US president Donald Trump’s proposed peace talks with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy could determine the future of Ukraine. The outcome will also determine the future and fundamental nature of Europe’s military partnership with the United States through the Nato alliance.
In this regard, Trump and his advisers would do well to read Phillips Payson O’Brien’s excellent War and Power: Who Wins Wars – And Why. O’Brien is professor of strategic studies at St Andrews and a highly respected historian and a prominent expert on strategic studies and the conduct and outcomes of war. His latest publication is both timely and sobering in equal measure.
O’Brien seeks to create a comprehensive and more holistic methodology for determining the conduct of war in the 21st century in all of its catastrophic consequences and potential outcomes. It is a powerful read, and meticulously researched: O’Brien forensically examines the manner in which the two World Wars were fought, along with the cold war and the wars the United States has fought in the 21st century thus far.
He sets out – with great clarity – a set of criteria, through which to analyse the war-fighting potential of what he terms “full-spectrum powers”. O’Brien eschews the terms “great powers” or “superpowers” to describe dominant and domineering global players in war and conflict – as he elegantly describes throughout the book the manner in which such powers are often defeated by smaller, more determined adversaries.
The criteria for assessing war-fighting capabilities that O’Brien proposes consist of traditional quantitative measures such as the economic and technological power of a state, along with its military prowess and capacity for force projection and the power and force multipliers of a state’s military and diplomatic alliances.
Critically, and crucially for our understanding of contemporary conflict in places such as Ukraine and Gaza, O’Brien also includes a number of qualitative measures, including the leadership qualities of full-spectrum powers – the personality traits, motivations and competencies of leaders – along with the nature of individual societies, whether they be dynamic democracies or brittle, fear-based autocracies.
In considering war – in all of its squalor and destruction – O’Brien interrogates the assumption of Von Clausewitz’s oft-quoted maxim that war is simply the extension of politics. O’Brien argues that war is simply chaotic, resulting in suboptimal and usually unpredictable outcomes for those states and populations unfortunate enough to be caught up in them. He cites Churchill – considered one of the finest war leaders of the 20th century – in his assertion that war is simply an “education in catastrophe”.
O’Brien throughout the book deftly debunks the notion of the rational “grand strategy” and received notions of the “art” of warfare. With examples from history ranging from Kaiser Wilhelm II in the first World War to Hitler and Mussolini in the second – and, worryingly, leaders such as Putin, Trump and Netanyahu today – O’Brien demonstrates that most wars are avoidable and increasingly chaotic and costly.
His examples speak eloquently to the notion that war-fighting is essentially the failure of politics – a fundamental failing in human beings – with a key and commonly recurring feature throughout history, of the wrong person in power, at the wrong time and in the wrong place, being a big determinant of the outbreak of war and the enormous and unnecessary human suffering that follows. We are uncomfortably close to such a state of world affairs at present.
O’Brien demonstrates that while the United States has won practically every battle it has fought since the 1940s, it has lost most of the wars it has become involved in
In terms of military prowess and the ability of full-spectrum powers such as the United States, Russia and China to project force around the world, O’Brien points out the imbalance of military power that exists currently. In simple military terms, the US dominates with up to 10 globally deployable aircraft carrier groups – each with air and missile capabilities that dwarf those of most nation states. This compares with Russia’s creaking fleet of Kyiv-class vessels and the significant vulnerabilities revealed within their naval, ground and air assets during Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine – in territory directly alongside Russia’s own borders.
In pointing out the catastrophic losses suffered by an inept and “inert” Russian military in Ukraine, O’Brien re-emphasises the point that quantitative measures, such as the very large numbers of tanks, armoured fighting vehicles and combat aircraft that Russia possessed at the outset of its invasion of Ukraine, bore little or no relationship to the spectacular tactical and strategic failure of Putin’s “special military operation” in Donbass.
In the same vein, O’Brien demonstrates that while the United States has won practically every battle it has fought since the 1940s, it has lost most of the wars it has become involved in. The most recent examples are its military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. As China seeks to rapidly arm itself and counterbalance US military dominance – despite Beijing having no recent war-fighting experience – President Xi Jinping and his advisers might take note that excessive military expenditure and an arms race in the Indo-Pacific region might not be the shrewdest or most optimal strategy in the long term.
Instead, pointing again to the history of war, O’Brien argues that diplomatic and military alliances are the greatest indicator and predictor for those states that can sustain the chaos of war-fighting and survive their consequences. He argues that in peacetime and in time of war, the relative power of a state should be seen in its alliances and friendships and not in its perceived or real adversaries.
[ The Irish Times view on the war in Ukraine: for all his bluster, Putin is losingOpens in new window ]
He concludes that war is not a test of armies but of societies. O’Brien’s chapters and analysis on war in the 20th and 21st centuries show clearly that states that adopt a warrior culture in their militaries – such as Japan and Germany in the second World War – are consistently and thoroughly defeated in all cases by conscripted armies of “citizen soldiers” fighting for their way of life in dynamic and relatively free societies.
