Military parades and promises of peace ring hollow when words lose their meaning

Images of mass military parades across vast parade grounds in Moscow, Beijing and other homes of regimes on the "other side" of the Cold War were a regular part of nightly television viewing, for those of us of a certain age. 

They have since become a trope in historic montages and pop culture clips.

Goosestepping disciplined troops and tank commanders saluting from their turrets, watched by groups of sullen, ageing men in fur hats and great coats dripping with medals.

Such parades don't entirely go away. China lifted the genre to a new standard last September to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of its WWII victory over the Japanese and, of course, casually just underscore to the world how it has truly arrived as a home of high-tech military gear. 

In Moscow this weekend, there will be something struggling not to be too embarrassingly revealing.

May 9 is Victory Day in Russia — the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

But it has had to be downgraded, partly because of security threats. Ukraine has actually hit sites in Moscow with drones near the Kremlin. 

Vladimir Putin reportedly asked for a ceasefire to allow the march to proceed. There won't be any tanks or ballistic missiles on display.

Six months ago, the analysis around Russia's war with Ukraine was that, no matter the sense of the stalemate during the brutal winter, there was a relentless logic to Russia eventually winning through sheer weight of economic power based in its resources and political stubbornness.

That's not the case anymore, despite the gains that have come to the country's coffers from the surge in oil and gas prices.

A series of ineffective ceasefires

It's only nine months since Donald Trump left the world gasping by hosting Putin at a summit in Alaska, despite the warrant for the Russian leader's arrest on war crimes, and essentially being humiliated by a much cannier player who came for a couple of hours, owned a joint press conference, then went away again with nothing being achieved.

Those were the days when Trump liked to publicly associate himself with strongmen like Putin.

You don't hear quite so much of that these days.

Now the reporting is of a Russian leader who spends his life in bunkers, who hasn't been seen in public for two months, and who faces increasing speculation that he may be toppled.

Next week Trump goes to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping, in a summit he had to postpone because the war the US started — along with Israel — against Iran wasn't going so well.

That war is going even worse now — although, technically, there is a ceasefire in place — given there seem to be daily reminders that the US doesn't know how to get out of the conflict.

Of course there are actually three ceasefires in place: with Iran, with Hamas in Gaza, and between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But these are the sorts of ceasefires you have when you don't have a ceasefire.

Over Thursday and Friday, the US and Iran shot directly at each other. The US hit sites in Iran. Iran fired on US vessels in the Persian Gulf. The two sides dispute who fired first. But it was an escalation in the tensions either way.

Notably, Iran said that the US had broken the ceasefire. The US, as it did earlier in the week, said Iran had broken the ceasefire.

The framing of what happened was as revealing as the event itself: the US doesn't want the ceasefire to end.

Others would dearly like it to end.

In Israel, the media is full of alarm that the US may withdraw from this conflict without finishing the job. It has continued its own conflicts with Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah even though ceasefires are also supposed to be in place in Gaza and Lebanon.

Having not been consulted about the latest mooted peace deal, it seemed a pointed rejection of any US sway of Israel's actions that it launched its first attack on Beirut in a month, just hours after the story was leaked. Israel is making clear it will be fighting, whatever the Americans do.

At least 846 people — including many women and children — have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire began, and thousands injured, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Israel says that five of its soldiers have been killed in the same period.

Those who have been in Gaza in recent weeks say the sounds of Israeli drones overhead are a constant, frightening part of daily life. There are few signs that Hamas will give up its weapons.

In Lebanon, more than 120 people, including women and children, have been killed in the past week alone, according to Lebanon's health ministry.

Hezbollah has proved itself able to keep attacking Israel, despite Israel displacing a million people from the south of the country and destroying villages and civilian infrastructure.

When words mean little

Even by the increasingly bizarre standards of the Trump administration, the warped sense of reality around world events is stretching.

Victory parades in a country at war in a five-year conflict, which has cost one million lives and needs a ceasefire to go ahead. Ceasefires where people still keep getting killed and where there is no confidence that the underlying causes of the conflict have been either settled or eliminated.

Yet we talk persistently of peace deals, despite the White House "announcing" via strategic leaks that one is just around the corner no fewer than five times in the past three weeks.

Information and propaganda wars are part of conflict. But the addiction to announcements in the world of media and social media — and the US president's addiction to feeding coverage about himself — has created the same sort of asymmetry with Iran in the war of words as many commentators observed were in place, in reverse, in terms of military power between the two combatants.

Increasingly it is the countries that find themselves in the physical middle of the bigger Iran-US conflict who are making a material difference to the way it is conducted.

Israel was always a major combatant. But its "side wars" in Gaza and Lebanon are playing a significant role in the bargaining over a larger peace deal since Iran insists Lebanon has to be part of the deal.

The Gulf countries, too, are increasingly playing a role. This week it emerged that Trump called off his Project Freedom plan to provide safe passage for vessels around the Strait of Hormuz because Saudi Arabia refused to let its bases and airspace be used to support it.

Saudi, unlike some of its Gulf neighbours, is not so totally dependent on being able to ship out of the Strait of Hormuz but it is still affected by the crippling of world trade.

But it saw the plan as an escalation. It still tries to walk a line between the US and Iran. And it has links with Pakistan. But, pragmatically, it also knows that if things do escalate, the Iran-aligned Houthis can put the same block on the Red Sea as Iran has on the Strait of Hormuz — which really would hit the Saudis.

Closer US allies in the Gulf have also once again being paying the price of the stand-off with attacks on the UAE being seen by Iran as a slightly less provocative proxy for attacking the US directly.

Despite Trump's disdain for his allies, the significant damage to US bases and military assets in the Middle East that are increasingly being reported means his military's physical options now seem more constrained.

Before the revelation about the Saudi position on its airspace, flight trackers were noticing unusual levels of military aircraft activity out of Tel Aviv at the beginning of this week.

The US may have 50,000 troops and all sorts of overwhelming hardware on a parade of sorts in the Middle East. 

But it's not much help if you can't land it anywhere. And the risks of using it have become part of the war of words about this conflict.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.