The Global War in Ukraine: 2021-2025
The Global War in Ukraine: 2021–2025 presents the war not as a regional anomaly, but as the central conflict through which a new global security and economic order is being violently shaped, with Ukraine serving as both battlefield and laboratory for twenty‑first‑century warfare.
It argues that unresolved post–Cold War structural tensions, evolving nuclear coercion, and the fusion of industrial policy with strategy have turned Ukraine into the furnace in which the future of globalization, alliance systems, and military innovation is being reforged.
At the heart of the book is the claim that structure outlives sentiment: geography, industrial bases, political systems, and historical grievances drive events more than leaders’ personalities or short‑term moods. The post‑1990 belief that trade and institutional expansion could tame these structural forces collapses where they intersect with incompatible visions of order, and Ukraine is portrayed as the place where these contradictions finally detonate.
Russia’s invasion is framed as the culmination of a long struggle over Europe’s security architecture, spheres of influence, and the fate of “awkward states” such as Ukraine and Belarus that never fully fit either Western or Russian post–Cold War projects.
Rather than treating Ukraine as a discrete crisis, the book adopts a global lens: the war simultaneously tests NATO and the EU, catalyzes an authoritarian coalition around Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, and accelerates the fragmentation of hyper‑globalization into a more securitized, multi‑bloc world. Nuclear weapons anchor a “second nuclear age” in which coercive signaling, ambiguity about red lines, and the creation of sanctuaries shape escalation boundaries and alliance behavior throughout the conflict.
The analysis of Russia centers on the “Putin dynamic,” reconstructing the 2022 invasion as the predictable endpoint of an escalation script visible yet misread. Russian doctrinal moves in 2021, Putin’s essay questioning Ukrainian statehood, and behaviors around exercises like Sea Breeze 21 are interpreted as deliberate steps in a managed escalation ladder meant to probe Western resolve after the Afghanistan withdrawal and the 2021 U.S.–Ukraine Strategic Partnership Charter. The book shows how threat inflation and grievances over NATO and the post–Cold War settlement, once operationalized, produced precisely the unified, militarized NATO that Putin claimed to fear.
A recurring counterfactual — “the path not taken” — highlights that more stable Euro‑Russian relations were once imaginable through mechanisms such as Partnership for Peace, but these faltered because core disputes over spheres of influence, Ukrainian and Belarusian sovereignty, and Russia’s great‑power self‑image were never resolved. Internally, war is depicted as a mode of regime maintenance: a political economy in which mobilization, repression, and external conflict fuse into a system that makes ending the war dangerous to the Kremlin itself.
Economically, the book argues that Russia has traded one dependency for another through “yuanization,” shifting from reliance on Western currencies and finance to deep dependence on China. Discounted oil and gas flows reconfigure Russia as a price‑taker in an asymmetric relationship where support is essential to Moscow but optional to Beijing. This hollows out a former empire fighting a war it cannot easily terminate, while raising questions about what a post‑Putin Russia might look like and how former Warsaw Pact states will shape its options.
In contrast, Ukraine is traced from post‑Soviet military inheritor to doctrinal and industrial innovator. The book details how Kyiv moves beyond Soviet legacy structures, builds a digital arsenal—including partnerships such as the Israeli‑Ukrainian relationship—and adapts to a battlespace defined by drones, electronic warfare, and software‑driven targeting. Over two years, Ukraine moves toward near self‑sufficiency in unmanned systems and becomes the first state to articulate a drone‑centric doctrine, exemplified by deep‑strike operations like “Spider Web” against Russian strategic aviation. Diplomatically, President Zelensky is portrayed as a “wartime communicator‑in‑chief” who weaponizes modern media and direct parliamentary addresses to build a broad, durable coalition, reframing Ukraine as a frontline democracy rather than a peripheral state.
