Opinion: Ukraine and Iran Have Exposed the Limits of Global Power
Two wars. Two superpowers. Two stalemates.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 expecting a three-day campaign that would topple the government in Kyiv and redraw the map of Eastern Europe. The United States attacked Iran in February 2026 expecting a rapid, decisive strike that would neutralize the nuclear program and end the clerical regime’s regional dominance. Both assumptions were catastrophically wrong.
The lesson of 2026 is not that great powers are still powerful. It is that they are not nearly as powerful as they believed themselves to be.
Fiona Hill, the former National Intelligence Council official who has spent decades studying Russia and U.S. foreign policy, put it plainly in a recent Brookings analysis: “Deadlock in Ukraine discredits Russia as a global military force. It corrodes Putin’s patina of indestructibility in the same way that the stalemate in the Persian Gulf undermines the United States and Trump.” The symmetry is uncomfortable for Washington, but it is real.
Consider the state of Russia’s military. More than four years into the Ukraine war, Russia has failed to take and hold the major cities it targeted in the opening weeks. By January 2026, Moscow had been fighting in Ukraine longer than the Soviet Union fought Nazi Germany in World War II. In April 2026 alone, Russia suffered roughly 35,000 casualties. The Russian army cannot man its borders, cannot project power beyond its immediate periphery, and cannot even produce enough weapons for export to sustain its traditional arms-client relationships. Countries that once orbited Moscow, from Armenia to the Gulf states, are openly breaking away.
Now consider the United States. Washington’s war in Iran, launched in February 2026, was supposed to be short. The intelligence community had warned for years that any attack on Iran would trigger a closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The administration ignored those warnings. Today, the Strait is effectively closed, 20 million barrels of oil per day are missing from global markets, and prices have surged past $116 a barrel. The Pentagon, like the Kremlin, is burning through munitions faster than the defense industrial base can replace them. It cannot produce the same volume of arms for export, leaving longtime customers from Europe to India building their own capacity.
The wars share a deeper structural truth. Both Russia and the United States launched offensives based on excessive confidence in their own military dominance and a corresponding underestimation of their adversaries. Putin believed Ukraine would fold. Trump believed Iran would collapse. In both cases, the adversary did not fold. And in both cases, the superpower discovered that modern warfare, drone-heavy and attritional as it is, is a brutal leveler.
Ukraine is the clearest beneficiary. Its military, hardened by years of combat, is now arguably the most competent fighting force in Europe. It has transformed warfare through remarkable battlefield innovation, particularly in drones and counter-drone systems. President Zelenskyy has begun moving away from exclusive reliance on the United States, cultivating partnerships with European allies and Gulf states eager to learn from Ukrainian drone warfare. The student has become the teacher.
Iran, meanwhile, has inflicted damage that goes beyond the battlefield. The war has killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and much of Iran’s senior leadership. But it has also exposed the limits of American military power in a way that will shape global perceptions for a generation. Every country watching the Persian Gulf stalemate is recalibrating its assumptions about U.S. reliability.
Perhaps the most dangerous consequence is the one getting the least attention. The New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, expired on February 5, 2026. For the first time since 1972, there are no legally binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two countries that together hold more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads. The old arms control architecture is gone. Nobody is building a replacement.
The wars in Ukraine and Iran are not side-by-side anomalies. They are a single story about the exhaustion of a post-Cold War world order built on the premise that American and Russian power were uniquely decisive. That premise is no longer sustainable. The question now is what comes next, and whether the world can build a new equilibrium before the old one collapses completely.