Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Across ages, scholars of war have returned to a deceptive yet simple question: what does it mean to win? Andrew Mack’s seminal work on asymmetric conflict showed why materially superior powers can lose “small wars” when battlefield dominance fails to produce the desired political outcome; in a later work, Ivan Arreguín-Toft argued that the interaction of strategies, rather than the balance of capabilities alone, often determines who prevails. Mary Kaldor’s formulation of “new wars” complicated the verdict further—contemporary conflict is sustained through dispersed networks, coercive economies and forms of violence that can persist beyond conventional campaigns. Analysed against this literature, the war with Iran has merely changed form and doesn’t offer a verdict on defeat or victory as yet.
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