A strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of roubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.

The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest. The traditional convoy of tanks and missiles couldn’t go ahead when the skies above Red Square were vulnerable to Ukrainian aerial mischief.

Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might........

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