When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, President Vladimir Putin changed the world in ways we’re only beginning to comprehend. Russia’s initial push toward Kyiv faltered, the fragile post-Cold War consensus held, and the response was vigorous. This was a violation of international norms that would not be tolerated. Europe and the United States levied sanctions on Russia, provided military aid to Ukraine, and President Joe Biden told a crowd in Warsaw that Mr. Putin could not “remain in power.” The Russian regime, it seemed, had fatally overstepped.
And yet the support to Ukraine that followed was always circumscribed; enough for Ukraine not to lose, but not enough for it to win. And the war, rather than restoring strength to the international order and the alliances that had once shaped it, has inaugurated an era of high-intensity, conventional wars with ambiguous outcomes. President Trump inherited a vexed new order in his second term, and has done much to contribute to it.
The war in Ukraine delineates two realities, both of which reveal important new truths about 21st-century international affairs. First: Ukraine has not been defeated. Russia has the larger population, economy and military, but Ukraine’s resolve and technological savvy — in particular, its capacity to innovate, build and deploy drones — have slowed the Russian advance to a crawl. An unfamiliar kind of asymmetrical warfare has emerged in which great powers are suddenly fallible and vulnerable.
Second: Russia has not been defeated. Despite sanctions, caps on its oil prices and the freezing of a large chunk of its central bank reserves, Russia’s economy has not collapsed. Russia has found ample trading partners, including among the BRICS group, a bloc of mostly developing nations that has sought to act as a counterweight to Western dominance. The global economy is diffuse enough that Russia has been able to acquire restricted chips and technology from outside Europe and the United States. Before the war with Iran, four years into the war in Ukraine, the Russian economy was showing strain, but not enough to have moderated Mr. Putin’s ambitions.
After trying in the early months to establish a global coalition behind Ukraine, Europe gradually compartmentalized the war in its overall foreign policy. Europe and the United States continue to do some business with Russia and a great deal of business with India, China and Russia’s other trading partners. Various European leaders have visited Beijing seeking to deepen trade ties with China, and in January, the European Union announced a new trade agreement with India.
The world is changing quickly. Ukraine has been an accelerator for a distinctively 21st-century kind of warfare, in which smaller states can stymie powerful adversaries by employing cutting-edge technology, some of it cheap and easy to mass produce, and the blocs and alliances that might once have acted in concert to deter aggressors are, at best, only partly effective.
All of this has also been evident in Iran. An Iran that is militarily weaker than the United States and Israel has been able to menace the gulf states and choke the Strait of Hormuz using inexpensive drones, creating a global energy crisis that could have long-term effects. Weeks into the conflict, the Trump administration has been compelled to lift sanctions on some Russian and even some Iranian oil — an unexpected windfall for both regimes. Iran, which has supplied drones to Russia, seems to have paid more attention to the war in Ukraine than the United States, which was initially depleting its stock of expensive interceptor missiles. (Ukrainian drone specialists are now in high demand in the Middle East.)
The outbreak of a major war in the Middle East will make it only harder for Europe to support Ukraine. Europe is dependent on Middle Eastern gas and oil, it has military assets in the region, and many Europeans live there. Yet the instability moving toward Europe from the Middle East will make Ukraine a more important European partner. Running combat operations in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean, the United States is clearly overextended globally, and its war in Iran threatens to end in humiliation. Precisely because Russia is benefiting economically from the war with Iran, and precisely because this war will diminish the scope and prestige of American power, Europe must be the bulwark of European defense, and Europe’s fundamental challenge is the survival of Ukraine.
So far, Europe has turned down Mr. Trump’s request to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In response, Mr. Trump warned that NATO faces a “very bad” future, which presumably could include further scaling back support for Ukraine. By any standard, it would be a fundamental error to view Ukraine’s cause as peripheral to U.S. interests. In Europe, Ukraine is beating back chaos, and Europe’s stability is essential to the U.S. economy, to the stature of NATO in U.S. foreign policy, to the viability of U.S. alliances in general and to Europe’s value as a source of investment and as a market for U.S. goods and services.
One way or another, a crucial precedent will be set in Ukraine. If Russia is allowed to extinguish Ukrainian statehood, the changing of borders by force and the breaking up of nations could once more become a regular feature of European life, as they have been in European history. Open-ended military conflict in Europe could, at some point, intersect with open-ended military conflict in the Middle East.
If, by contrast, Ukraine is sufficiently supported and is able to hold its own, then Europe at least will be a zone of order and peace. In a world increasingly weighed down by militarism and violence, the attractions of order and peace might prove infectious.
Michael Kimmage is the director of the Kennan Institute and the author, most recently, of “Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.”
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