Many scholars believe that U.S. policy in Europe is counter-hegemonic, as it was in the early twentieth century. In this view, the U.S. security interest in Europe is to prevent one country from dominating Eurasia. As potential hegemons, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led the United States to involve itself deeply in European security affairs.

The first year of war in Ukraine demonstrates beyond doubt that the Russian Federation of 2023 is not, and for the policy-relevant future will not be, a potential hegemon in Europe. Either U.S. aims in Europe have expanded dramatically over recent decades or they have always been more expansive than the conventional wisdom would suggest.

Russia has conducted its war disastrously. The Kremlin’s crazy initial concept of operations, its refusal or inability to fight with combined arms at the outset, and its failure to suppress Ukrainian air defenses were all perplexing militarily. Russia’s war crimes inflamed Ukrainian nationalism, even turning previously favorable Ukrainians against them. The Russian military has performed much worse in the field than it appeared on paper. The idea that Russia’s military, struggling to defeat a much smaller and weaker neighbor, could pose a threat to the major power centers of Europe is a joke.

In a reasonable world, it would be good news to learn that preventing hegemony in Europe doesn’t require much U.S. exertion. But the “trans-Atlantic community,” which informs elites and the public about such matters, has managed to avoid that conclusion. As Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, once wrote, “U.S. foreign policy elites’ very identity has tied them to the continuation of an approach that supports their interests as a class: an activist foreign policy of American global leadership.”

Instead of recognizing the good news of Russia’s weakness, we learn that its weakness makes it more dangerous. Other supporters of U.S. leadership in Ukraine, like Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan, admit that “there is no way that Putin’s conquest of Ukraine has any immediate or even distant effect on American security,” granting that the claim is “kind of ludicrous.” Rather, for Kagan, “the defense of Ukraine is a defense of the [sic] liberal hegemony.”

Everywhere you look on Ukraine policy—whether in Poland, Israel, Turkey, or in Ukraine itself—you see elites jealously defending their countries’ interests. Then, there is the United States. In our country, an insular elite has dominated the Western response to the invasion, sending tens of thousands of U.S. troops to Europe and recentering European security on the United States, at a tremendous cost in money, risk, and attention.

The ruin of the war for Ukrainians and Russians is a humanitarian tragedy, but the conclusion regarding Russia’s weakness is good news. A more prudent foreign policy elite would have taken the win.