Political conflicts require political solutions.

Simply pouring more resources into a conflict—financial or military—only serves to fan the flames of whatever structural political issues underlie it.

It is this political test that leaders have been failing and continue to fail.

(Every war ends in a political solution. Wars are precluded by political solutions. In some cases, perhaps a bloodbath is the only path to an eventual political solution, but in the majority of cases, this is just an excuse for failures of imagination and character. War is a way that people try to turn an unsatisfactory political situation into a satisfactory one. Diplomacy serves the same purpose, at vastly lower cost. The point of diplomacy is to create a satisfactory political situation without war.)