EVEN BEFORE the Russo-Ukrainian War, confusion prevailed among those sketching where an untethered international political system was headed. Early on, the argument was over its changing structure: no longer unipolar, was it becoming genuinely multipolar or, as Samuel Huntington argued, “uni-multipolar,” sharing elements of both, or, as Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass had it, simply non-polar?

Gradually the focus shifted to the uncertain fate of the “liberal international order,” which, for hardened realist theorists like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was always something of an illusion, one exposed by the resurgence of great-power politics. For others such as Robert Blackwill and Thomas Wright, the post-Cold War order led by the United States was dissolving into “a model in which many countries choose their own paths to order, without much reference to the views of others, both near and far.” For protagonists of the liberal international order, like John Ikenberry, it remained in place but under assault, less by its Russian and Chinese challengers than by the failure of its democratic architects to protect it. Most Western analysts saw it as a combination of the two: the threat posed by Russia and China to a “rules-based international order,” coupled with the growing incapacity of democratic governments to deal with core problems at home and abroad. For Russian and Chinese thinkers, the liberal international order was a conceit of a U.S.-led West now crumbling as other states gained power and asserted their interests—or as a Chinese saying put it, “the East is rising, while the West is declining.”

But what if the dominant feature of international politics in the decades ahead turns out to be two interlocking cold wars in a new bipolar world? One is already in place. The United States and Russia have been in a new cold war since the eruption of the Ukrainian crisis eight years ago. Initially, unlike the original Cold War, it was not driven by ideological animus, did not unfold under the shadow of nuclear Armageddon, and did not engulf the entire international system—but it shared other critical characteristics.

Similar to the early Cold War period, the capacity for introspection disappeared after 2014, and each side held the other entirely responsible for the collapse in relations. Then, as before, each believed the underlying cause of the conflict arose not out of a friction-filled interaction, but from the disposition of the other side—not as a conflict of interests, but of purpose. Thus, both countries assumed the situation could change only with a fundamental shift in the character of the other side’s leadership or, at a minimum, a fundamental reorientation of its foreign policy. Agreements such as on the removal of Syrian chemical weapons or on preventing dangerous incidents during the two countries’ air operations in Syria were treated by both nations as one-offs and merely transactional. Neither pursued small steps towards a potentially cumulative transformation of their current trajectory.

The failure of analysts and policymakers on both sides to recognize this qualitative change in the relationship from the decade before, when, given the ups and downs after NATO enlargement, neither was quite sure whether the other was friend or foe, had two significant consequences. First, after the demise of the Soviet Union, neither Moscow nor Washington had ever fully responded to—perhaps even recognized—the larger stakes in the relationship, but as they sank into their new cold war, they forfeited the chance to even respond.

Having failed to exercise leadership in creating a regime stabilizing a new multipolar nuclear world, they had now lost the will and capacity to manage their own increasingly complicated nuclear relationship. Six years after 2014, the only remaining piece of the patchwork nuclear arms control regime created over the previous fifty years was the imperiled New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and whether it could be saved, or a follow-on agreement be reached, seemed bleak.

A Europe “whole and at peace”—indeed, a “Euro-Atlantic security community stretching from ‘Vancouver to Vladivostok’”—a goal that national leaders from all fifty-six Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) countries had reaffirmed at their summit in 2010 had largely faded by 2014. In the new U.S.-Russian cold war, this sentiment became a risible fantasy, as the two sides removed guardrails and fortified their military forces along a new Central European front stretching from the Arctic to the Black Sea.

Strategies on how the two of the four largest greenhouse gas-emitting states might work together to mitigate the threats from climate change, particularly in the Arctic, went unexplored. Moreover, any hope that Moscow and Washington might find it better to cooperate in dealing with the rising tensions between the United States and China, rather than exploit them against each other, vanished.

Second, qualities shared with the original Cold War closed minds in Moscow and Washington in ways that significantly aided the descent into the current Ukrainian catastrophe. Neither side any longer tried very hard to understand the concerns driving the other side’s behavior. Neither any longer thought it worthwhile, as they had after the 2003 Iraq War, to explore where their basic interests in a critical instance, such as the Ukrainian crisis, could be reconciled and where not. If there had been a way to avoid the current crisis, it is important to understand why and how their renewed Cold War mindsets obscured it.

