> If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone. My sort of un

> If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone. My sort of uninformed reading of the problem in Mali / Sahel desert insurgencies is just that the French didn't do a very good job at a strategic level, which isn't really the military's fault. It strikes me that most of the western debacles have been essentially down to a pretty thin understanding of how to discover and support regional partners. There's no quantity of bombs or boots that would make the Afghan kleptocratic torture state command a plurality of support, and worse, the Americans were temperamentally incapable of building bridges with the kind of people that could form a stable government. My feeling is that resources aren't the problem: the problem is that (for a number of reasons) western policy making elites are just making the wrong decisions, both in terms of how ambitious their projects are (the post-invasion Iraq project was insane), and in terms of who they choose to work with. If you take Iraq for example, the US chose to marginalize Iran early on, despite the fact they would have been (practically speaking) a great partner, who were more than willing to involve themselves in Iraqi regime change.