This diplomatic effort institutionalizes in the Ramstein format, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which grows from 40 nations in April 2022 to a 54‑member apparatus by late 2025, committing over €145 billion in military aid and spawning focused coalitions on armor, air defense, and electronic warfare. Leadership evolution—from U.S. primacy to a joint UK–German chairmanship—is read as evidence that support has become structurally embedded rather than personality‑driven. Zelensky’s 10‑Point Peace Formula shifts Ukraine from aid‑seeker to agenda‑setter by foregrounding nuclear safety, food and energy security, accountability, and territorial restoration, and by binding multiple states into thematic working groups through summits in Copenhagen, Jeddah, Malta, and Switzerland. Outreach to the “Global South” through Grain from Ukraine, focused diplomacy in Africa and the Arab world, and the Crimea Platform achieves partial but contested success against entrenched Russian narratives and longstanding economic ties.
The war also forces a European defense renaissance. The book contrasts Germany’s journey from Cold War frontline state to complacent power dependent on cheap Russian energy, and then to a real but incomplete Zeitenwende marked by rearmament, co‑production with Ukraine, and large‑scale investments in munitions, air defense, and unmanned systems. The Baltic states, Poland, and the Nordics are recast as the new strategic core of European defense, with high defense‑to‑GDP ratios, early and robust aid to Ukraine, and readiness to take harder deterrent measures shaped by lived experience of Soviet and Russian domination. National storylines, Poland as logistical and humanitarian hub, the Baltics as top donors by GDP share, and the Czech Republic as an ammunition “champion”, illustrate how a “Coalition of the Willing” supplements NATO through flexible, fast‑moving groupings.
Another major theme is Asia’s entanglement and the emergence of a polycentric order. China provides economic oxygen, technology, and diplomatic cover to Russia while avoiding overt military involvement that would trigger severe secondary sanctions and jeopardize its European ties. North Korea and Iran are depicted as crucial military enablers, supplying artillery, missiles, drones, technical cadres, and localized manufacturing know‑how, even as events such as Israeli strikes on Iranian infrastructure expose the fragility of these authoritarian partnerships. On the democratic side, Japan and South Korea’s defense postures and industrial policies are significantly reshaped by Ukraine: Japanese space‑based ISR and legal reforms on defense exports, and South Korea’s emergence as a pivotal defense producer tie Indo‑Pacific security more tightly to European theaters.
The result is a polycentric “free‑for‑all square dance” in which middle powers like India, Turkey, Brazil, and Gulf states hedge, arbitrage sanctions, and leverage energy and technology ties across multiple coalitions.
Technology and industry are treated as protagonists rather than backdrop. The book draws an explicit analogy with Spain in the 1930s as a laboratory for mechanized and air warfare, arguing that Ukraine has become a compressed innovation space for drones, electronic warfare, AI‑assisted targeting, and software‑defined systems, where innovation–counter‑innovation cycles are measured in weeks.
A full chapter follows the global diffusion of drone warfare skills through foreign fighters: Russian recruitment of Africans, often under deceptive terms, and thousands of Colombian veterans fighting for Ukraine together generate a transnational pool of technically skilled fighters whose experience may later fuel criminal and insurgent groups.
On the industrial side, the book insists that “industrial policy is deterrence,” highlighting Ukraine’s wartime resurrection of its defense industry and parallel efforts in Europe and the United States as evidence that democracies can regenerate mass production and strategic depth. By contrast, Russia leans on an “arsenal of autocracy” that sustains the war at the cost of growing dependency and shrinking autonomy.
Running through the narrative is a “shadow storyline” of nuclear coercion and war termination. Nuclear forces shape behavior primarily through threats, signaling, and the creation of sanctuaries that combatants hesitate to strike, forcing NATO and Ukraine’s partners into continual calibration of assistance to avoid uncontrolled escalation.
The book criticizes incrementalism and argues that war termination is a design problem requiring explicit thinking about end states, trade‑offs, and risk acceptance. It calls for greater European nuclear maturity, more serious Franco‑British dialogue, stronger deterrence postures, and societal understanding of nuclear stakes, while accepting that the current Russian regime has closed off cooperative security pathways, necessitating a long‑term posture of managed confrontation that still preserves space for a different future Russia.