Vladimir Putin’s tragic roll of the dice, however, has pushed the new U.S.-Russian cold war to a qualitatively deeper level. Initially, the Biden administration’s strategy for dealing with Russia reprised a venerable Cold War approach tracing back to the 1967 NATO Harmel Report: “deterrence” combined with “détente.” It was, as administration spokesmen described, “holding Russia to account when its actions threatened the interests of the United States or its allies,” but, at the same time, pursuing cooperation in areas of mutual interest, such as nuclear arms control and climate change.

February 24 blew up that strategy. The administration has replaced it with a multilateral campaign preoccupied with weakening and isolating Russia. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has underscored, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” This shift in strategy is meant to remain for as long as Putin holds power. Sanctions won’t be lifted. NATO, having added Finland and Sweden, will further fortify its defenses. Russia will be excluded, where possible, from international fora and institutions.

The war in Ukraine also diminished the differences between the old and new cold wars. As the crisis deepened, Putin’s loose but menacing talk about Russia’s nuclear options has revived fears from an earlier era. And as the repression within Russia mounts and Putin and his closest advisors drum with growing passion on, as they claim, the alien, desiccated values guiding the United States and other Western societies, the cultural chasm separating East from West parallels the ideological animosity of the Cold War. The only remaining distinction between the two cold wars is that of scope. The first Cold War left no part of the world untouched and no country free from the force field of the U.S.-Soviet competition. China, however, wants no part of the new U.S.-Russian cold war, and, as their positions on the Russo-Ukrainian War demonstrate, India, Brazil, and most of the Global South are also standing at a distance.

A U.S.-China cold war, as during the original Cold War, would engulf and reshape the entire international system—its institutions, alliance structures, economic flows, and zones of conflict. The two countries are not yet at this point of confrontation. Their intensifying rivalry does not, for now, share the characteristics of either the original or the new U.S.-Russia cold wars; but, unless trends are consciously redirected, that is where they are headed.

On the U.S. side, gone are the fears that treating China as an adversary would, in turn, make it one. Now, U.S. defense planners speak freely of the military threat that China has become. Indeed, as the Pentagon puts it, China is now “our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge” guiding U.S. defense plans and force development. “China’s nuclear and conventional armed forces,” according to Adm. Charles Richard, the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, have achieved “a strategic ‘breakout’” that has “altered the global power balance.” This shift in tone is palpable with each new leap in Chinese capabilities: news that China is building 230 new ICBM silos prompted warnings that China is on a pace to match U.S. forces by 2030. The surprise test of a hypersonic missile that circled the globe and struck within thirty miles of its target—“close to a Sputnik moment,” in the eyes of Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—stirred alarm that China had surged ahead in a variety of key military technologies, including in space and cyberspace.

China, for its part, makes plain that its military ascendency not only embodies the country’s return as a great power but that it also serves as a response to what it sees as an increasingly aggressive U.S. foreign policy. Chinese experts suggest that the sudden spurt in China’s nuclear program has several potential explanations—all of them driven by perceived growing U.S. hostility. This development, some say, is intended to create a sense of mutual vulnerability forcing the United States to accept China as it is and desist from its “ideological” campaign against the way China chooses to govern itself. Others see an intrinsic military motive. The U.S. emphasis on developing usable nuclear weapons for “limited nuclear options,” they say, leaves China no choice but to follow suit, if China’s military options in a war with the United States are not to be degraded.

The second major trend in the slide toward a U.S.-China cold war has been the accelerating politicization of the economic relationship. As a result, economics no longer offsets the stresses in other dimensions of the relationship, and the voices of those urging a decoupling of the two economies grow in both countries. Nevertheless, countries whose economies are as entwined as the United States and China cannot easily turn the benefits gained from these ties into policy weapons. Roughly 20 percent of the imported goods that Americans consume come from China; trade with China generates nearly 1.2 million American jobs; and China bankrolls nearly 4 percent of the U.S. national debt, holding more than $1 trillion in U.S. treasuries. On the other hand, the United States remains China’s largest export market, taking nearly 19 percent of its total exports, amounting to 3 percent of China’s GDP.

