.
The most important thing to note is that Ukraine is Clown World’s proxy. The entire Empire That Never Ended is fighting Russia, and is in the process of losing the war militarily, economically, and diplomatically. And once Clown World either contracts or collapses entirely, there isn’t a similar force on Earth capable of recreating it.
Which means any lessons about late-stage imperial proxy wars will probably not be relevant for another 200 years.