Just over a year ago, I argued that international politics was entering a new era in which might would once again make right. Donald Trump’s return to office promised an unapologetically transactional foreign policy, with military strength restored as the dominant currency of global persuasion. The rules-based international order that emerged after the Second World War appeared to be giving way to a more familiar brand of Realpolitik.

Events since then have done little to disprove that assessment. Great powers continue to pursue their interests through coercion, military pressure, and hard bargaining. What has changed, however, is the assumption that overwhelming military superiority inevitably produces political success. Modern warfare is exposing the limits of raw power in ways few anticipated.

Limitations of Might Is Right

The conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza have demonstrated that overwhelming military superiority no longer guarantees political success. In an age defined by drones, cyber capabilities, economic chokepoints, and asymmetric warfare, weaker states are discovering that they possess tools capable of frustrating, delaying, and sometimes even derailing the ambitions of far stronger adversaries.

The underdogs are not necessarily winning, but their ability simply to refuse defeat is proving remarkably consequential. Russia invaded Ukraine with overwhelming advantages in manpower, military hardware, and economic resources. Yet Ukrainian forces have repeatedly identified vulnerabilities in Russia’s war machine and exploited them with surprising effectiveness. Cheap drones have struck strategic targets deep inside Russian territory, challenging assumptions about Russia’s military invulnerability. The myth of the untouchable great power has been badly shaken.

The memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran tells a similar story. At the outset of the conflict, the Trump administration appeared to believe that sustained military pressure and economic coercion could achieve ambitious objectives, from weakening the regime to curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Yet after months of strikes, Washington found itself returning to diplomacy.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of that reality was the Strait of Hormuz. When the conflict began, the waterway remained open. Iran’s decision to close it disrupted global energy markets and created precisely the sort of economic leverage that military superiority alone could not neutralise. Rather than compelling Tehran into submission, the conflict ultimately forced Washington to negotiate from a less advantageous position than many had anticipated.

Changing Warfare

The explanation lies partly in the changing character of warfare itself. For decades, military power was measured by metrics that no longer seem quite as decisive: aircraft carriers, fighter aircraft, tanks, and massive conventional armies. Those assets remain formidable and indispensable, but they are increasingly vulnerable to technologies that are cheaper, more adaptable, and far easier to proliferate.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran have become laboratories for twenty-first-century conflict. Increasingly, speed, adaptability, innovation, and the intelligent application of relatively inexpensive technology matter as much as, if not more than, sheer defence spending.

Defence analysts have become increasingly focused on what is known as the “cost-exchange ratio.” A drone costing tens of thousands of dollars can compel an opponent to launch interceptor missiles worth millions. Patriot interceptors cost roughly $4 million each, while THAAD interceptors can approach $15 million. For weaker powers, relatively inexpensive drones have become an effective means of threatening defensive systems worth billions of dollars.

Israel offers perhaps the clearest example of this emerging challenge. Its layered missile defence architecture, comprising Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, has rightly been regarded as one of the world’s most sophisticated air defence networks, saving countless lives. Yet even these advanced systems are facing growing pressure. Iran has increasingly relied on saturation tactics, launching mixed waves of drones and missiles designed less to achieve pinpoint accuracy than to overwhelm defensive capacity through sheer volume.

More recently, Iran has deployed missiles carrying cluster munitions that disperse multiple submunitions during flight, creating additional complications for interception systems designed to defeat singular incoming threats. Once those bomblets separate, they become significantly more difficult to intercept, illustrating yet another way technological adaptation is complicating even the most advanced defensive architectures.

Even the aircraft carrier, long regarded as the ultimate symbol of military power, is beginning to attract uncomfortable scrutiny. Defence planners increasingly question whether these enormously expensive platforms remain prudent investments in an era increasingly dominated by precision-guided missiles, autonomous systems, and drone swarms capable of imposing disproportionate costs.

What Does All This Mean?

Many commentators have argued that the return of “might is right” would embolden China to pursue military action against Taiwan. Their assumption is straightforward: recent conflicts demonstrate that great powers are increasingly willing to redraw borders through force. Yet the lessons of Ukraine and Iran may point in a rather different direction.

Rather than proving that military strength guarantees victory, both conflicts have demonstrated that weaker actors can survive by exploiting vulnerabilities, embracing innovation, and steadily increasing the costs imposed on a more powerful adversary. The same logic would apply to any future confrontation involving Taiwan and China, India and Pakistan, or indeed elsewhere across the Indo-Pacific.

Military power remains the foundation upon which states build deterrence, influence, and security. Trump’s transactional worldview remains very much alive. Great powers will continue to bargain from positions of strength and seek leverage wherever they can find it. But recent wars suggest that strength alone is no longer enough. The ability to innovate faster, impose asymmetric costs, and deny an opponent a decisive political victory has become just as important as overwhelming military superiority itself.

Might still matters. It simply no longer guarantees that right—or victory—will follow.