This mutual dependency, however, is no longer viewed by either country as largely beneficial, marred only by disputes over specific trading practices. Both governments now view it as a potential threat to national security. While the tariff war initiated by the Trump administration was a hammer intended to force China to correct the imbalance in its trade with the United States, it was also accompanied by steps to sever ties in areas of education and research, blacklist companies associated with China’s defense and intelligence agencies, and punish with sanctions Chinese officials said to be involved in repressive actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. “We don’t need China,” Donald Trump exclaimed in a 2019 outburst, “and, frankly, we would be far better without them.” When campaigning for re-election, he promised that “we’ll end reliance on China once and for all.”

The Biden administration is considering easing aspects of the trade war with China, but it has kept in place other elements of the Trump administration’s hardline policy. Sanctions are added to sanctions, and more Chinese companies are blacklisted on national security grounds or for human rights violations. The Biden administration’s plan, announced in June 2021, to “build resilient supply chains and revitalize American manufacturing” has a sound policy basis, given the vulnerabilities of the U.S. globalized economy, but the explicit primary target in three out of the four priority areas—large capacity batteries, critical minerals and materials, and pharmaceuticals—is China.

China answers each new U.S. action with counteractions of its own, such as a sweeping Anti-Sanctions Law passed last summer, targeting U.S. lawmakers responsible for sanctions imposed on China. The law is broad enough to potentially ensnare U.S. companies. Since 2020, Xi Jinping has also embraced a Chinese version of decoupling, dubbed the “dual circulation strategy.” Against the vagaries of global economic demand and the U.S. threat to supply chains, Xi has set China on a path to self-sufficiency and the indigenization of critical technologies, with the goal of making the domestic market the engine of the country’s economic growth.

Third, both countries have locked themselves into a struggle for technological supremacy driven by national security concerns—a dynamic similar to the nuclear arms race in the Cold War. Each month brings a new action by the United States, such as the decision to blacklist “seven” Chinese supercomputer entities, followed by the blacklisting of Huawei and four additional major Chinese telecom firms “on national security grounds.” Furthermore, Washington has warned companies and research institutions of “the risks of interacting with China in five key tech sectors: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, semiconductors, and autonomous systems.” The Biden administration is also devising its own version of the Trump administration’s “clean network” initiative—an effort to deny China access to all American data, as international security expert Alan Dupont says, “from military communications carried on undersea cables to 5G-enabled smart refrigerators and television sets.”

China has long been weaponizing data, viewed as key to dominance in critical technologies at the heart of twenty-first-century economic competition with the United States. To this end, China has pilfered where it can, striven to eliminate dependency on the United States for materials and expertise, and vastly expanded investment in relevant sectors. Beijing's “techno-nationalism” and the aggressive U.S. response have transformed science and technological advancement into an intense new battleground.

Fourth, if deepened, the shifting contours of a burgeoning geostrategic rivalry will provide the ultimate shape of the new cold war. Conceptually and practically the path is now open: the strategy that the United States formally embraces and China informally parrots—to “compete, confront, and cooperate”—is losing its balance. Confrontation is taking on organizational forms, competition as a constructive challenge is yielding to destructive means, and cooperation in scope and scale is shrinking. The Biden administration’s new China strategy implicitly commits the United States to a strategy of containment. Accordingly, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said, “[W]e cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory ... So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing...”

The architectural underpinning for this strategy is already advanced. NATO’s new 2022 Strategic Concept introduces China as a multi-pronged threat. Indeed, the expansive scale of the security challenges that China and Russia are said to represent and the response NATO has planned make it appear that the alliance is girding for a global Cold War 2.0. The administration’s Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership takes aim at China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework targets China’s efforts to bind the economies of East and Southeast Asian countries to its own. The administration is working to strengthen the Quad, the defensive collaboration between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and has orchestrated a trilateral security pact with Australia and the United Kingdom (AUKUS). Washington has also encouraged the new Japanese-Australian defense pact—all implicitly directed against China. On the issue of Taiwan, President Joe Biden’s repeated assurances that the United States will defend Taiwan has muddied Washington’s long-standing posture of “strategic ambiguity,” even if he insists nothing has changed. Moreover, Washington’s new emphasis on arming Taiwan—in ways designed to avoid a crisis similar to Ukraine—further calls into question the nature of “strategic ambiguity.”

