When Great Powers Are Not So Great: Lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War

The Russo-Ukrainian war is still unfolding, and academics clearly understand that analyzing an event that is ongoing is a dangerous exercise. Nevertheless, the war has already provided a series of lessons salient for considering the future of great power competition. In this effort I address three such lessons and offer suggestions as well about what the lessons may augur for the ongoing conflict between China and Taiwan and the great power competition surrounding that conflict. Of the three lessons perhaps the most important one is that both policymakers and academics tend to overestimate the strength of major powers. I claim that this is due not to intelligence assessments about raw capabilities, but importantly, we fail to take into consideration the extent to which such assessments are conditioned by governmental effectiveness and control over corruption. Not taking these factors into account had suggested at the start of the war that Russian capabilities were so overwhelming compared to Ukraine’s that the conflict should have ended early and quickly. Yet, once these two conditioning factors are taken into account it helps to explain why overwhelming capabilities (on paper) failed to achieve predicted results. I contend that this is not an issue specific to the Russian Federation; any assessment of great power competition must take into account not only relative capabilities but as well governmental effectiveness and control over corruption in the deployment of those capabilities. I suggest two other lessons as well from the war. One is about the “power” of trade relationships in deterring conflict. I suggest that despite substantial trade interdependencies between the Russian Federation and especially European NATO members, such interdependencies did little to deter Russia from initiating the war. In fact, the only major role I find for this consideration is that reductions in trade relationships between Ukraine and Russia may have helped trigger the belief in the Kremlin that Ukraine was moving towards the West and may have accelerated consideration of the war option. Finally, I suggest that alliances may be more resilient than expected when security threats become visible to the alliance. It would have been understandable had the Kremlin anticipated that NATO, weakened by internal disagreements, the British exit from the EU, and the barrage of criticism levied at NATO by then-President Donald Trump, would not respond with a clear and strong voice to the invasion of Ukraine. That it did has not only altered the conduct of the war and its possible outcome, but as well raises important issues about the alliance context in which major powers compete with each other.