For the second time in less than half a year, Iran has hurled hundreds of missiles at Israel. Although Iran technically launched more weapons at Israel in April, only 120 of those were ballistic missiles—a smaller salvo than the more than 180 ballistic missiles used this time. The drones and cruise missiles used in April were more easily intercepted and shot down by Israeli, American, and European air defenses, working in cooperation with some of Israel’s Arab partners.

According to early reports, miraculously enough, no Israelis were killed in this latest barrage, although falling debris killed a Palestinian in Jenin, on the West Bank. But some of the missiles seem to have gotten through Israel’s three layers of anti-missile defenses, inflicting an unknown amount of damage. An attack yesterday by two terrorists in Tel Aviv was far more lethal, killing at least seven civilians; its relationship to the Iranian attack is unclear.

The war between Iran and Israel has gone on for a long time, although mostly in the shadows. Iran has armed Hezbollah as a proxy force to attack Israel, and so it has over the years, with roadside bombs, ambushes, and rockets; Iran has also equipped Yemen’s Houthis with long-range weapons to attack the Jewish state, and so they have, as well. Israel has bombed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters in Damascus, sabotaged the Iranian nuclear program, and conducted assassinations and raids (including the lifting of an entire Iranian nuclear archive) in Iran itself. A war on the high seas, in which ships on both sides have been sabotaged or attacked, has drawn less coverage but been no less intense.

But what we’re now witnessing is something different: a large and open exchange of fire, a different stage in a conflict that has been going on for a generation. Its roots lie in the very nature of the Iranian regime. Fundamental to its ideology is unyielding hostility to the United States (“the Great Satan”) and a desire to expel it from the Middle East, a commitment to the destruction of Israel (“the Little Satan”) as part of a path to regional dominance, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a shield against retaliation.

In pursuing these goals, Iran has long relied on indirect means, which even if detected do not elicit all-out conflict with the United States or Israel. Its Arab proxies have the blood of thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Jews abroad on their hands. Until this past month, Iran’s strategy—build a proxy-driven “ring of fire” around Israel and lever the United States out of the Middle East with relentless low-level violence—appeared to be working.

The United States abjured the use of large-scale force against Iran, even as Iraqi militias trained and equipped by Iran ambushed American soldiers. Neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations reacted by pummeling the country behind those attacks. As recently as 2020, following America’s killing of the head of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, a barrage of missiles hit an American base in Iraq, inflicting concussive traumatic brain damage on scores of American troops without an American reaction. Former President Donald Trump, who ordered the attack on Soleimani, recently dismissed these injuries as “headaches.”

The series of smashing blows Israel has landed against Hezbollah over the past month—against its leadership, its middle management, its arsenal, and its communications—changes all this. Iran’s most powerful surrogate has been beaten badly in ways from which it may not fully recover. The implications for Iran are profound, coming on top of Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse during the new Iranian president’s inauguration. Iran’s attacks in April, and even more so now, are desperate attempts to avoid what Iran’s leaders fear most—strategic humiliation.

To American minds, at least, avoiding humiliation as a strategic objective, or even inflicting it as a tool of strategy, may seem absurd. To the Iranian regime, though, humiliation is potentially lethal. An unpopular regime that is presiding over a feeble economy, backed by a military that cannot protect its own airspace, dependent on a tired revolutionary ideology, led by a repressive and corrupt elite, and directed by the octogenarian last link to the regime’s founder cannot afford humiliation.

One might think that, for Israel, simply parrying the Iranian blow would be enough, as it was in April. It is not. In the Middle East, as in most of the world, if you keep on taking punches without punching back you look weak, and as Osama bin Laden famously said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” This is why President Biden’s plea for a “proportional” response by Israel is absurd: The logical consequence would be a large-scale, expensive, and totally ineffective Israeli attack on Iran. Last April Israel merely hit a radar site in Iran—a flick on the nose to warn of worse to come. This time, it has to deliver.

There are deeper reasons for Israel to hit back hard. Defense is often a mug’s game; it costs more than offense. If Iran does not suffer (not merely “pay a price”) as a result of this attack, it has every incentive to keep on building more advanced missiles and to have another go, and then another. Sooner or later, some of its missiles will hit their targets.

