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Leo Tolstoy writes in War and Peace that Napoleon never controlled the great army with which he invaded Russia in 1812, though this only became evident to others after he failed to win the battle of Borodino and during his calamitous retreat from Moscow.

Tolstoy, with his wide experience of military conflict, understood that all wars have so many moving parts – military, political, social – and that these parts move so swiftly and in such contradictory ways that those in nominal command are, in practice, at the mercy of events.

Proof that Tolstoy knew what he was talking about was provided by Vladimir Putin when he launched his disastrous invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and then again by Donald Trump when he attacked but failed to defeat Iran in 2026.

The two wars strikingly resemble each other in that they are being waged by leaders exercising great power but demonstrably appalling judgement, who are now mired in “forever wars” they can neither win nor end without a compromise which would reveal that they have entirely failed to fulfil their original war aims. The temptation is strong for Putin and Trump to double down in their efforts to achieve victory, regardless of the cost to their countries.

The phrase “forever wars” has become a stock term to describe a conflict that might go on ad infinitum at an unchanging level of violence. Bad though this is, as so many people will go on dying, it is also deceptively comforting as it suggests that a war is static and deep frozen. But in real wars, this stalemate seldom lasts, since fighting escalates automatically as the warring parties seek to break the deadlock to their own advantage with some new super weapon or surprise attack.

History shows that these may achieve a temporary tactical advantage, as when Germany first used poison gas in the First World War or the Americans bombed North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. But these are never the decisive knock-out blows they were expected to be, and they invariably provoke counter-escalation by the enemy. This has been the repeated pattern in Ukraine and the Middle East wars.

A classic example of an escalatory spiral came this summer when the US Navy partially succeeded in opening a passageway for oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which Washington believed would breach Iran’s blockade of the crucial waterway. But Iran counter-escalated successfully with an unexpected offensive by its Houthi allies in Yemen, who seized control of the Bab al Mandab strait at the exit/entrance to the Red Sea through which passes 10-12 per cent of the world’s maritime trade.

This deadly dance of escalation and counter-escalation is often obscured in the Western media by selective reporting. Very real Ukrainian successes are highlighted, but setbacks get scarcely a mention.

Ukraine has hit Russian oil refineries and important targets with drones and missiles deep inside Russia, a tangible success. But is it a decisive turning point in the war in Kyiv’s favour, as some Western commentators suggest? Going by media reports, this might well be so.

Yet during the same period that this was happening, Russian drones and missiles closed the Ukrainian port of Odesa on the Black Sea through which Ukraine, until recently, exported as much as five million tonnes of its grain a month. Instead, it is forced to send its agricultural exports to small-capacity ports on the Danube and Black Sea by road and rail, both vulnerable to omnipresent jet-powered Russian drones.

Skewed and partisan reporting of war gives a false impression of the balance of power between the combatants. Non-journalists often imagine that war propaganda is all about concocting damaging “fake facts” about the enemy. But the most effective propagandist seeking to shape public opinion never lies, but instead selects stories that show our side doing well and ignoring those that show anything different.

Given that governments, and the overwhelming majority of the public in the West, are pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian, it is easy to provide the ingredients for wishful thinking. For instance, it was widely reported some months back that the Russian army was losing 35,000 soldiers killed or seriously wounded each month. Ukrainian military intelligence was the source of this figure, but it was confirmed by anonymous Western intelligence officials, the implication being that the Russians might soon be unable to replace their battlefield losses.

The number seems very high, though there is no doubt that drone-dominated battlefields are extraordinarily lethal places. But since the Russians also use drones in huge numbers, an obvious though little-asked question was how great Ukrainian military casualties were by way of comparison.

These are a Ukrainian state secret, but on 17 September, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk informed the Polish parliament that “Russia’s new strategy – and, above all, its new technical capabilities, namely kamikaze drones – is also resulting in significantly higher casualties on the Ukrainian side. Our partners in Ukraine have informed me that recently there have been 27,000 casualties per month, and this, of course, unfortunately, in the saddest sense of the word, sets records for this war.” Ukrainian officials denied this number, but Tusk and his counterparts in Kyiv have no reason to exaggerate Ukrainian casualties. Again, there was scant mention of this in the Western media.

I am not shocked by participants in wars trying to give a rosy picture of their own prospects and to blacken those of the other side. This information war has been going on since the first caveman threw a stone at his neighbour. But experience shows that the most satisfied consumers of war propaganda are those who produce it. Blurred in all this self-serving over-optimism is the lethal fact that both Ukraine and Russia can go on escalating but these escalations are fast becoming bigger, more destructive and increasingly uncontrollable.

