When did a major state last unambiguously win a land war on a significant scale? Desert Storm in 1991, perhaps, but it was settled to a great extent from the air. The Iran-Iraq war was inconclusive. The Soviets lost in Afghanistan before the west did. France gave up on Operation Barkhane, its counterinsurgent mission in the Sahel, in 2022. You are left to cite Russia’s invasion of Georgia (population 4.4mn at the time), the still-evolving situation in Gaza and the Falklands war, which happened nearer to the second world war than to the present.