For years now, Russia has been desperately attempting to convince the world — and, indeed, itself — that it is a great power. But photo opportunities at summits, nuclear saber-rattling, boasts about BRICS and military adventurism abroad are less signs of true power than the tactics of a weak actor attempting to mask weakness — to divert attention from a crumbling empire.
Behind the façade of a belligerent great power lurks a hollowing-out state, edging toward the exit of the great powers’ clubhouse. Once indisputable — in fact, during the Cold War, one of only two superpowers — Russia today is visibly in decline.
History offers little comfort: The international system has a depressingly poor track record in managing the fall of great powers. More often, decline has been a source of violent turbulence, even world war.
Declining powers lash out. Sometimes it is a reflex for relevance, sometimes an attempt to compensate for structural weakness, sometimes a desperate gamble that one last throw of the dice might reverse decline.
In the first two cases, the result can be regional destabilization; in the third, catastrophic systemic war. To understand today’s Russia, we must place it in this pattern of decline, destabilization and turbulence. When we do, the historical parallels are sobering.
The origins of the First World War offer a stark lesson. Germany did not go to war in 1914 out of a sense of confidence and growing power, but from fear. Berlin recognized Russia’s growing industrial power, expanding railway network and vast demographic superiority and concluded that the Second Reich could not prevail over such a giant in the long run.
More alarming was the prospect that Russia was nearing a “take-off” moment: the ability to mobilize swiftly and overwhelm Germany in concert with France. German leaders believed that waiting meant encirclement, and that encirclement meant defeat. Convinced that time was running out, they struck first. Germany was not bold, but desperate: a declining state, gambling everything on war to preserve its place in Europe.
The same logic haunts Russia today. Like Wilhelmine Germany, it sees encirclement and exclusion from Europe’s future and so lashes out against Ukraine, as Berlin once did against its neighbors. Faced with marginalization, it chooses the reckless path of war as a gamble for relevance.
This playbook is not limited to great powers. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, though never a peer competitor, was a textbook case of a declining state that chose military adventurism as a way out.
By 1990, Saddam’s Iraq was drowning in debt and isolated by its war with Iran and missteps in the Middle East. Its invasion of Kuwait was a reckless attempt to reset the state, revive its finances and reclaim relevance. Instead, it provoked an American-led coalition that shattered its military and guaranteed its long-term decline.
Seen in this light, Russia’s behavior has a historical familiarity. It is a declining power that cannot conceal its stagnation. The economy is overdependent on hydrocarbons, hobbled by rent-seeking and further strangled by sanctions that cut off Western capital and technology.
The wartime uptick in growth is already fading. Inflation is climbing, consumer markets shrinking and industries outside of defense are faltering. Even official forecasts concede growth will fall sharply in 2025 and 2026.
Meanwhile, Russia faces demographic free fall: high mortality, mass emigration and chronically low birth rates are producing a shrinking labor force, a stressed pension system and an economy unable to sustain militarization.
The Russian military has been bled dry in Ukraine, its pre-war image of prowess exposed as hollow. Losses in manpower, equipment and prestige have been immense.
Yet rather than face decline, Moscow has doubled down on destabilization. War is the most obvious expression of that pattern, but not the only one. Interventions in Africa, the Middle East and cyberspace are less the moves of a rising power than the flailing of a falling one.
Likewise, stage-managed encounters with China and the Global South, participation in BRICS summits and nuclear theatrics are more performance than reality — the theater of a great power seeking to hide its decline.
History rhymes because declining powers rarely decline gracefully. Leaders perceive retreat as humiliation and vulnerability. They seek to stave it off at any cost. In the process, they create crises that pull the wider system down with them.
Russia is undoubtedly declining, but it retains the capacity to generate turbulence. A nuclear-armed state with advanced cyber capabilities and a permanent United Nations Security Council seat can still inflict severe damage on its way down.
The challenge is not simply to deter Russian aggression, but to manage its decline in ways that minimize systemic disruption.
History teaches that the fall of a great power is rarely peaceful. Germany in 1914 and Iraq in 1990 both remind us that weakness can be as dangerous as strength. Desperation drives recklessness.
Russia’s posture today is that of a bully who knows he is weak. But weakness does not make Russia benign; it makes it more dangerous.
A nuclear and cyber-capable Russia hurtling down the arc of decline will remain a source of instability well beyond Ukraine. The challenge for the international community is therefore neither to indulge the fiction that Russia is still a peer competitor nor to dismiss it as a spent force.
The task is to manage its decline in a way that precludes another 1914 — another moment when the world mistook weakness for irrelevance and allowed a faltering power to drag the system into catastrophe.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington. Liam Athas is a researcher at Macalester College.