But this is also an opportunity, for the United States as it is for Israel, to confront an enemy who is in fact weak. Iran has been penetrated by Israeli—and, one must presume, by American and European—intelligence services. The Iranian military is equipped with a mix of obsolete American hardware from the shah’s days, homemade missiles and drones largely intended for offensive use, and a small number of Russian supplied systems like S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Iran is suffering double-digit inflation, a double-digit poverty rate, and a brain drain brought about by its government’s policies. It is heavily dependent on oil revenues to keep going—revenues earned on the 4 million barrels a day exported despite feeble sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.

All of this argues not only for Israeli strikes—which will surely come—but for vigorous American action as well. Israel may well choose to attack economic targets, and in particular the oil industry that keeps Iran’s economy afloat. Attacks on the nuclear program—buried and dispersed at different sites—would probably be more difficult. In either case, Israel will need American help.

Israel has a large and capable air force, including nearly 40 F-35s. But it lacks a large fleet of aerial refueling planes, necessary for long-range strikes, which the United States has in plenty. At the very least, the United States can quietly help supply that deficit. The question is: Should it do more?

The answer is yes. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden have all insisted that Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons. The first concluded an agreement that would slow but not stop that program; the second scrapped the agreement and tightened the screws of sanctions but did nothing to materially affect the program; the third attempted to resurrect the agreement but failed—and again, did nothing substantive. This is possibly the last opportunity to do something of consequence.

The Biden administration’s plea for restraint or proportionality on Israel’s part is obtuse, and its apparent reluctance to act decisively and forcefully here is not merely a display of culpable timidity, but the loss of an opportunity that may not come again.

The United States, unlike Israel, has long-range heavy bombers, unusual advanced weapons, and the ability to operate from bases and aircraft carriers in the region. It has long focused intelligence collection on Iran’s nuclear program—the regime’s ultimate ace in the hole—and thought about how to destroy it. Iran has killed and wounded plenty of Americans, and has never ceased to declare its enmity to the United States. It has now provided the U.S., a country whose avowed policy is to put an end to the menace of Iranian nuclear weapons, the opening to make good on what have been, until now, empty threats and emptier promises.

By taking counsel of its fears, the Biden administration set up Afghanistan for a return to the Dark Ages, set up Ukraine for a hideous war of attrition which it may lose, and will now set up the Middle East and the world beyond for a nuclear-armed Iran. This is not prudence, but strategic folly. There is little time to correct it and avoid worse to come.

Here’s what you could have had: That’s what I kept thinking throughout the vice-presidential debate. The head-to-head between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance was a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump—a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal.

How soon will that day come? The most surprising moment of the debate arrived right at the end, when it became clear that the outwardly subservient Vance is already plotting his post-Trump future. Don’t tell the mad old king, but his most loyal baron is looking at the crown and wondering how well it would fit his head.

More on that later, but first let’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. Onstage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, offered slick, coherent, and blessedly short answers to the CBS moderators’ questions. (The Bulwark compared him to a “smoother, 2016-vintage Marco Rubio.”) Tim Walz, the Democrat, started nervously, quickly discovering that being folksy in an empty room is hard—although he certainly didn’t go down in Dan Quayle–style flames. The debate was cordial—too cordial for many Democrats, who wondered why Walz was not delivering the smackdowns they longed to see.

Both candidates committed political sins well within the expected range: Vance freely ignored the first question on Iran, and instead recapped his appealing backstory for any viewers unfamiliar with Hillbilly Elegy. Walz dodged and weaved around a question about his inflated biography, before eventually conceding that he “misspoke” when he claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The two men also managed to have several substantive exchanges on policy, arguing over what we can learn from Finland’s approach to gun crime, and to what extent mental-health issues interact with mass shootings. All of that was a reminder of what American political debates used to be like in the distant past of, oh, the early 2010s.

The pundits have largely called this debate for Vance, who successfully downplayed his unpopular positions on abortion and health care, and took several opportunities to push his key ideological theme of protectionism. America needs to become more self-sufficient, and not just in heavy industry, he said, because “the pharmaceuticals that we put in the bodies of our children are manufactured by nations that hate us.” That line sounded less paranoid than it once might have, after former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed last week that, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, he had flirted with sending a commando team to recover vaccines held by the European Union.

The audience polls were closer, however. Walz recovered from his shaky start to deliver several punchy lines. On gun violence, he talked about his own teenage son witnessing a shooting, drawing an empathetic response from Vance, as well as his meeting with the parents of the pupils killed at Sandy Hook—realizing that he had a picture of his own child on the office wall, when the people in front of him had lost their own children. Asked to explain why he changed his mind and now supported a ban on assault weapons, Walz said simply: “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents.”

