The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its own slow and wistful drift of predetermined arc and inexorable precession through the unwitting revivification of the historical suffering as salients that define and sustain it, this socio-political system endlessly invokes the difference, isolation and insecurity that self-validates an essentially persecutory neurosis in dissociative fantasy as system of belief.
The extent to which history more broadly considered autonomously follows a similar contour and trajectory remains unanswered, perhaps unanswerable. I would suggest that in as much as the grand acts (and monumental strategic blunders) of history recursively reproduce the insecurities that as fuel stoke these conflicts, those who extract benefit are much less in control of the ebb and flow of power than they tend to retrospectively assert.
Daedelus Kite 