Russia’s Defeat Would Be America’s Problem

Stephen M. Walt

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At the end of Pericles’s speech convincing his fellow Athenians to declare war on Sparta in 431 B.C., he declared that he was “more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.” In particular, he cautioned against hubris and the danger of combining “schemes of fresh conquest with the conduct of the war.” His warnings went unheeded, however, and his successors eventually led Athens to a disastrous defeat.

Centuries later, Edmund Burke offered a similar warning to his British compatriots as Britain moved toward war with revolutionary France. As he wrote in 1793: “I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. … We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.” Burke’s forecast did not come true, however, in part because Britain’s ambitions remained limited even after France was defeated.

I mention these two gloomy prophecies, because there is a possibility that the United States and its Western allies will come out of the war in Ukraine with a clear win. More far-sighted statecraft by the West might have prevented the war in the first place, sparing Ukraine the vast destruction it has suffered at Russian hands. That counterfactual notwithstanding, a combination of Russian miscalculations and military incompetence, fierce Ukrainian resistance, formidable Western material and intelligence support, and potent sanctions on Moscow may eventually produce a victory for Kyiv and its Western backers. Assuming the fighting does not escalate further—a possibility that still cannot be ruled out—and Ukraine continues its recent battlefield successes, Russian power will be greatly diminished for many years to come. It is even possible that Vladimir Putin will be ousted from power in Moscow. Should Russia suffer a decisive defeat, warnings about the inevitable decline of the West will seem premature at best.