All very civil, sane, normal. Very demure. Every so often, though, an alternate reality began to bleed into the CBS studio. Or rather—our reality began to bleed in. The one where Donald Trump is the Republican candidate. The clearest signal was Vance’s frequent tic of referring to his running mate: Donald Trump’s energy policy, Donald Trump’s border policy, Donald Trump’s wisdom and courage. By contrast, Walz mentioned Kamala Harris more rarely.

You and I both know why Vance name-dropped with the zest of an out-of-work actor. Trump is one of those people who picks up a political memoir and flicks to the index to see how often he is mentioned. Over the past eight years, the entire Republican Party has reshaped itself around his giant ego, and it is filled with many men much smarter than Trump—men like J. D. Vance, in fact—who believe they can manipulate him through flattery. The former president won’t have been paying attention to the finer details of Finnish policy, but instead listening for his name. Throughout the debate, the Trump campaign’s rapid-response team blasted out “fact-checks,” but the candidate’s own TruthSocial feed rambled through his usual obsessions: the CBS anchors’ low ratings; paeans to his own greatness and sagacity—“America was GREAT when I was President,” “I SAVED our Country from the China Virus,” “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN”—and praise for “a great defense of me” by Vance.

The big mystery of this moment in American politics is that Trump’s flaws—his self-obsession, his lack of self-control, his casual lies—are so obvious. And yet all attempts to replace him with a lab-grown alternative, with those flaws removed, have failed. (Had Vance run in the Republican primary, I suspect he would have done about as well as Ron DeSantis.) The Republican base loves the chaos and the drama and the darkness that Trump offers, and resists all attempts to replace those qualities with boring competence.

All the way through, the times Vance really seemed in trouble were when he had to defend Trump’s behavior, and his own switch from critic to sycophant. He gave an outrageous—but superficially convincing—explanation for how he went from thinking Trump was “America’s Hitler” to its last and only hope. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” he said. In the same way, the only real flash of the dislikable “childless cat ladies” version of Vance—familiar to me from edgy podcasts and cozy Fox News interviews—came when he had to defend Trump’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When the moderators noted that the Haitians in question were in America legally, Vance replied: “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check.” Not exactly the response of a man confident that he is telling the truth.

Right at the end, Vance was asked whether he would challenge the election results in ways that violated the law and the Constitution. “I think that we’re focused on the future,” he said, before jazz-hands-ing into standard Republican talking points about the threat of Big Tech censorship. (The two flagship cases of this in right-wing lore involve Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID discussions on Facebook and Spotify.) Harris, Vance said, would “like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.”

At this, Walz found a new gear. The Folksy Midwestern Dad was now not angry, but disappointed in his wayward son, who had returned long after curfew, smelling suspiciously of weed. Vance, Walz’s demeanor implied, had let himself down. “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” he began, before mounting a devastating attack of Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. “He lost this election, and he said he didn’t. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died.” As Walz moved into a riff about being a football coach, telling his team that playing fair was more important than winning at any cost, Vance reflexively began to nod slightly.  

In his response, Vance tried his best—pointing out that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Walz shot back: “January 6 was not Facebook ads.” (We might also note that, whatever her misgivings about the election, Clinton attended Trump’s inauguration, explicitly acknowledging the peaceful transfer of power to an opponent. By contrast, Trump did not stay in Washington, D.C., to watch Joe Biden get sworn in as president, but instead flew off to Florida in a huff.)

Walz then asked Vance flat out whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Again, the Republican could only offer a cop-out—“Tim, I’m focused on the future”—and a pivot back to Big Tech censorship, which allowed Walz to go in for the kill. “This is not a debate,” he said. “It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

The extraordinary part of Vance’s waffle here isn’t that he refused to tell the truth—to say the 2020 election was valid. The really remarkable thing is that the Republican vice-presidential nominee can’t bring himself to agree with his boss and say that the 2020 election was stolen. In the past four years, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to challenge the results, the candidate himself encouraged the crowds on January 6 to protest them—culminating in threats of violence to Congress and then–Vice President Pence—and his stump speeches regularly feature riffs about the issue. This year, he has suggested that he will lose only if the Democrats “cheat like hell.”

Vance did not echo this language, nor did he repeat his previous suggestion that he would not have done what Pence did in January 2021, which was to certify the results. On the most fundamental issue of this year’s contest—whether America is still a functioning democracy with free and fair elections—the Republican ticket is not entirely in sync.

