By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-09-09 02:11:54 | Updated at 2026-09-09 10:39:32
9 hours ago
A war is a clash of wills — a bloody collision between irreconcilable national interests.
In the ancient world, it was easy to tell apart winners and losers.
The defeated city — think of Troy in the “Iliad” — was looted and burned to the ground. Most of the population was put to the sword, while the young women were distributed as bonus prizes among the winners.
One of the epithets Homer uses for the hero Odysseus is “sacker of cities.” Homer meant this as a compliment.
Modern wars, on the other hand, can be hugely complicated affairs.
Sometimes, the outcomes are self-evident: there’s no question that the US won World War II but lost the Vietnam War.
Just as often, contemporary wars end in confusion.
Who won the Korean War — or, more recently, the Iraq War?
It depends on whom you ask.
In those cases, the most decisive weapon by far is information — the ability to persuade the home audience and the world at large that you are, in fact, winning.
Information warfare
Two epochal wars are raging at present — between Russia and Ukraine, and the US and Iran — the outcome of which will determine not only the global disposition of power but also the continuing ability of the 20th century to export its quarrels to the 21st.
For all that, both wars belong to the confusing category.
Ferocious information struggles are thus being waged in parallel with the slaughter and destruction on the ground.
The invasion of Ukraine, which the Russians initially thought would be wrapped up in a matter of weeks, is now deep into its fourth year.
The information war was lost by Russia almost immediately.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his previous life a TV comic, turned out to be a courageous and charismatic wartime leader. The blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag suddenly sprouted in windows and porches across the West in a gesture of moral support.
Pressed by their electorates, NATO governments lavished material assistance on Ukraine.
Despite his reputation as a master of propaganda, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin showed no interest in playing the game.
Against the Western narrative of the plucky Ukrainian underdog-with-a-MANPAD, Putin opposed the myth of Russian invincibility.
His forces greatly outnumbered the Ukrainian military. His missiles would wreak mayhem on Ukraine’s infrastructure and civilian centers. He planned to squeeze the country like a constrictor until all resistance disintegrated.
Given the dense fog of war and the pro-Ukraine slant of most news sources, we don’t know how close Putin came to achieving his objective.
Last winter, however, the Ukrainians were hanging on by a thread.
Russia not-so invincible
The electric grid was down in brutal subfreezing conditions. Ukrainian forces were running out of manpower. The Russian army was famous for its winter offensives. A major breakthrough seemed possible, even probable.
It never happened.
Since that low point, two developments have changed the balance of forces to Ukraine’s advantage — and driven the war closer to a decision-point.
First, Ukraine’s production and deployment of military drones has increased by many levels of magnitude.
Tactically, the drones make up for the shortage of Ukrainian personnel: drone “kill zones” are responsible for 60 percent of Russian casualties at the front.
Strategically, drones have struck deep into Russian territory, including Moscow, hitting refineries, ports, and factories, wearing down Russia’s industrial warmaking capacity.
The second development is a consequence of the first.
By continuing to feed soldiers into the Ukraine meat-grinder, Russia has seen casualties outstrip the number of recruits, making a civilian call-up increasingly likely. This threat has inspired the panicked flight of military-age males out of the country.
In addition, the Russian economy, squeezed by international sanctions and the drone onslaught, appears to be sputtering. Russia’s oil-refining capacity in particular has taken a hit.
Putin sheds few tears over the loss of lives or prosperity of his fellow Russians, but there are elements in the power equation that even a dictator must respect. He has gone to great lengths to avoid a new mobilization for that reason.
Regardless, the myth of Russian invincibility lies in tatters. The alternatives — evident to Putin no less than to a watching world — are either endless attrition or an end to hostilities.
Peace won’t look like a final settlement, as neither side can yield on the principles involved.
Rather, it will resemble the arrangement in Korea — an armistice along the current front lines with a tacit promise not to devastate each other’s territory.
For what it’s worth, such an agreement would favor Ukraine.
Putin, who is 73, will soon go the way of all flesh. The next ruler of Russia will have more pressing business at hand than to pursue a debilitating imperial adventure.
