How Russia Can Defeat Ukraine and NATO

How Iran Defeated America

Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago ranks as one of our most distinguished political scientists. As early as the beginning of May he already declared that President Donald Trump’s ill-fated war against Iran was already so irretrievably lost that the only way he could end it and save the world economy from total disaster would be “to surrender.”

That statement proved prophetic. The provisions of the “Memorandum of Understanding” that Trump recently signed with Iran were so extremely one-sided that the vast majority of observers, whether supporters of the war or its opponents, whether Americans or Israelis, generally described the document in such humiliating terms.

Encountering American ... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing. Indeed, Prof. Robert Pape argued that the outcome of the war may have potentially established Iranian regional hegemony over the Persian Gulf and its vast natural resources. An Israeli national security expert interviewed by the New York Times suggested much the same thing:

“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday.

“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”…

Over the weekend, a lengthy WSJ investigation described the huge destruction that Iran had inflicted upon the American naval base in Bahrain, our most important in the region, which will probably never be rebuilt. Our many other regional bases also suffered billions of dollars of damage at the hands of inexpensive Iranian missiles and drones so we might permanently abandon all of those facilities, thereby achieving one of Iran’s primary strategic objectives.

Soon after he launched his original attack against Iran, Trump had boastfully proclaimed that he would only accept “unconditional surrender.” So when an interviewer recently asked him what had become of that demand, our president responded with his typically outrageous bluster, declaring that he’d indeed successfully forced the Iranians to sign an agreement along those lines. This led Mearsheimer to joke that Trump was actually being truthful, but the country that had unconditionally surrendered had been America. Both Prof. Pape and Tucker Carlson said much the same thing.

Perhaps because of his total ignorance of history, Trump willingly signed the document at Versailles. In many respects the terms recalled the infamous Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War that Imperial Germany had been forced to sign over a century ago, a fact noted with considerable amusement by some analysts.

Unreal: the symbolism of Trump signing a surrender agreement at Versailles in which the US agrees to pay massive reparations is just too perfect.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Macron weaponized Trump’s complete ignorance of history and told him something like: “Mr. President,… https://t.co/1HpMrYV66B

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 18, 2026

Back in March I wrote 👇 that Iran was winning, and not only strategically but tactically too, but I genuinely didn’t expect it would eventually lead – 3 months later – to a complete US surrender.

Because, make no mistake, this is what the “deal” that was just signed is: a… https://t.co/5TiPVQBct8

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 18, 2026

The shocking nature of the agreement may be illustrated by a single, striking element. In Paragraph 6, America committed to supporting the creation of a fund for “the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran that would be at least $300 billion in size. According to Wikipedia, Iran’s current GDP is around $225 billion in nominal terms, so this amounted to roughly 1.3 years of Iran’s total economic output. Therefore, a comparable figure for America would be around $42 trillion(!) in financial reparations, an amount somewhat larger than our entire accumulated national debt. If we had defeated some other country in a war and forced it into promising to help pay off the entire American national debt, I’m sure that our leaders would have endlessly crowed about their stupendous victory.

A peace agreement involving such onerous financial provisions seemed extremely rare in recorded political history. The figure mentioned was roughly comparable to the outrageous total reparations payments that Germany had been forced to promise the Allied countries in its own 1919 Treaty of Versailles. But Germany never actually paid that sum, which anyway was to have been spread out over a dozen years. So the financial terms of America’s defeat might certainly be one for the record-books.

Purely on the geopolitical considerations, Prof. Mearsheimer argued that America had suffered the greatest strategic disaster in its 250 year national history, replacing the Iraq War of a quarter century ago at the top of the charts.

A few days ago Tucker Carlson interviewed influential MAGA military analyst Brandon J. Weichert whose early analyses of the severe difficulties that America was encountering in the war had proven accurate, and he provided a good summary of the longer-term consequences that I would encourage people to watch.

Video Link

Admittedly, the accord that we signed with Iran was merely a preliminary one, and neither Trump nor America has been much known for faithfully fulfilling their solemn agreements. Indeed, over the last week Trump has unsurprisingly resorted to numerous “confabulations,” declaring the pact included all sorts of things that it did not and that the Iranians had made all sorts of other commitments they strongly denied, with Vice President JD Vance sometimes offering some similar misrepresentations. In a FoxNews interview, Trump even threatened the lives of the Iranian negotiators, hardly normal diplomatic protocol. The Israeli government refused to comply with any of the Lebanese provisions of the document.