Now, I’m beyond being surprised that Vance wouldn’t tell the truth. But I am intrigued that, when given the biggest platform of his career to date, he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either. After so many humiliating concessions, this is the point when Vance decided, to adapt the famous phrase of the poet E. E. Cummings, “There is some shit I will not eat.” He switched so deftly to his talking points about misinformation that much of the instant punditry missed his sleight of hand.

Why not agree with his boss about what happened in 2020? The inevitable conclusion must be that J. D. Vance—smart, ambitious, and only 40 years old—is already contemplating the post-Trump future. Once the former president is out of the picture, what will be the point of harping on his personal bitterness about being rejected by the American people? The voters of 2028 or 2032 will undoubtedly care more about gas prices and housing costs than an old man’s grievance. You might as well keep doing Trump’s crazy material about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

By any measure, Vance did quite well last night. But I wonder if Trump noticed that, amid all the name-drops and the flattery, his running mate is “focused on the future”—a future that doesn’t include him.

In an underground parking lot beneath an ordinary building in an ordinary Ukrainian city, dozens of what appear to be small, windowless fishing boats are lined up in rows. The noise of machinery echoes from a separate room, where men are working with metal and wires. They didn’t look up when I walked in one recent morning, and no wonder: This is a sea-drone factory, these are among the best engineers in Ukraine, and they are busy producing the unmanned vessels that have altered the trajectory of the war. Packed with explosives and guided by the world’s most sophisticated remote-navigation technology, these new weapons might even change the way that all naval wars are fought in the future.

Certainly, the sea drones are evolving very quickly. A year ago, I visited the small workshop that was then producing the first Ukrainian models. One of the chief engineers described what was at the time the drones’ first major success: a strike that took out a Russian frigate, damaged a submarine, and hit some other boats as well.

Since then, the sea drones, sometimes alone and sometimes in combined attacks with flying drones or missiles, have sunk or damaged more than two dozen warships. This is possibly the most successful example of asymmetric warfare in history. The Ukrainian drones cost perhaps $220,000 apiece; many of the Russian ships are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The military impact is enormous. To avoid Ukrainian strikes, Russian ships have mostly left their former headquarters, in the occupied Crimean port of Sevastopol, and moved farther east. They no longer patrol the Ukrainian coast. They can’t stop Ukrainian cargo ships from carrying grain and other goods to world markets, and Ukrainian trade is returning to prewar levels. This can’t be said often enough: Ukraine, a country without much of a navy, defeated Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

Nor is Ukraine’s talent for asymmetric warfare confined to water. During a recent trip, I visited another basement, where another team of Ukrainians was working to change the course of the war—and, again, maybe the course of all subsequent wars as well. (I was allowed to tour these operations on the condition that I not identify their locations or the people working at them.) This particular facility had no machines, no engines, and no warheads, just a room lined with screens. The men and women sitting at the screens were dressed like civilians, but in fact they were soldiers, members of a special army unit created to deploy experimental communications technology in combination with experimental drones. Both are being developed by Ukrainians, for Ukraine.

[Read: The ‘Gray Zone’ comes to Russia]

This particular team, with links to many parts of the front lines, has been part of both offensive and defensive operations, and even medical evacuations. According to one of the commanders, this unit alone has conducted 2,400 combat missions and destroyed more than 1,000 targets, including tanks, armored personnel vehicles, trucks, and electronic-warfare systems since its creation several months ago. Like the sea-drone factory, the team in the basement is operating on a completely different scale from the frontline drone units whose work I also encountered last year, on several trips around Ukraine. In 2023, I met small groups of men building drones in garages, using what looked like sticks and glue. By contrast, this new unit is able to see images of most of the front line all at once, revise tools and tactics as new situations develop, and even design new drones to fit the army’s changing needs.

More important, another commander told me, the team works “at the horizontal level,” meaning that members coordinate directly with other groups on the ground rather than operating via the army’s chain of command: “Three years of experience tells us that, 100 percent, we will be much more efficient when we are doing it on our own—coordinating with other guys that have assets, motivation, understanding of the processes.” Horizontal is a word that describes many successful Ukrainian projects, both military and civilian. Also, grassroots. In other words, Ukrainians do better when they organize themselves; they do worse when they try to move in lockstep under a single leader. Some argue that this makes them more resilient. Or, as another member of the team put it, Russia will never be able to destroy Ukraine’s decision-making center, “because the center doesn’t make all the decisions.”

