That's probably why ISIS is still alive despite years of US troops in Iraq.
The US crushed ISIS(then called AQI) back during the Bush years - it took a while, and a change of strategy, but they were completely demolished. When the troops left, ISIS came back.
How would you imagine a scenario in which Putin overtly losing in Ukraine? How would it look like?
At this point, a complete loss is impossible. We can't push him out of Crimea in any plausible way. Support for the Ukrainian military to keep the eastern bits of the country from being overrun could work. But the real move here is stationing a bunch of military hardware in the Baltics, adding whatever is left of Ukraine to NATO, seeing if we can carve Belarus out of his sphere of influence, re-starting ballistic missile defense programs and deploying them in real quantity, and getting the Europeans to start fracking already so they're not so dependent on Putin's goodwill.
NATO has far higher military expenditure than Russia. I think if nukes were out of the picture then retaking the Crimea would be a possibility. But this is unlikely because the main objective has to be preventing nuclear war, and the more we escalate, the more likely it is that nukes will be used by accident if nothing else. For this reason its probably a good idea not to add the Ukraine to NATO - its simply not worth the risk to get involved.
Ballistic missile defence stops mutually assured destruction, and so gives ones enemies an incentive to strike firs...
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