The War in Ukraine shocked people who have not been observing Russia for quite some time and showed how misguided the foreign policy of the United States has been for at least a decade.
It pains me to say so, but Mitt Romney was right in 2012 when he said Russia is our main adversary. It is extremely unfortunate Obama did not do enough to prevent the War in Ukraine.
To predict an invasion, we are going to need a few things to be true:
- The invader country needs to be significantly larger than the target.
- The invader country is likely to be undemocratic.
- The invader country needs to be able to support its military economically.
The Iraq War was an exception to the rule.
So, we need a combination of a large population, a large economy, and a corrupt, kleptocratic dictatorship.
In other words, Russia.
There are only a few major aggressor countries that have these attributes.
The only dictatorships with a population over 100 million are China and Russia.
If we expand to a democracy score under 4, Ethiopia and Pakistan have the population and authoritarian systems to be suspect, but their economies are terrible. So they will be unable to support their militaries. So, China and Russia remain the biggest threats in the world.
However, China is restricted in its aggression by trade.
If we reduce our threshold to 10 million people and have a GDP per capita threshold of $5000, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela will appear on the list.
Cuba is an island nation, and if they attack any of their neighbors, the United States Navy will land in Havana. They cannot do anything. Jamaica is not part of the Rio Pact, but this would be of little value to Cuba.
Iran talks about invading Israel, so this is a possibility, but it is unlikely to succeed. Even though Israel is not part of any military alliance, if they were attacked, they would be defended by the US military.
Saudi Arabia is a major state sponsor of terrorism, as this model predicts.
Venezuela talks about invading Guyana, and since Guyana is not a member of the Rio Pact, Venezuela would succeed. However, Venezuela’s economy is in free fall.
Suppose you have fewer than 10 million people. In that case, it is hard to project influence abroad, and according to my model, only Bahrain has the economy and authoritarian government to be a threat. But their population is only 1.5 million, so they are limited in their evil.
Russia has two obvious targets across the land, Ukraine and Georgia, and they have attacked both of them. Mongolia is another potential target.
China’s potential targets are Mongolia, Bhutan, and Nepal. Bhutan and Nepal are tiny, and India will likely defend them.
However, Mongolia cooperates with the United States in military matters and is also a global partner of NATO.
Every other country is either too democratic, too poor, or too small to be a threat on the global stage.
This map makes the Ukraine war obvious, and also the War in Yemen as why it is seeing so much violence from Saudi Arabia. Africa has a lot of conflicts, but they are regional or usually connected to terrorism.
I think it is likely that the invasion of Ukraine will be the last interstate conflict for a while.