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Notes -
The Chechens, Afghans, Goths and so on were supposed to lose. Most of the time, big established powers are supposed to defeat smaller, poorer powers since they have all these resources and advantages. WW2 is one of those scenarios. But sometimes this doesn't happen, we have the man bites dog case where the small powers win. Or in the case of Chechnya, they won the first war, lost the second.
Explaining this kind of rarity is what the model is for, it suggests that when the big powers start losing to the small powers, the big power won't be big for too much longer. The Soviets suffered all kinds of disasters in the 1930s and 1940s and pulled through but by the 1980s the war in Afghanistan was enough to cause them political trouble! Stalin would've laughed at the idea of a mere 15-20K dead soldiers causing problems for the Soviet Union. But the USSR of Andropov and Brezhnev was not what it used to be.
I think there is a useful meaning of 'weak' that is certainly satisfied by Andropov and Chernenko. The former was very sick and died quickly. The latter was described as "an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not" when he succeeded Andropov in 1984. Or take Biden. Old and muddled. There's a certain kind of political culture that gets you young, energetic leaders, another delivers these old talkers. Scipio Africanus was 28 when he won his first campaign, Napoleon was 27 when he invaded Italy, Alexander won battles in his teens. Vigour, aggression and youth vs bureaucracy, physical weakness, senescence and passivity.
This kind of strength doesn't guarantee success - Belisarius and Aurelian didn't manage to turn things around for Rome. But something must have happened to change Rome from the supremely confident, all-conquering Republican Rome to the desperately embattled 3rd and 4th century Rome. The institutions and culture of the old days disappeared, expansion slowed and stopped. Why did they give up on annexing Germania, they'd never halted expansion before no matter the disaster?
How could ISIS even show up - wasn't the US supposed to be waging a global war on Islamic terror and securing the oily lands? It seems like a pretty serious failure in your military strength if strawman-Islamists from your own feverish propaganda materialize and take half of Iraq, only to be beaten back by Iranian proxies (who now control the territory in question). If the US were truly strong, they should have been able to stomp Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and so on, install new regimes of awed, pliant clients who send back tribute to the Metropole lest they incur Washington's wrath. Iran should be quivering in their boots, grimly defending their homeland, not advancing on all fronts.
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