My opinion > any commentator can fail to have all the information about what is really going on.
One thing > there is top secret classified information which can influence people in power. Yes, politicians might break promises, on purpose, but also because once in power they get info too secret for them to know while running for an office.
Also, it looks to me like a lot of history has been decided by someone's personality . . . not who had the money or the military power or whatever. Plus, there can be personalities not well known but who can influence someone who reaches a position of rulership.
And, of course, God is the One really in control, and He as our Father with Jesus His Son share control with us His children, by working together with our prayers. So, we in reality have more power than this world's ones who make it seem like they are rampaging at will.
What can be happening, often enough, is as God's word guarantees >
"God resists the proud",
we have in James 4:6 and in 1 Peter 5:5.
My opinion is a lot of nonsense is connected with how God is resisting wrong people. And when, for one example, we see some war that is not decisive but going on and on in a mess, it can mean both sides are acting in pride and God is using each of them as His means to resist the other.
In the earlier scriptures we can see how a battle could go quickly and cleanly, even with a major profit of plunder, for the side who was in God's will.
But if one side forms an alliance with the wrong people, that side can lose out because of not first seeking God to rule and decide what they do. And their bad choice of whom they depend on can be "why" they are doing poorly and badly.
And if there is sin in the camp . . . this could be the real reason why one side could not get an efficient victory. Just one example of this can be how ones just seek to have their own lives that they expect and dictate > but >
"He who loves his life will lose it," Jesus Himself says in John 12:25.
So, yes a country can have a lot of people acting maybe so civil but merely loving their own lives. And so they can lose . . . emotionally, socially, politically, and militarily. And God's resistance is helping to keep them from getting into much worse trouble than what we are seeing and hearing about.
Civil respectable religious people became able to do what they did to Jesus. So, yes there are civil but self-interested ones who are so busy with criticizing others; however, they who love their own lives, with selfish treasure pleasures, can lose them and they are capable of much worse than the stuff they might be criticizing.
But God's resistance is succeeding in keeping this selfish world in line enough for God to succeed in doing all His good which will last.