Is it even possible for an army today to ever successfuly establish rule over another country?

>Tibet is and always was a part of Argentina

I'd say that a military campaign that creates a state that lasts for eighty years is a pretty succesful military campaign.

Crimea

no
nationalism was a mistake

Yes because of course this is remembered as a great success too

loool

If the target country is isolated enough. If the power difference between the two country is > 10x, they can do it.

Do you think the U.S. could annex Tuvalu?

There are some examples of countries that could be ruled after military intervention:
- Estonia (by Russia)
- Latvia (by Russia)
- Lithuania (by Russia)
- Taiwan (by China)
- Botswana (by South Africa)
- Uruguay (by Brazil)
- Costa Rica and Panamá (by the USA)
- New Zealand (by Australia)

Maybe, but it would require a shit-load of anthropologists and social scientists (HUMINT), psyops against civilian population, social engineering and economic stimulus and incentives to be successful and not descend into a tyrannical military police-state. Even then results may be varied. Not many nations have the intelligence, military and academic resources to even attempt such an undertaking. The US does but rarely succeeds.

Military occupations are just never popular, no matter how much applied anthropology you utilize to "win hearts and minds"

The crusade that spawned it was.

How do you measure "power difference"? Sounds like a BS metric dude did you just make that up?

He's talking about psychological operations, actually manipulating the information locals receive in order to convince them that belonging to a whole new country is good for them, and rebelling is futile and senseless. It seems like you'd need that if you were actually intent on conquering a place.

Just think about how many missed opportunities the Nazis missed during Operation Barbarossa, where they could have been bolstering local sympathizers and Communist-haters and establishing themselves permanently among the population, but they went full retard with the Aryan supremacy meme and made people hate them even more than they hated Stalin. By the time they actually got around to utilizing them it was much too late. Shitty intelligence gathering is widely considered one of the main reasons for Barbarossa's failure.