One-sided Iran conflict
The war could mark the end of Russia’s 400-year run as a great power — given the country’s dreadful demographic trends, maybe forever.
The ultimate winners? The noncombatants. That would be mainly China, whose geopolitical appendage Russia has already become, and to a lesser extent the US.
In the American conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran, matters stand quite differently.
Whereas Russia and Ukraine have pounded each other relentlessly like two well-matched heavyweights, the Iran War has been a one-sided affair, with US and Israeli attacks leaving that country economically prostrated and politically disorganized.
The Iranian leadership has been pulverized.
The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed during the initial February bombardment.
His son and heir, Mojtaba Khamenei, if he’s really alive, was so mangled or traumatized by that event that he has never been seen in public since.
Many high-placed militia, industry, and technology officials have also gone to their reward in Islamist heaven.
The chief reason for the war, which is the Iran’s nuclear program, has been neutralized for many years, possibly decades.
Not only have the underground refinement laboratories been bunker-bombed to dust — much of the necessary industrial infrastructure has also been destroyed.
Iran’s air defenses were taken out almost immediately. Its vaunted missile and drone arsenal appear to have been rendered harmless.
The Iranian regime’s sporadic and futile attacks on its neighbors have only intensified the hostility of the Arab Gulf nations.
Meanwhile, Iran’s network of Arab proxies has suffered an almost complete collapse.
Syria, once virtually an Iranian colony, is now in enemy hands.
Hamas in Gaza hasn’t escaped Israel’s wrath after the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023.
Hezbollah too has been decapitated and decimated by Israeli forces. At the moment, the Israelis are in the process of taking out a massive Iranian-built Hezbollah fortress on a Lebanese mountain ridge.
Given these military and political defeats, the Iranians opted for economic warfare: they declared the Straits of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is shipped, closed to business.
Trump vs. Iran & media
After a few weeks of evident confusion, however, the Trump administration seems to have taken control of the strait.
The US Navy has cleared Iranian mines, blockaded Iranian vessels — making it impossible for Iran to export its own oil — and safely rerouted the transport shipping of friendly nations.
Gasoline prices have spiked, but so has the stock market.
In brief, all the American war aims have been met: eliminating the nuclear threat, downgrading Iran’s strike capability and ending its capacity for mischief through terrorist proxies.
I’m guessing this abundance of good news hasn’t reached you yet.
Here’s what you have been hearing:
“Iran is on track to win this war pretty spectacularly.”
“A more confident Iran emerges after six months of war with the US.”
“The Iran War is a strategic failure.”
In its conflict with Iran, the United States has lost the information war as decisively as it has won the kinetic fight.
For this, President Trump owns his share of responsibility.
He’s been an erratic wartime communicator, first boasting that he would annihilate Iran’s “whole civilization,” then negotiating a settlement so generous to the ayatollahs as to make Barack Obama blush, finally backing off from that into incoherence.
The president may have thought he was performing the art of the deal, but Americans were listening — and they were baffled.
Still, the truth remains that whatever Trump said or did, the global elite class, including the media, was going to side with his enemies.
And whatever the US has achieved, those around the world who loathe and envy this country will root for our defeat.
The question now is which story gains traction: the reality of victory or the perception of defeat.
Trump has time on his side.
He may suffer a distracting political defeat at home, or yield once again to the impulse to obtain some sort of deal through appeasement.
Otherwise, he has two years to apply crushing pressure on Iran.
The theocratic regime, already leaderless, is unlikely to survive that trial in its present form.
Mid East realignment
The end of the Iran War will make possible a dramatic realignment in the Middle East, as the Sunni Arab nations and Israel forge military and economic bonds to ensure that Iran never again threatens their existence.
By 2028 or so, then, both Ukraine and Iran could lapse into an unusual state of external calm.
The last raging fires of the post-Cold War era — Russian irredentism and Islamist nihilism — will have been extinguished.
Curiously, in an entirely different context, other “end of history” fever dreams, like the transgender psychosis and climate fanaticism, have begun to fade from the scene.
For the first time since World War I, the open future rather than a grievance-crowded past could determine the standard of progress and the course of events.
If that is indeed the case, we are in for an interesting ride.
