While Xi gets smart, Trump and Putin are showing the world what dumb power can do

The wars in Ukraine and Iran are different in many ways but united in essential character. Not only because both are illegal. But because both are wars of hubris.

Vladimir Putin and then Donald Trump did not launch their invasions because there was any actual threat to their nations. Putin had to invent “Nazis” running Ukraine in order to make it sound scary. He said Ukraine had “gone so far as to aspire to acquire nuclear weapons”, knowing very well that Kyiv had surrendered all its nukes to Russia in the 1990s under the Budapest Memorandum in return for a supposed security guarantee from Moscow.

As for the alleged nuclear threat to America from Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in early March that “there has been no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb”. Trump’s own spy chief agreed.

The US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in late March gave written testimony to the Senate – which she refused to read aloud for fear of enraging her boss – that “as a result of Operation Midnight Hammer” last June “Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been (sic) no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability”.

Putin and Trump launched these wars of choice, heady with hubris, the overweening pride and arrogance that the ancient Greeks so feared as the precursor to disaster.

We shouldn’t be too shocked. Remember Putin posing bare-chested on horseback in the mountains? And Trump’s boast that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes? And both of them publishing footage of themselves wrestling opponents to the ground.

“How much dumber will this get?” Hillary Clinton wanted to know early last year. Trump, unable to learn from Putin’s disastrous misjudgment in Ukraine, has now given the world a strong clue. Both men expected their wars would be over in days or weeks.

They declared maximalist demands at the outset of their wars. Putin insisted on “denazification”, total disarmament of Kyiv and the installation of a neutral government. Trump stipulated “unconditional surrender” by Tehran.

Senior fellow at the US Studies Centre and former political staffer

Instead, they are being humiliated by much smaller nations. Their grand visions of crushing victories have turned out to be fantasy. In reality, they are stalemated. Neither Russia nor the US appears able to win, yet they seem unable to extract themselves. These great powers are reminiscent of the impetuous rabbit in the famous African-American folk story of the tar-baby published in 1881.

In the tale tol