In its final chapters, the book juxtaposes the Spanish Civil War and the war in Ukraine as conflicts that began locally but evolved into global proxy wars and laboratories for new forms of warfare. Six through‑lines emerge: the endurance of structural factors; the need for coalitions built to act rather than posture; the centrality of industrial capacity to deterrence; the transformation of war’s grammar by intelligent mass, software advantage, and persistent sensing; the continual presence of nuclear coercion; and the strategic value of historical memory.
The work concludes on a sober but not fatalistic note, arguing that democracies have already shown real adaptive capacity: Europe is relearning defense, alliances are widening their aperture, defense industries are scaling, and Ukraine has evolved from aid recipient to doctrinal pioneer and co‑producer. The war in Ukraine is ultimately cast as both map and mirror—a map of how the world arrived in this dangerous present, and a mirror forcing societies to confront what will be required to build a more stable, if more contested, future order.
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Pasquale Preziosa presents The Global War in Ukraine: 2021–2025 as essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how a seemingly regional conflict has become a system‑defining war that is reshaping European defense and the global order. He highlights the book’s unsentimental core lesson that what the post–Cold War order refused to resolve has returned as a structural crisis and praises Laird’s ability to trace how misread signals, strategic amnesia, and institutional complacency helped make war more likely.
For Preziosa, the book’s strength lies in privileging structure over mood, showing how Putin’s grievance‑driven threat inflation produced the very unified, militarized NATO he claimed to fear, from Finland and Sweden’s accession to Germany’s rearmament and a revitalized Anglo‑French nuclear dialogue. He commends the analysis of Russia’s wartime political economy and “yuanization,” the asymmetric relationship with China, and the clear-eyed treatment of an authoritarian axis that is transactional and brittle rather than monolithic. Equally, he underscores the book’s treatment of technology and industrial policy, Ukraine’s rapid move to drone‑centric doctrine, Operation Spider Web, the fusion of commercial and military ISR, and the axiom that industrial policy is deterrence—as reasons why this volume should guide how democracies think about war, innovation, and resilience.
Brian J. Morra recommends the book as required reading for the U.S. foreign‑policy establishment and allied governments precisely because it makes clear that Russia’s war in Ukraine is global in nature, embedded in a new geopolitical age where traditional east–west and north–south labels no longer explain state behavior.
He emphasizes Laird’s explanation of how Asian powers, China, North Korea, Japan, South Korea, and key middle powers like India, Brazil, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf States, and South Africa are all entangled in the conflict, from North Korean artillery and troops on the European battlefield to Indo‑Pacific democracies underwriting Ukraine and authoritarian partners supplying Moscow. Morra sees particular value in the book’s framing of a “free‑for‑all square dance” of shifting coalitions and its insistence that Western institutions must start by truly grasping the global, polycentric character of the war rather than treating it as an isolated regional problem. For him, Laird provides the conceptual map policymakers need to understand how Ukraine sits at the intersection of European security, Indo‑Pacific strategy, and the emerging competition among overlapping coalitions.
Dr. Holger Mey endorses the book as a rigorous, uncomfortable, and indispensable analysis at a “critical juncture,” arguing that Laird forces readers to confront hard truths about Western illusions, Russian imperatives, and the structural forces that made this war likely. He values the way the book links the Cold War’s nuclear/“zones of influence” equilibrium to the post‑1990 abandonment of those concepts, showing how NATO expansion, European disarmament, and the neglect of power politics created a strategically incoherent environment in which a resurgent Russia would eventually react.
Mey stresses Laird’s contribution in putting Ukraine back into its proper systemic frame: not a local war but a conflict about rival models of order, spheres of influence, and the credibility of Western security guarantees from Europe to the Indo‑Pacific. He recommends the book for its clear exposition of how power vacuums, weakness, and forgotten lessons about military force and deterrence have returned “with a vengeance,” and for its sober assessment that this war, lacking easy off‑ramps for any side, will shape great‑power relations and the architecture of international order for decades to come.
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