By the weekend, there were already strong signs that the agreement might be collapsing. A cargo vessel attempting to transit the Gulf refused to take the route demanded by the Iranian IRGC and was hit by a drone, after which Trump ordered a bombing attack in retaliation and the Iranians struck back, leading to a cycle of strikes and counter-strikes. So perhaps the war will be restarted and the Strait soon be closed once again, with a large majority of the cargo ships and tankers still trapped inside, and the global oil supplies once again heading towards “tank bottom.” The Israel Lobby and U... Walt, Stephen M. Check Amazon for Pricing.

But regardless of what happens, the humiliating terms the Iranians had forced Trump to sign certainly demonstrated the tremendous success of their strategy against an adversary whose annual military spending has been more than 100 times greater. Over the last decade, we had spent well over two trillion dollars on our navy, with one of its most crucial missions being control of the vital sea lanes of the Persian Gulf, but it proved totally useless against the Iranian forces.

Russia’s Unsuccessful Ukraine War

I think that the remarkable results of Iran’s bold and courageous military strategy should be given very careful consideration by the Russians. The latter are now well into the fifth year of their grinding war against Ukraine, a “special military operation” that had begun in February 2022 and was originally expected to last only a month or two.

At the cost of a few thousand lives and a few weeks of heavy combat operations, Iran has apparently inflicted a severe strategic defeat upon America, the world’s reigning global superpower, perhaps even taking an important step towards establishing itself as a regional hegemon in its own right.

Meanwhile, Russia’s war against a much weaker Ukraine has already lasted longer than its colossal Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. Yet Russia has still failed to capture much of the territory of the four eastern oblasts that it had officially annexed and incorporated back in September 2022.

Casualty figures are hotly disputed, but I think that the Russian forces have probably suffered many hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, including at least a couple of hundred thousand fatalities. Although Ukrainian losses have likely been far greater, such Russian casualties still loom very large in a population of about 143 million, especially one that has low fertility rates, rates that are far below replacement levels. Hundreds of thousands of severely wounded or maimed Russians may have become a grim and unwelcome sight across all the cities, towns, and villages of that huge country.

Russia is far stronger than Ukraine and Iran is far weaker than America, but the results of the two conflicts have been exactly the opposite of what might have been expected.

Worse still for the Russians, there has been a steady escalation in the boldness and size of the Ukrainian strikes deep within Russian territory. Last month, Moscow was attacked by many hundreds of heavy drones, and earlier this month St. Petersburg suffered a similar fate. For huge Ukrainian attacks to be regularly striking Russia’s most important cities represents a tremendous national humiliation.

The sharp contrast between the battlefield achievements of Iran and Russia was shown on the front page of this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. One story reported the great destruction the former had inflicted upon America’s Persian Gulf bases. Meanwhile, another described the very successful recent waves of Ukrainian drone attacks against Russia’s prized Crimea territory, which had led to a severe fuel and electricity crisis and forced the declaration of a state of emergency.

Ukraine has also begun successfully attacking Russian oil refineries, inflicting substantial damage upon that country’s main export industry.

Against Our Better Jud... Alison Weir Best Price: $7.99 Buy New $9.93 (as of 10:55 UTC - Details) Last month, a Ukrainian drone strike on a college dorm killed 18 young women studying to become teachers, and there is considerable speculation that this atrocity was deliberate, intended to embarrass Russian President Vladimir Putin and demonstrate his weakness in the face of such brutal attacks.

Indeed, the Ukrainian government has now grown so self-confident and aggressive that it recently threatened to expand the war by attacking neighboring Belarus, a longtime Russian ally.

Meanwhile, advances in drone technology seem to have drastically reduced the pace of Russian progress on the battlefield, with signs of a deadlock developing.

For most of the last few years, Prof. Mearsheimer has been confident that the weight of Russia’s superiority in manpower and munitions would ultimately prove decisive and its complete victory on the battlefield was merely a question of time. But last month he began to reassess that longstanding perspective, suggesting that contrary to his own expectations, the ultimate result of the Ukraine War might be the sort of frozen conflict that some others had long predicted.

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