Forever wars and collapsable regimes
By 
Seva Gunitsky points out that Russia’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than World War I, which was a conflict that was just a bit “disruptive,” as the MBAs say, to a previous Russian regime:
The costs of continuing the war are slow and diffuse (inflation, labor shortages, civilian economy starving) while the costs of stopping or even pausing are immediate and concentrated (mass unemployment, veteran crisis, defense industry collapse, narrative implosion).
And guess what, regimes almost always choose the slow bleed over the acute crisis. That’s part of the war trap, and the reason why bad policies persist: the costs of reform are front-loaded and visible but the costs of the status quo are dispersed and slow-moving.1 Gorbachev discovered this the hard way.
I started with World War I for a reason. The last time Russia found itself in a war this long, it destroyed the regime. February 1917 happened not because of battlefield defeat, but because of the strains of a war economy and the political shock of trying to manage those strains. And October 1917 was largely a result of trying to keep the war going despite these mounting problems. That’s a lesson you’d think Putin might heed. But heeding it means ending the war, and ending the war means facing everything the regime has spent four years deferring.
It’s a nice trap he’s stumbled into. Unfortunately the entire country is in the trap with him.
The news tonight is that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have ordered our Warfighters to launch a fresh wave of attacks on Iran, approximately seventeen seconds after Trump’s latest wave of claims that the war was all but over because President Deals was about to reach the best deal any president has ever made, that will make gas cost negative dollars etc. etc.
Trump, like Putin, is now in a war that he can’t get out of, because the costs of stopping it are too high — as may well be the costs of continuing it, but as Gunitsky points out, that’s how the war trap works.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of tyrants, and I can only hope they bunk together in hell, someday soon.