In this deepening geopolitical duel, China is seizing the initiative. Under Xi Jinping, China expert Elizabeth Economy argues, China sees itself as “reclaiming its historic position of leadership and centrality on the global stage.” In the Chinese leader’s eyes, the United States, a reigning but crippled superpower, can’t abide China’s rise, and is determined to undermine its economic dynamism and checkmate its foreign policy success. In response, Beijing intends its BRI, beyond its economic benefits, to whittle away at American geostrategic advantages.

China’s military modernization and forward deployment in the South China Sea are designed to give China military dominance in the first two “Pacific island chains,” as well as a competitive presence in the Indian Ocean region. It has increased the sophistication and aggressiveness of state-curated cybersecurity attacks on the United States. Furthermore, China continues to organize ever more ambitious joint military exercises with Russia in Northeast Asia addressed not only to local threats, but also a potential military conflict with the United States. And across a wide swath of international institutions, Beijing has secured a leadership role and sought to use its position to alter their rules and norms to its liking.

THE RUDIMENTS of a U.S.-China cold war are thus in place. Crossing the threshold into a formal cold war will occur if the following three trends deepen and then merge. First, if the tension surrounding the U.S.-China military rivalry grows, further distorting increasingly tense economic relations. Second, if the overall strategy of the other country comes to be seen by one or both countries as seriously intent on undoing its domestic order. And third, if the geostrategic competition is seen by one side as tilting decisively in the other’s favor. If the essence of a cold war is a relationship with all the elements of war short of guns firing, but with the risk that they could, that is where the United States and China will then be. That is where the United States and Russia are.

As noted earlier, while the U.S.-Russia cold war, unlike the original Cold War, does not encompass and encumber the entire international political system, if this threshold is crossed, a U.S.-China cold war will. The international economy will be deeply warped and destabilized by economic warfare between the two countries that account for more than 40 percent of the world’s GDP. Deeply frayed U.S.-China economic ties will risk fracturing the entire global economy. The incipient trend toward deglobalization already underway, such as the shifting away from “just-in-time” material sourcing and the moving toward locating critical production facilities closer to home, will then have a dominant, security-oriented source. For security reasons of their own, European Union (EU) countries, Japan, and India are already encouraging companies to leave China, creating barriers to intellectual property theft, and banning China’s next-generation telecommunications technology from their markets. But, if the effects of ruptured U.S.-China economic ties force a reorientation of their trade, the unraveling for these nations will be enormously disruptive. Not the least because any such reorientation will involve—indeed, will be driven by—the impairing of critical supply chains.

Second, international institutions and governance mechanisms will be thrown into further disarray as each side seeks to undermine those favored by or created by the other side. Key international governmental organizations, such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and mechanisms such as the G20 could shatter into a patchwork of institutional battlefronts. China may well try harder to use the BRI to lock most of the Global South into a technological ecosystem closed to the high-tech products of Western economies, or exploit its market share to dictate foreign policy. The nascent but contentious effort to design a regime governing the flow and storage of data will likely entrench two competing models. In general, the expansive but ragged institutional framework that comprises today’s global governance structure will fracture into something resembling that during the original Cold War. Only this time, it will be a more balanced standoff.

Third, the global commons—its natural resources, communications links, and shared knowledge base—will increasingly be an arena of competition rather than cooperation. Any level of cooperation in managing these commons, necessary as it may be, will be measured against the advantage it may yield to the other side. The sharp descent into a deep U.S.-Russia cold war illustrates how rapidly and thoroughly all forms of educational, scientific, and technical cooperation can be scuttled. Obstacles to addressing existential threats, such as those posed by climate change and nuclear weapons, will swell.