This appears to be the case in Ukraine where – despite dire predictions of a catastrophic collapse of Zelenskiy’s armed forces before the Kremlin’s much-hyped military – Ukrainian troops have fought with great courage and tenacity against Putin’s ill-considered vanity project. As such, Ukraine is a classic example of an ally “worth its weight in gold”, which is at risk of being betrayed by Trump.
On Ukraine, O’Brien observes, “Biden, had, like US presidents before him such as Trump and Obama, failed to understand that Ukraine was not some insignificant state whose people would give up in the face of Russian power”. If Putin is rewarded by the United States for its aggression in Europe, the US will have committed an egregious act of self-harm in acting contrary to the vital interests of its invaluable European allies within Nato.
One of the United States’ greatest strengths has been its diplomatic and military alliances. This is an ecosystem that enables full-spectrum power in its fullest sense and, as O’Brien observes, it is now being systematically dismantled by the Trump presidency, an administration that seems hell-bent on disrespecting and making enemies of its closest friends. These are the actions of an irrational leadership, and symptomatic of a former superpower entering its senile or end-stage.
In considering the possibility or risk of a global conflict between the United States and China in the coming decades, O’Brien concludes his analysis in a final chapter titled War and Power in the Indo-Pacific. He collates all of the evidence on leadership from previous conflicts – noting in particular the manner in which autocratic and sociopathic leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini and Putin have dragged their countries into irrational and unwinnable conflicts – in order to warn of an emerging leadership style in the US which is polarising an otherwise dynamic society and systematically undermining and destroying invaluable existing alliances.
O’Brien also notes the crucial value of new and emerging technology during wartime in determining outcomes. In the first World War, for example, Britain went from horse-drawn transport in 1914 to a fleet of 27,000 trucks, 2,600 tanks and (almost unbelievably) more than 50,000 aircraft by 1918. In a similar manner, Ukraine has gone from almost zero drones in 2021 to more than four million weaponised drones by 2024 in order to shape battlefield outcomes in Ukraine and to strike targets deep within Russia itself. O’Brien hypothesises that new autonomous weapons systems and the race for supremacy in artificial intelligence will transform the next global conflict.
In attempting to predict the outcome of such a war between the US and China – if such a catastrophe were to happen, O’Brien summarises: “Instead of looking at a military (power) in and of itself – counting its equipment, reading its doctrine, discussing its weapons – look instead at the economy, leadership, society and structure that created it. Its strengths and its weaknesses will come from these.”
In such uncertain times, in my view, Ireland should take a leaf from O’Brien’s book – value and protect our unique militarily neutral status – and continue to strengthen the extraordinary sets of alliances that we enjoy. While we need to urgently invest in our near-defenceless military capacity, Ireland needs to renew and protect our societal values and remake a republic in which our young people have a stake – a republic that they will be prepared to defend.
Further reading
Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won The War by Jonathan Dimbleby (Viking, 2024)
A doorstep of a book about the events of 1944 and the manner in which Stalin’s Red Army comprehensively defeated Hitler’s armies at the conclusion of the second World War. Dimbleby takes the reader through each military operation and battle fought to expel the Wehrmacht from the Soviet Union and follows the progress of Soviet formations all the way to Berlin.
His work is exhaustively researched and contains eyewitness accounts from soldiers and officers from all sides – alongside an impressive wealth of archival material from the diaries and papers of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin’s delegations.
Dimbleby offers the reader an alternative narrative to the winning of the war, inviting us to consider that it was a Soviet triumph – with D-Day and the contribution of the US and Britain a mere sideshow. It is a fascinating read and its accounts of the battles fought in Ukraine are particularly relevant given the conflict there today.
Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992–1995 by Jonathan Carroll (University Press of Kansas, 2025)
Carroll, who is Irish, is associate professor of military history and modern war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, UK. His book is an authoritative and compelling account of the UN’s attempt at peace-enforcement and nation building in Somalia between 1992 and 1995. Most readers will be familiar with the incident in October 1993 when two US Blackhawk helicopters were shot down in Somalia – an event that led to the Battle of Mogadishu and the loss of 18 US troops and hundreds of Somalis. Carroll’s book goes beyond this incident to recount the attempts of the international community to engage in an ambitious strategy of peacebuilding in Somalia. It was an extremely hazardous mission and one of the first experiences of UN peace enforcement for members of Óglaigh na hÉireann who served with UNOSOM II from August 1993 to January 1995.
Unfinished Empire: Russian Imperialism in Ukraine and the near-abroad by Donnacha Ó Beacháin (Agenda Publishing, 2025)
Prof Donnacha Ó Beacháin of Dublin City University has spent a great deal of time in Ukraine and has a wealth of experience of the challenges and suffering brought about by Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression there. This book is a carefully considered and comprehensive analysis of the nature of the Kremlin’s war of expansion into Donbass. Ó Beacháin carefully dissects and dismantles the false narratives and grievances put forward by Putin’s apparatus in order to justify their invasion for “defensive” purposes. The book is a masterclass in calm and objective examination of the conflict in a time of misinformation and disinformation. Above all it is written from the heart and with passion and is a warning to the EU and its allies of the ongoing threat posed by Putin’s cynical Russian imperialism.
