Wake-up call: Enduring Russian war effort reveals limitations of US, Western power

Stephen Kuper

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Despite what we have been told, America’s power has its limits and Russia’s enduring war effort against Ukraine has served to reinforce this, but it also provides an opportunity to be clear-eyed about the multipolar future.

Full disclosure, I have no doubt that this is going to upset some people; I am not trying to be needlessly provocative, rather I am trying to open up the conversation.

Over the weekend, while watching an interview with an Australian organising a pro-Ukraine march, I was confronted by his narrative that can be best summarised as, “Russia is on the verge of collapse, the Russian people are close to having enough of Putin and throwing him out, their economy is breaking” or perhaps, “We have them on the ropes”, the Ukrainians just require the tools “to finish the job”.

Now yes, this fits with the enduring narrative that has permeated the West’s public consciousness since the failure of Russia’s airborne-led initial invasion in early 2022.

But something didn’t quite “gel” for me.

Following a sip of my coffee and finally relenting to my toddler son’s repeated requests to watch him jump on his new trampoline, it hit me: wasn’t Putin’s Russia also positioning itself to directly assault Europe, crush NATO and conquer the continent in a way that Stalin could only dream of?

How could these two diametrically opposed, seemingly contradictory realities be simultaneously true? Surely this wasn’t a case of Schrodinger’s Russia?

Then the reality really hit me. This wasn’t so much about Russia and whether or not it was on the verge of collapse, or whether the hordes of Russia were going to storm through the Fulda or Suwalki Gap in a daring surprise attack taking the Western allies by force.

This was actually about the very real limitations of the United States and broader Western allies under the auspice of NATO and similar organisations when it came to actually affecting the decision making of a committed, adversary that ranked somewhere above a lower-tier middle power.

Russia isn’t Libya, Serbia or Syria