Ukraine, Iran, and Occam's Razor

Or, what Putin and Trump have in common with every other leader who initiates a war.

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

On Sunday the New York Times’ Neil MacFarquhar had an interesting essay comparing Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine folly with Donald Trump’s Iran folly, and what those two follies have in common — namely, piss-poor perceptions of their targets:

“Both conflicts have produced a similar outcome: a weaker power has trapped a stronger one in a costly confrontation,” Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, wrote in a policy paper for the Brookings Institution this week. “Like Putin, Trump did not have a plan for what would happen next.”

The root of the issue is that both presidents sparked wars with limited understanding of the opposing side, Ms. Hill said in an interview. “Both projected their own centralized views of their own roles onto Iran and Ukraine, so they thought if they could decapitate the system it would fall,” she said.

Mr. Putin did not anticipate fierce Ukrainian resistance, for example; Mr. Trump ignored admonitions that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz, and appeared to underestimate Iran’s capacity to retaliate and inflict damage on America’s allies in the region. Nor did the Iranian people rise up against their authoritarian leaders, as Israel and the United States had urged them to do.

While the bombing campaigns of the United States and Russia have had devastating effects, analysts noted, air power alone has not proved decisive….

Ultimately, analysts said, the lack of a resolution makes both the United States and Russia appear weak, and could hasten a more decentralized international order.

The rest of the article is well worth reading. I do think Hill is onto something when she notes that both Putin and Trump misperceptions of their adversaries led to their current imbroglios. The idea that both leaders have been too heavily insulated from critical voices is a solid observation. Vladimir Putin ostensibly has spent a generation trying to rebuild the Russian state, but he has exercised ever-greater control over the Russian government, sidelined his most competent advisors, and creating a culture of intimidation. As a result, Putin has plenty of loyalists but no one who can tell him when there is a problem. As for Trump, well, his hollowing out of state capacity and installation of an army of sycophants is well-trodden territory in this newsletter.

That said, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World also believes that while Putin and Trump share some commonalities in how they view the world, launching misbegotten wars that turn into strategic quagmires is hardly unique to them. Indeed, this is a moment when Occam’s Razor should provide some useful guidance.

What does Occam’s Razor tell me? It is pretty simple: both Putin and Trump launched their wars of choice because their prior uses of military force had seemed to go well and they thought their past successes predicted future successes.

It is worth remembering that prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, strategists were all a twitter about Russia’s success at gray zone warfare — what some called the Gerasimov Doctrine. Prior to 2022, the Russian military had successfully intervened in Georgia in 2009, Crimea in 2014, and Syria a year after that. In all three cases, Russia achieved its strategic goal without too much fuss or loss of life. With that kind of winning streak, it’s not surprising that Putin believed he could take all of Ukraine with a shock and awe campaign.

Similarly, Trump also became enamored of using military force to solve his problems based on his prior track record. In 2020 he approved the drone strike that assassinated Qassem Soleimani. In 2025, however, his lust for military action increased dramatically with each action. Operation Midnight Hammer in Iran clearly failed in its objective — otherwise Trump does not approve Epic Fury eight months later. But at the same time, Midnight Hammer did not trigger a large-scale Iranian response, further emboldening Trump. The Venezuela operation against Maduro was also a tactical success, one that took less time than Midnight Hammer no less. Little wonder that he thought attacking Iran would be a quick and painless affair.

Now both Putin and Trump are forced to adopt-second-best responses. For Putin, it means launching even more brutal airstrikes against Kyiv. For Trump, it means making a lot of concessions to obtain a regional cease-fire.

So where do thigs go from here? Unfortunately, if Fiona Hill’s Brookings paper is any guide, the short-term answer is grim:

Deadlock in Ukraine discredits Russia as a global military force. It corrodes Putin’s patina of indestructibility in the same way that the stalemate in the Persian Gulf undermines the United States and Trump….

So-called “second-rate powers” have diminished the standing of Putin and Trump, the men who started these ill-advised wars. Russia and the United States both have fewer means to exert power and influence than before. Their erstwhile allies—in places like the Caucasus and Central Asia in the case of Russia, and Europe in the case of the United States—are looking beyond them at new regional security options, hastening the development of a more decentralized international order.

Simply put, the perception of power is in and of itself a form of power. U.S. failures erode the utility of U.S. structural power. The most useful quality of structural power is securing concessions based merely at the possibility of its use. Even if non-compliance is costly for targets, the rest of the world notes the resistance more than the cost-benefit ratio. The more instances in which targets resist, the less efficient the exercise of structural power will be.

In other words, both Russia and the United States currently are in ragged strategic shape. And that does not seem to be changing anytime soon.