Relational Movement and the Failure of Force

A strategic puzzle, one that dates to the 1950s, is still confounding policymakers in powerful states: Why do they lose the wars they start with small states? The answer is that the international system is becoming increasingly multiplex. Rather than being organised around a few tightly bounded blocs, the international system allows any actor to move away from coercion, with numerous consequential actors, overlapping institutions, competing forms of authority, and relationships that vary across political, economic, military, and societal domains. States may cooperate with one group of partners on security, another on trade, and still others through regional or international institutions. Nonstate actors, private organisations, diasporas, and transnational networks also participate in shaping political outcomes. Amitav Acharya and his colleagues describe this emerging order as multiplex because it contains multiple, overlapping pathways through which actors can cooperate, compete, and exercise influence.

Materially powerful states rarely lose these wars because they lack military capability. They possess overwhelming advantages in firepower, technology, logistics, intelligence, mobility, and economic resources. They can destroy opposing forces, seize territory, control airspace, and impose enormous costs, yet battlefield dominance frequently fails to produce their desired political outcomes. The deeper institutional problem is that powerful states often expect coercive force to close a conflict. Military pressure is assumed to reduce an adversary’s capabilities, increase its costs, restrict its options, and eventually compel political submission. Mechanical war, the big wars powerful states prepare for, rests on this compressive logic: superior force is expected to narrow an adversary’s political space until continued resistance becomes impossible. Small wars, however, rarely occur within such bounded environments. They unfold across societies, borders, identities, political movements, and international networks. Andrew Mack, writing decades ago, observed that materially weaker actors can prevail because military asymmetry does not automatically determine political endurance or willingness to continue fighting. Multiplexity allows us to extend Mack’s basic argument.

Under multiplex conditions, coercive pressure can therefore produce movement rather than closure. I call this process relational movement: the repositioning of actors, alignments, legitimacy, and support networks in response to external pressure. Actors facing superior force can seek new patrons, reorganise coalitions, introduce additional participants, reroute resources, move across borders, or appeal to new audiences for political recognition. Force may reduce their material capacity while leaving open, or even expanding, the relationships through which resistance continues.

The U.S. war in Vietnam (1954-1975) illustrates the distinction. The United States possessed overwhelming military advantages and inflicted devastating losses on North Vietnam and the communist movement in South Vietnam. Yet Hanoi did not have to match American power mechanically. It had to prevent American power from producing political closure. North Vietnam accomplished this partly by moving relationally. It preserved connections with both China and the Soviet Union, receiving weapons, economic assistance, technical support, and political backing while navigating the widening dispute between its two principal patrons. Laos was co-opted well in advance of the main effort in South Vietnam, but Cambodia remained contingent well into the 1970s, with Prince Sihanouk supporting the communists, Lon Nol supporting the United States, and the introduction of the North Vietnamese-supported Khmer Rouge eventually removing the entire Cambodian state apparatus. At the same time, Hanoi presented the conflict as a struggle for national liberation, connecting communist organisation to the much broader legitimacy of resistance against foreign intervention. American escalation destroyed material assets, but it also strengthened the political narrative through which continued sacrifice could be justified.

The United States was therefore dominant within the conventional battlespace but could not control the wider relational structure surrounding the war. Its bombing campaigns destroyed supplies, but never fully eliminated external support. North Vietnamese military units were destroyed, but Hanoi’s political organisation proved extraordinarily resilient. Most damning, U.S. support to the South Vietnamese government failed to transfer the legitimacy necessary for durable political authority. North Vietnam remained materially weaker, but it retained the ability to adapt, reconnect, and continue acting.

This pattern extends beyond Vietnam and into the present. Relational movement is about creating political space during conflict. Weaker actors, like Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran, increasingly operate within systems containing alternative patrons, commercial networks, international institutions, information platforms, and multiple audiences for legitimacy. They do not need to defeat a great power symmetrically. They need to preserve enough political space to prevent that power from converting battlefield superiority into obedience.

Multiplexity thus changes the strategic meaning of effective power. Material capability still matters, and force still destroys. But destruction does not necessarily decide a contest when actors can reorganise the relationships sustaining resistance. The central question in small wars is therefore not simply how much force a powerful nation can apply. It is whether that force can stop the weaker actor from moving relationally.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.