The same fatal process is at work in the US war with Iran. A deal to end the war is still just conceivable, but a massive escalation is more likely. The US – and probably Israel – may well resume their bombardment of Iran after the midterm elections in the US. They will likely target its infrastructure as part of an “annihilation” campaign that Trump threatened this week at the UN. The Iranians also have an array of escalatory options, from precisely targeting US naval vessels to encouraging the Shia militias in southern Iraq to attack Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The Ukraine and Middle East wars now dominate world politics to a degree that has not been true of any military conflict since the Second World War. It is a dominance that is likely to grow as these wars intensify and spread.

The multitude of world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly in New York this week produced no positive ideas about how to restart serious negotiations to bring these conflicts to an end. I suspect they prefer expressing a vacuous determination to do something about a future threat to humans from AI than to reveal their present-day impotence in stopping human beings from slaughtering each other in a war zone now stretching from the Baltic to the Indian Ocean.

As with Napoleon’s doomed march on Moscow over two centuries ago, a world-shattering disaster is every day more predictable – and looks increasingly unavoidable.

Further thoughts

I wrote a column last week about the chutzpah – the Yiddish word meaning brazen cheek – of the Reform UK party in claiming to be the voice of the ordinary patriotic Briton when its ideas come almost exclusively from the Donald Trump playbook and its money from dubious megadonors. Its latest wheeze is to cut the UK civil service in half, as Elon Musk proposed to do when wielding a symbolic chainsaw in the heady first days of Trump’s second term.

In the Channel 4 News documentary on Reform, meetings between its senior officials and supposed American donors – in fact part of an elaborate sting – take place in Mayfair private members’ clubs, not the pubs which are supposedly Nigel Farage’s favoured haunt.

Reform is clearly lower in the water than a year ago because of successive scandals and the departure of Sir Keir Starmer as national hate figure. In theory, Andy Burnham could attack Trumpism at home and abroad, pillorying Farage as an unpatriotic Trump stooge. But this is clearly not going to happen, at least for the moment, because the British establishment is so wedded to the UK’s alliance with the US, much diminished though the political returns from it may be.

Self-interest dictates that Burnham somewhat distance himself from Starmer’s humiliating obeisance, but not seeking an open break like Canada. But such a balancing act may not be sustainable as Trump shows ever-increasing signs of megalomania and general detachment from reality – such as the construction of the new White House ballroom which will come complete with military defences such as snipers and bunkers.

I mentioned previously Jacob Weisberg’s book Profiles in Cowardice about how the US elites capsulated with unseemly haste to Trump authoritarianism in his second term. Weisberg features eight prominent Americans who ran up the white flag, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and others. I find nothing very surprising about this: people with power and money invariably want to cling on to it at all costs.

Moreover, it is easy to mock the humiliating speed with which individuals and institutions in America bent the knee and failed to defend freedom of expression and basic civil rights, but at a more lowly scale, much the same happened in the UK under Starmer and his immediate predecessors.

Resistance to the assault on basic rights – like the right to protest – has been sporadic, with enough of those who might have spoken out staying self-protectively silent to fill a British companion volume profiling examples of homegrown moral and political cowardice. Many a candidate springs to mind.

Beneath the Radar

I was always cheered as a reporter on the few occasions when I was banned individually or collectively from attending a press conference or some similar well-orchestrated event, which promised to produce little real news in return for a major investment in time and tedium. But a ban is a news item in itself, giving the impression that the person or individual on the receiving end of the ban is a freedom-loving journalistic martyr, and those excluding them have something to hide.

CNN, MS Now and have now been grudgingly readmitted to the White House following their brief exile, after a judge found in their favour – though journalists from CNN and MS Now were then denied access to a White House State Dinner. It is unclear at the time of writing if they have been readmitted to “the pool” covering major Trumpian events. As an erstwhile Washington correspondent, I always found the White House press corps a pretty craven lot, tending to revel in their proximity to power – but maybe they have improved.

Paranoia about the supposed liberal bias of the media has always been a characteristic of the American far right. I remember 30 years ago being told by members of some extremist group in North Carolina – then deemed off-the-wall crazies but now probably mainstream – that they were forbidden by their leadership from talking to any journalist.

Of course, this stirred my interest, and I pursued them from meeting to meeting in a hastily hired taxi with an enthusiastic driver who admitted to me that for years he had been hoping that a customer would jump into his cab and say to him, “Follow that car”.

All wars are propaganda wars, but none more so than the Russia-Ukraine war. Well-balanced and well-informed analysis is at a premium. I have been reading journalist and academic Anatol Lieven on Russia and Ukraine from long before the Russian invasion in 2022 and have always found him a model of good judgement – as in this recent interview with Tom Switzer.