Finally, bilateral competition between the United States and China, as in the original Cold War, will inflame and make less manageable regional conflicts in strategically significant parts of the world. The immediate and volatile case of Taiwan, rising tensions in the South China Sea, and the decades-old uncertainties on the Korean Peninsula will not be a U.S.-China cold war’s only arenas. It will spread across the globe, and as the struggle to secure interests in more distant critical regions intensifies, the familiar pattern of one or both powers intervening in local conflicts, backing opposing parties, and acting not as peacemakers, but as contestants, will exacerbate regional conflicts, as it did during the Cold War.

THUS, A U.S.-China cold war will transform the international political system in fundamental ways, but alone it is not likely to alter its current amorphous structure. Combined with the new U.S.-Russia cold war, however, it will once again give the system a bipolar structure. The force field created when the untamed animosity between Russia and the West merges with a comparable hostility between China and the United States will vastly shrink the room for maneuver of those struggling to stay above the confrontation. Even a major player like India—which has remained aloof from the U.S.-Russia cold war and exploited the Ukrainian crisis to buy Russian oil at discounted prices—will find its choices much diminished. The conjoined cold wars will inevitably produce a China-Russia axis—albeit with complications and limitations—thus, raising the China challenge for India and, with it, the need to give priority to India’s stake in U.S.-led counterbalancing efforts against China. Other countries, including substantial parts of the Global South, may try to play one side against the other and seek the economic rewards—but this path will be narrowed by the harsh conditionality the battling sides will attach to their favors.

The bipolarity of the original Cold War came apart as the result of five centrifugal forces: the Sino-Soviet split, polycentrism in the Communist world, the filling of power vacuums and the rise of powers like China and India, the Soviet Union’s faltering economy, and the overreach by both sides in the cases of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Except for potential overreach, the forces at work in a bipolar contest driven by dual cold wars will more likely be centripetal, as the political, economic, and security options open to much of the remainder of the world shrink.

The consequences of moving from the current level of great-power strategic rivalry to a new bipolarity driven by two interlocking cold wars will be immense and tragic. In present circumstances, there is again a growing normative bipolarity at the level of the countries’ internal political orders and value systems. However, the possibility, although shaken by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, still exists that at the international level China and the United States could reconcile themselves to rules allowing for a modus vivendi.

When Putin argues that Peter the Great in the Great Northern War was not taking lands from Sweden, but returning to Russia what historically and legitimately belonged to it, as he is doing in Ukraine, he has thrown over the anchoring norm of the post-World War II UN system, and substituted its eighteenth-century Hobbesian opposite. If, as appears to be the case, a majority of countries tolerate the seizure of another country’s sovereign territory by force, the norm at the center of the contemporary international order is seriously endangered. Worse, if Xi embraces Putin’s defection, let alone views resolving the Taiwan issue as the decisive factor determining his personal legacy, as Putin does Ukraine, and then acts accordingly, any thought of finding common ground on the rules governing the international system vanishes.

China does not rule out the use of force if Taiwan moves toward independence, but it denies a readiness to force the issue by military means. For the moment, this leaves room for the two countries to seek, as former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd suggests, a “managed strategic competition” with rules designed to prevent the two countries from lurching into war. His rules include both sides abstaining from cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, the United States “strictly adhering to the ‘one China’ policy,” China “dialing back ... provocative military exercises, deployments, and maneuvers,” and China ceasing further militarization of the South China Sea, reciprocated by a reduction of U.S. and allied operations in the area.

If, however, a new U.S.-China cold war merges with an inflamed U.S.-Russia cold war, then the quest for rules of the road such as Rudd suggests has no chance. The world will have returned to a state more destructive and dangerous than that in the period from the 1948 Berlin crisis through the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It would be more destructive, in fact, because the current international system’s economic, technical, and social components and their nexuses are far more extensive and complex. Such a standoff would even be more dangerous than the original Cold War because two new cold wars will each contain the grounds for a major military conflict, even World War III, as the current Russo-Ukrainian War prompts Biden to warn.

