After Ukraine defeats Russia, which seems imminent at this point…
I’m getting ahead of myself here. Ukraine has been doing multiple targeted strikes every day on critical military and infrastructure targets inside Russia for months now. Like we saw in Syria, this will eventually reach a tipping point where the Russian supply line collapses, and then the front line of Russians in Ukraine will collapse. This is happening now. This is why Putin is meeting with Trump in a pointless meeting in Alaska today. Just give it a few months.
Once Ukraine wins, the question becomes, which countries are left that could be the target of an invasion in the future? I’m narrowing this down to where:
- One must be a democracy; one must not be. To be a democracy, you need an overall democracy score from the Economist Intelligence Unit of 5 or more.
- You must physically border an authoritarian regime whose democracy score is under 5 and more than 2 points less than yours.
- The authoritarian regime must have a GDP at least 10 times that of the democracy. Russia’s economy is over 10 times the size of Ukraine’s, and it is a stalemate. If they were even, the democracy would easily win.
- The authoritarian regime must have at least twice the population of the democracy. Do you really think that Zimbabwe would win a war against South Africa? Be realistic.
- The democracy cannot have a mutual protection pact.
This leaves us only a few conflicts that have the possibility of turning into massive international conflicts between bordering states.
- Chinese invasion of Mongolia, except for the fact that China and Mongolia have strong relations, according to the Wikipedia article.
- Russian invasion of Georgia, as we saw in 2008.
- Russian invasion of Mongolia, except for Mongolia’s strong relationship with China.
- Russian invasion of Ukraine, as we see right now.
- Iranian invasion of Armenia, which is not out of the question if Azerbaijan and Iran wanted to work together on such a mission.
So an invasion of Mongolia is out of the question because of their relationship with China. China does not want to waste its investments from the Belt and Road Initiative. Plus, it would have major diplomatic repercussions for China. It’s not likely. Chinese political culture has been focused on strength through cooperation since the Vietnam War, and it has worked well for them. They are not going to throw that away.
China might defend Mongolia if Russia invaded, plus Russia’s resources are not well-positioned to attack Mongolia. There are only a few chokepoints for moving people and goods east to west in Siberia, and if those connections were destroyed, Russia would be unable to reach Mongolia with most of what is left of its military. Russia can barely operate across a vast fertile plain, let alone the mountains and deserts of its border region with Mongolia. They are unlikely to even attempt such a suicide mission.
I do not believe an invasion between an authoritarian regime and a far-flung democracy is very likely. Could Russia successfully invade Mauritius? Not really. Any realistic war is going to be between bordering states.
So the obvious path forward is for Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia to join NATO, and that pretty much eliminates every likely large-scale war involving democracies.
The remaining ongoing armed conflicts in the world are located in countries with extremely poor economies and large issues with corruption. The factors behind these conflicts are internal, primarily corruption, which is the solution to these conflicts. The people of those countries need to fix their governments; foreign nations will be limited in their effectiveness without buy-in from the people. Look at Iraq.
Simply eliminating the possibility of large-scale international conflict being inflicted upon democracies with clean governments would be a massive victory, and the only thing we have to do to secure that future is to let Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia into NATO.
