How the Ukraine War is Reshaping the World
BOOK REVIEW: War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World
By Hal Brands (Editor) / Johns Hopkins University Press
Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole
The Reviewer — Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.
REVIEW — The editor of War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, Hal Brands, is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
His previous books include Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (2022), coauthored with Michael Beckley; The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today (2022); and The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age (2023).
This book, War in Ukraine, is published with the assistance of the America in the World Consortium and its supporters. Founded in 2018, by a team of scholar-practitioners from Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Texas-Austin, this new consortium was designed to better prepare the next generation of scholars to confront geopolitical challenges and advance American national interests abroad.
The book is therefore a collection of edited papers, a product of a conference hosted at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies where these papers were first discussed, coinciding with the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, on February 24, 2022.
On that occasion, some of the world’s leading analysts assessed the conflict’s origins, trajectory, and implications. They offered their provisional appraisals of what Brands is calling, rightly so, “the most geopolitically consequential crisis of the 21st century so far.” Similarly, the book is then organized along the same pattern,
War in Ukraine thus constitutes a collective effort to write history in real time, to explore the unfolding history and global significance of the Ukraine War. Sometimes, it is definitively hard to read; it can be confusing and difficult to understand, thanks to the variety of points of view expressed; it is rarely as clear and illuminating as Anne Applebaum (see Off-Ramps vs Defeat); it is nevertheless always worth reading.
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The focus is less on providing a blow-by blow account of the war than on understanding its deeper causes and essential elements and explaining how this war is reshaping the world. Consequently, Brands opens the book with an essay on the Ukraine War in relation with the global geopolitical order. In his introduction, he distills six core conclusions and themes.
First, Brands reminds readers that what we often call the Ukraine War didn’t start in February 2022, even if that is when its most intense, calamitous, and globally resonant phase began. If we follow his reasoning, in fact, Putin’s bid to control Ukraine, politically and geopolitically, dated back even further, to his failed effort to sway its presidential elections in 2004–2005. Moscow’s methods changed over the next two decades, but its core objective never did.
In this perspective, the Ukraine War is simply, and again, rightly, viewed as the biggest of the many wars of the Soviet succession, simply the next phase of a longer-running struggle between Ukraine and a series of Russian empires—whether tsarist, communist, or Putinist—that have sought to dominate it.
Brands contends, indeed convincingly, that if this war has proven so globally transfixing, perhaps that’s because it reminds us of ugly realities—the viciousness of autocratic aggression, the destructiveness of large-scale war, the fragility of international order—we might prefer to forget.
Second, this war was the result of a double failure, years in the making: Putin’s failure to ensure a weak, pliant Ukraine by means short of all-out conflict, and the West’s failure to deter just such an all-out attack. Brands and his contributors in that sense argue that Putin tried to conquer Ukraine in 2022 because he was running out of other options—and because he was running out of time before a stubbornly defiant country made its future with the West.
Yet if Putin’s invasion reflected a failure of coercion by Moscow, Brands also reflects fruitfully on a more rarely mentioned factor: the failure of deterrence—or perhaps a failure to attempt deterrence—by the West. He does not mince words in that regard: “The crucial, collective failure of America and its allies was their inability to make clear—or perhaps even to realize—how much Ukraine’s survival mattered to them before a shocking invasion cast that survival into existential doubt.”
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For Brands, the outcome of that invasion illustrates a third theme, which is that the course of the war was highly contingent and fairly predictable all at once. He thus argues persuasively that if this book was written in early 2024, at a comparatively low mark in Ukraine’s fortunes, it is worth remembering that the country’s fight for its existence was never supposed to go this well.
He repeats his observations on this point like an eternal truth; the bottom line is that victory in modern warfare is often a matter of mass and endurance—which meant that such conflicts are ultimately contests of economic and societal mobilization—and that, for all its early successes, a Ukraine fighting against a larger, stronger Russia still faced a very tough road ahead.
A fourth theme, reflected in the title of this volume, is that the Ukraine War produced a world more fractured than at any time in decades. Putin’s invasion occurred as global tensions were already rising. It pitted two coalescing, rival coalitions more sharply against one another, even as other countries resisted this polarization of world politics—or profited from playing both sides.
If the Ukraine War marked the return of a more divided world, it also marked—a fifth theme—the return of great-power nuclear crises. In that context, paradoxically, nuclear coercion worked both ways. The course of events in Ukraine thus revealed the crucial, if sometimes subtle, effects of nuclear weapons on great-power crises—and offered a warning of more such crises to come.
The sixth, and final, theme is that the global legacy of this war is yet to be fully written. For if this conflict illustrates the contingency of major war, it also illustrates the contingency of global order. On this note, Brands concludes his introduction with a warning: “a great deal is still at stake in Ukraine—most fundamentally, whether that conflict fortifies or fragments an international order that has served America and its friends so well.”
In closing, to quote Anne Applebaum, reading War in Ukraine will help any concerned citizen willing to stand for freedom and real democracy all around the world to start thinking, not only about helping Ukraine but about defeating Russia—or, if you prefer different language, persuading Russia to leave by any means possible.
War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats
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