Members of Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade assemble a Poseidon reconnaissance drone in Sumy province, near the Russian border, in August. (Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty)

I recognize that this account of the war effort differs dramatically from other, grimmer stories now coming out of Ukraine. In recent weeks, Russian glide bombs and artillery have slowly begun to destroy the city of Pokrovsk, a logistical hub that has been part of Ukraine’s defensive line in Donetsk for a decade. Regular waves of Russian air strikes continue to hit Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. The repeated attacks on civilians are not an accident; they are a tactic. Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to deprive Ukrainians of heat and light, to demoralize the people as well as the government, and perhaps to provoke a new refugee exodus that will disrupt European politics.

Russia remains the larger and richer country. The Kremlin has more ammunition, more tanks, and a greater willingness to dispose of its citizens. The Russian president is willing to tolerate high human losses, as well as equipment losses, of a kind that almost no other nation could accept. And yet, the Ukrainians still believe they can win—if only their American and European allies will let them.

Two and a half years into the conflict, the idea that we haven’t let Ukraine win may sound strange. Since the beginning of the war, after all, we have been supporting Ukraine with weapons and other aid. Recently, President Joe Biden reiterated his support for Ukraine at the United Nations. “The good news is that Putin’s war has failed in his core aim,” he said. But, he added, “the world now has another choice to make: Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let a nation be destroyed? We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away.” Hoping to rally more Americans to his side, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spent much of last week in the United States. He visited an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania. He met with former President Donald Trump, and with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien: How defense experts got Ukraine wrong

Zelensky also presented a victory plan that asked, among other things, for Ukraine to have the right to use American and European long-range missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia. This kind of request is now familiar. In each stage of the war, the Ukrainians and their allies have waged public campaigns to get new weapons—tanks, F-16s, long-range missiles—that they need to maintain a technological edge. Each time, these requests were eventually granted, although sometimes too late to make a difference.

Each time, officials in the U.S., Germany, and other Western powers argued that this or that weapon risked crossing some kind of red line. The same argument is being made once again, and it sounds hollow. Because at this point, the red lines are entirely in our heads; every one of them has been breached. Using drones, Ukraine already hits targets deep inside Russia, including oil refineries, oil and gas export facilities, even air bases. In the past few weeks, Ukraine’s long-range drones have hit at least three large ammunition depots, one of which was said to have just received a large consignment from North Korea; when attacked, the depot exploded dramatically, producing an eerie mushroom cloud. In a development that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the war, Ukraine has, since early August, even occupied a chunk of Russian territory. Ukrainian troops invaded Kursk province, took control of several towns and villages, set up defenses, repelled Russian troops, and have yet to leave.

But in truth, the imaginary red lines, the slow provision of weapons, and the rules about what can and can’t be hit are not the real problem. On its own, a White House decision to allow the Ukrainians to strike targets in Russia with American or even European missiles will not change the course of the war. The deeper limitation is our lack of imagination. Since this war began, we haven’t been able to imagine that the Ukrainians might defeat Russia, and so we haven’t tried to help those who are trying to do exactly that. We aren’t identifying, funding, and empowering the young Ukrainian engineers who are inventing new forms of asymmetric warfare. With a few exceptions, Ukrainians tell me, many allied armies aren’t in regular contact with the people carrying out cutting-edge military experiments in Ukraine. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, says that the Ukrainians have spare capacity in their own drone factories, and could produce more themselves if they just had the money. Meanwhile, $300 billion worth of frozen Russian reserves are still sitting in European clearinghouses, untouched, waiting for a political decision to use that money to win the war. Biden is right to tout the success of the coalition of democracies created to aid Ukraine, but why not let that coalition start defending Ukraine against incoming missiles, as friends of Israel have just done in the Middle East? Why isn’t the coalition focused on enforcing targeted sanctions against the Russian defense industry?     

Worse—much worse—is that, instead of focusing on victory, Americans and Europeans continue to dream of a magic “negotiated solution” that remains far away. Many, many people, some in good faith and some in bad faith, continue to call for an exchange of “land for peace.” Last week, Trump attacked Zelensky for supposedly refusing to negotiate, and the ex-president continues to make unfounded promises to end the war “in 24 hours.” But the obstacle to negotiations is not Zelensky. He probably could be induced to trade at least some land for peace, as long as Ukraine received authentic security guarantees—preferably, though not necessarily, in the form of NATO membership—to protect the rest of the country’s territory, and as long as Ukraine could be put on a path to complete integration with Europe. Even a smaller Ukraine would still need to be a viable country, to attract investment and ensure refugees’ return.   

