SNA (Galesburg) — History is replete with examples in which one side won a war and benefited from doing so, but it also includes examples like the First World War, in which all sides lost far more than they gained. Two years into the Russia-Ukraine War, it is apparent that this conflict will be counted among the latter cases.

Of course, there are degrees of loss, with some bearing more costs than others. The pain and destruction are not distributed equally.

There’s little doubt that Ukraine will suffer the heaviest. Hundreds of thousands of its men are already dead and maimed, many cities reduced to rubble, and refugees scattered around the world.

While neither Kyiv nor the West is willing to admit it yet, some of the worst is in all probability yet to come.

The eventual peace settlement is unlikely to be favorable. Either US financial support will collapse in the next year or so, or else a sufficiently financed and well-armed Ukraine will simply run out of soldiers who can fight within a couple of years. The ultimate outcome is unlikely to be much different in either case.

Russia can absorb battlefield losses that Ukraine cannot, and Moscow has successfully shifted to a war economy with a high degree of autarchy. Ukraine has no industry of its own, having become completely dependent on the largess of the West and its allies.

Not for the first time, Russia was embarrassed in the early stages of a major war only to slowly turn the tide, at horrific cost, and grind down their opponents through attrition.

That means that this war—whenever it ends—will most likely involve Ukraine giving up 20%-25% of its territory, pledging not to join NATO, and eventually turning against Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reassessing the quality of his leadership.

The United States looks like it will be spared most of the human costs of its proxy war. Its parents will not be attending funerals for their children. But the Russia-Ukraine War is another nail in the coffin of the US-led unipolar world order that emerged after 1989 and the end of the Cold War. It follows the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hopefully it will be sufficient to demonstrate to Americans that the limits of their power have been reached; it is past due time to look at the world more realistically.

The stakes of snapping Washington out of its lingering fantasies of global domination couldn’t be higher—they potentially run as high as the continued survival of human beings as a species.

This is the time to reshape global institutions in a way that acknowledges the fact that we’ve already entered a multipolar world. The focus needs to shift away from disastrous neoconservative and liberal interventionist notions like “benevolent global hegemony” or “the indispensable nation” and move toward systems that pragmatically reduce friction between the existing and the emerging great powers.

Which brings us to the other party in the conflict—Russia.

What it stands to achieve in this war is the ability to finally draw the line against US encroachment within its own previous imperial zone. Since the end of the Cold War, Moscow watched satellite after satellite shift into the US orbit. The Warsaw Pact was absorbed into NATO and the European Union; the same with the former Soviet Baltic States. But at Ukraine, the line has been firmly drawn.

The human cost, of course, has been terrible. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers have been lost, and another generation has been brutalized. The long-term demographic outlook for Russia also does not look good. Moscow has proven that it is still a great power, but it has no potential to become a superpower in this century on par with the United States, China, or India.

The notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the (umpteenth imaginary) reincarnation of Adolf Hitler should be dismissed for what it is—the stock historical analogy employed by the neoconservatives. Every US rival, they pretend, is Hitler. And their answer is always “preemptive” war.

Russia has been sufficiently bloodied in this war that it will have little desire to jump into another major conflict anytime soon. Also, every bit of evidence demonstrates that the Putin regime well knows the difference between those countries shielded by Article 5 of the NATO treaty and those which are not.

Russia will survive its Ukraine war with its great power status intact, but it will never be more than a sad and tragic chapter in the nation’s history.

This article was originally published on February 26, 2023, in the “Japan and the World” newsletter.