MAYBE MAJOR economies are too entangled, globalized supply chains too essential, and data platforms too impervious to fracturing that U.S. and Chinese decoupling and weaponized economics can only go so far. Maybe the economic dynamism that gingers Xi Jinping’s ambitions is overhyped, and China's economic vulnerabilities are greater than commonly recognized. Maybe China will decide that its Russian partner is too reckless and inept to embrace too closely. And maybe U.S. allies and other key players will manage to stay free from the riptide of U.S.-China rivalry, or even from the bipolar force of two entwined cold wars, and create barriers to the damage either can cause. But a prudent regard for the tragic, unexpected turns history can take would urge leadership in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing to carefully weigh the trajectory they are on and how seriously they want to test moving in another direction.

That will not be easy or, alas, even likely. The future of what is now a ravaged U.S.-Russian relationship will be barren and riddled with dangers. The war in Ukraine will likely end with no agreed resolution and either with a substantial portion of Ukraine occupied and absorbed by Russia or in a Korean War-like stalemate. In either case, Russia will have lost Ukraine, NATO will have made Ukraine its security ward, and the EU, with Ukraine its imminent member, and NATO will face off with Russian military forces along an East European front from the Black Sea to the Arctic, including its new 830-mile Finnish extension.

Both Russia and the West will then have two choices. The natural inclination on both sides—already signaled at NATO’s July Madrid summit—will be to reconfigure their beefed up military forces and push a larger number of them forward to the line of contact. The alternative would be to focus an equal effort on restoring and strengthening the military guardrails dismantled over the course of the post-2014 U.S.-Russia cold war: to reconstitute a modernized version of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe governing the numbers of forces and kinds of weapons forward deployed; to resuscitate the Open Skies Treaty and Vienna Document providing for transparency in military activity and limits on military maneuvers; to restore the NATO-Russia Council as a point of regular military-to-military contact; and to embrace the earlier tentative prospect of eschewing the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in the European theater.

Even sooner, by October 2022—the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis—whatever the state of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the two countries will still have nearly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons in an increasingly complex and unstable nuclear world—and it is simply common sense, as the two presidents now seem ready to do, to return to their suspended “strategic stability dialogue.” Following the June 2021 summit, the dialogue produced two critical working groups—one on Principles and Objectives for Future Arms Control and the other on Capabilities and Actions with Strategic Effects. As the risks inherent in their deepening confrontation mount, exploring paths to nuclear arms limitations and stabilizing the nuclear relationship—the task of the first group—becomes ever more urgent. Doing so by considering emerging technologies, new war fronts (such as cyber and space), and concepts for nuclear use that threaten strategic stability in more complex ways—the task of the second group—becomes ever more essential.

Great as the opportunity costs are in a deepening U.S.-Russia cold war, the evolution of U.S.-Chinese relations will be the single factor producing or preventing a dystopian bipolar world driven by two destructive cold wars. Xi’s apparent belief that the United States and the West are in irreversible decline and Biden’s conviction that the struggle between Chinese authoritarianism and American democracy is existential make finding common ground more difficult. Both perspectives, however, also create an imperative that the challenge each sees remain short of conflagration. Rudd’s concept of “managed strategic competition” and the steps that he urges would seem an obvious place to begin. (And in his most recent analysis, he sees signs that leadership in both countries, plagued by a swelling set of unresolved problems, may be ready for a temporary respite from their jousting.) However, now that China is a peer nuclear competitor, and should be acknowledged as such, the two countries need to go further. They need to launch an active, ongoing strategic dialogue to explore how each imagines the paths to a nuclear war, the weapons systems and strategies that risk producing such, and potential measures that would reduce this risk.

Both countries should also recalibrate the way they are altering the context for conventional war in East Asia. China should relax its moves toward claiming the Taiwan Strait as territorial waters, and the United States should reemphasize its “one-China” policy and reciprocate any restraint in Chinese military actions with limitations on its own military operations. In general, both nations need to rebalance the elements in the United States’ overt and China’s implicit strategy of competing, confronting, and cooperating. The space where competition invites confrontation should be narrowed, and where it permits cooperation, should be broadened.

A year or two ago, none of us, including leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, could have imagined what the Russo-Ukrainian War has wrought. One hopes their ability to imagine what worse could yet go wrong will not fail them.

Robert Legvold is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, where he specialized in the international relations of the post-Soviet states.

Image: Reuters.