Right now, the actual obstacle is Putin. Indeed, none of these advocates for “peace,” whether they come from the Quincy Institute, the Trump campaign, the Council on Foreign Relations, or even within the U.S. government, can explain how they will persuade Russia to accept such a deal. It is the Russians who have to be persuaded to stop fighting. It is the Russians who do not want to end the war.

Portraits of Russian service members killed during the invasion of Ukraine are projected onto the State Council building in Simferopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea, in April. The letter Z is a symbol of the Russian invasion. (AFP / Getty)

Look, again, at the situation on the ground. Even now, two and a half years into a war that was supposed to be over in a few days, the Kremlin still seeks to gain more territory. Despite the ongoing Ukrainian occupation of Kursk province, the Russian army is still sending thousands of men to die in the battle for Donetsk province. The Russian army also seems unbothered by losing equipment. In the long battle for Vulhedar, a now-empty town in eastern Ukraine with a prewar population of 14,000, the Russians have sacrificed about 1,000 tanks, armored vehicles, and pieces of artillery —nearly 6 percent of all the vehicles destroyed during the entire war.

Russia has not changed its rhetoric either. On state television, pundits still call for the dismemberment and destruction of Ukraine. Putin continues to call for the “denazification of Ukraine,” by which he means the removal of Ukraine’s language, culture, and identity—as well as “demilitarization, and neutral status,” by which he means a Ukraine that has no army and cannot resist conquest. Nor do Russian economic decisions indicate a desire for peace. The Russian president now plans to spend 40 percent of the national budget on arms production, sacrificing living standards, health care, pensions, broader prosperity, and maybe the stability of the economy itself. The state is still paying larger and larger bonuses to anyone willing to sign up to fight. Labor shortages are rampant, both because the army is eating up eligible men and because so many others have left the country to avoid conscription.

Negotiations can begin only when this rhetoric changes, when the defense machine grinds to a halt, when the attempts to conquer yet another village are abandoned. This war will end, in other words, only when the Russians run out of resources—and their resources are not infinite—or when they finally understand that Ukraine’s alliances are real, that Ukraine will not surrender, and that Russia cannot win. Just as the British decided in the early 20th century that Ireland is not British and the French decided in 1962 that Algeria is not France, so must the Russians come to accept that Ukraine is not Russia. At that point, there can be a cease-fire, a discussion of new borders, negotiations about other things—such as the fate of the more than 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped and deported by the Russians, an orchestrated act of cruelty.

We have not yet reached that stage. The Russians are still waiting for the U.S. to get tired, to stop defending Ukraine, and maybe to elect Trump so that they can dictate terms and make Ukraine into a colony again. They are hoping that the “Ukraine fatigue” they promote and the false arguments about Ukrainian corruption (“Zelensky’s yachts”) that they pay American influencers to repeat will eventually overwhelm America’s strategic and political self-interest. Which, of course, might be the case.

But if it is, we are in for a nasty surprise. Should Ukraine finally lose this war, the costs—military, economic, political—for the U.S. and its allies will not go down. On the contrary, they are likely to increase, and not only in Europe. Since 2022, the military and defense-industry links among Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China have strengthened. Iran has delivered drones and missiles to Russia. Russia, in turn, may be providing anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, Iranian proxies who could use them against American and European commercial and military ships in the Red Sea. According to a recent Reuters report, the Russians are now constructing a major drone factory in China. The Chinese stand to benefit, that is, from the huge technological gains that the Russians have made, in many cases by imitating the Ukrainians in drone warfare and other systems, even if Americans aren’t paying close attention.

[Read: Confessions of a Russian propagandist ]

A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbors. I doubt very much that Germany and France, let alone Poland, are prepared for the consequences of a truly failed Ukraine, for a collapse of the Ukrainian state, for lawlessness or Russian-Mafia rule at the European Union’s eastern doorstep, as well as for the violence and crime that would result.

The means to prevent that kind of international catastrophe are right in front of us, in the form of Ukraine’s drone factories, the underground sea-drone laboratory, the tools now being designed to enable the Ukrainian army to beat a larger opponent—and also in the form of our own industrial capacity. The democratic world remains wealthier and more dynamic than the autocratic world. To stay that way, Ukraine and its Western allies have to persuade Russia to stop fighting. We have to win this war.

Brendan Rodgers' Celtic suffer again in Europe as they fail to learn lessons of old, writes Tom English.