By W. James Antle III, The Week

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has turned out to be a much tougher slog than the Kremlin anticipated. The Kyiv offensive appears stalled. The morale of Russia’s conscripts is poor. Instead of swiftly folding, Ukraine is fighting back.

None of this means Russia won’t prevail in Kyiv in the end. But the cost could be unsustainably high. This raises larger questions about whether invading and occupying foreign countries necessarily pays off for the invading and occupying power.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) laid out Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bad options in a tweet. “At best he will achieve a costly military victory followed by an even costlier long-term occupation & committed insurgency,” he wrote. “At worst, he will be trapped in a humiliating quagmire.”

If this sounds like the outcome of some policies Rubio himself has advocated, you may understand why these observations are relevant to the foreign policy considerations of governments that are not dictatorships engaged in unprovoked aggression. We think back to when imperial powers plundered other lands to add to their natural or material resources, or more recent cases where expansionist totalitarian regimes sought with each intervention to set themselves on a glide path to world domination.

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