Brussels –

A year on, we’re still struggling to come to grips with the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Even though the war will likely continue for some time — a bloody stalemate could last for years. In discussions I recently had at a conference in Brussels, some experts drew parallels to the Korean Peninsula — with some lessons emerging, some proving encouraging, but most troubling.

The following stood out:

First, we have become reacquainted with the reality of interstate war, and even the potential involvement of great powers. Jeffrey Gedmin and William Kristol, two longtime observers of the trans-Atlantic relationship, write in American Purpose that “in Europe, the war isn’t a wake-up call but is, rather, an alarm bell that continues to ring every day with a loudness and persistence that may be difficult” to appreciate elsewhere. East Asia take heed: Two countries, both of which hope to rewrite the regional order, have been steadily improving their military capabilities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a reminder that such hopes are not abstract, distant ambitions, but instead can be acted upon in a moment’s notice. The prospect of military coercion is real.

Second, in a world that must address the threat of aggression, deterrence — and especially nuclear deterrence — are again defining features of international relations. The comforting belief that concern about nuclear weapons ended with the Cold War has been exposed as a delusion. Russia’s readiness to brandish its nuclear arsenal during the war and the resulting caution of Western governments have confirmed for many the utility of these weapons. North Korea's Kim Jong Un is surely noting NATO’s caution and concern as it assists Ukraine. A growing number of officials and experts now argue that Ukraine made a grave mistake when it agreed in 1994 to give up its nuclear arsenal, then the third largest in the world. (Kyiv inherited those weapons from the Soviet Union when that superpower imploded.)

Ominously, Russia, which has given nuclear weapons a special place in its war-fighting doctrine with its policy of “escalating to de-escalate” — being ready to go nuclear in a conventional conflict to shock the adversary into suing for peace — will now be even more reliant on that arsenal. Its conventional forces were decimated in the first year of the war, forcing Moscow to mobilize 300,000 soldiers in an emergency draft last September and there have been rumors that another, larger, order is in the works. Those numbers won’t compensate for the loss of the country’s best and most professional soldiers, as well as vast amounts of equipment and weapons. In conversations I had last week, several analysts likened Russia to North Korea: resentful, exhausted and paranoid — and increasingly reliant on its nuclear weapons to threaten neighbors, claim status and ensure regime survival.

The nuclear menace is returning as the last nuclear arms control agreements shrivel. The United States walked away from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2018, arguing that Russia was cheating and that China’s exclusion gave Beijing an unfair advantage in Asia. Last month, Russia under President Vladimir Putin announced that it was suspending participation in the New START pact, the last remaining strategic arms control agreement with the U.S., putting its strategic nuclear systems on combat duty and threatening to resume nuclear tests. When mechanisms for nuclear control and confidence are more important than ever, the toolbox for nuclear diplomacy is increasingly bare.

Third, nuclear policy, principles and dynamics remain poorly understood among officials and publics the world over. Every conversation about nuclear weapons at some point bemoans the gap between experts and decision makers (sometimes ordinary citizens are included), a complaint that I’ve heard for over two decades — my seniors remind me that they have long expressed the same frustration.

Nuclear policy remains the domain of a small community of experts in every country, and given the belief that the nuclear danger receded at the end of the Cold War, those groups have shrunk smaller still in the three decades since. This group has generally suffered fools lightly, which has contributed to its insularity, as has its vocabulary and the demand to internalize a logic that is, on its face, somewhat dehumanizing.

We’re engaged in a crash course to relearn and adapt those understandings to a new geopolitical environment, one in which many of the assumptions that guided previous thinking no longer seem to fit. (The same dynamic could be at work in the U.S. financial sector with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as bankers have to relearn finance in a world of rising interest rates.)

Which brings me to my fourth point: To their credit, the West — the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia — are reconstructing the global security order. There is insistence that there is no going back to the pre-2022 security order in Europe and growing consensus that Asian security architecture must be remodeled.

European nations are responding individually and collectively to the war by increasing defense spending, discussing (as a prelude to modernizing) nuclear policy and debating (as a prelude to implementing) new defense policy and doctrines. Reflecting the new realities, conversations take up such topics as the role of independent nuclear deterrents (those of France and the U.K.) in Europe’s defense; the European Union’s role and its relationship to NATO; and balancing NATO’s growing concern with developments in the Indo-Pacific with its primary responsibility to defend Europe — all the while trying to figure out what the U.S. will do in this threat environment.

By the way, regardless of how sincere governments are about actually increasing budgets to reach the long-demanded 2% of gross domestic product defense-spending threshold, that number is almost beside the point. The real question is how governments will spend those funds. What weapons will be produced and by whom? How will they be deployed and used? What force structure with which roles and missions will national militaries adopt? Those are far more determinative of defense and deterrence than a crude threshold for defense budgets.

In Asia, U.S. alliances are being modernized, with Japan leading the way; new security partnerships being forged (Japan-Australia and Japan-U.K.); trilateral security mechanisms — AUKUS, U.S.-Japan-Australia, U.S.-Japan-Philippines and now U.S.-Japan-South Korea — are emerging or being reinvigorated; and mini- or plurilateral structures such as "the Quad" are firming up. Meanwhile, economic security efforts are sprouting, from supply chain resilience initiatives to investment screening to new strategic trade controls.

Increasing integration is the common theme across all these developments, which in turn demands coordination, not only within regions but across them as security and economic ties are global. The response has been piecemeal, however. The same or similar conversations are held in capitals around the world, in foreign policy and defense ministries, as well as commercial and trade bureaucracies. I am intensely skeptical of “a NATO for the Indo-Pacific,” but getting the pieces in place effectively and efficiently in this region alone screams for some sort of overarching framework.

Finally, for all the attention that will be devoted to nuclear weapons, we can’t ignore other forms of defense and deterrence. Win or lose, Russia will be exhausted and resentful. It may not be able to threaten its neighbors with conventional force for a decade, but Moscow will still view them with intense suspicion and seek to weaken them. Other countries will, too.

We must expect disinformation and destabilization efforts that aim to weaken our societies and crack the unity that has been our most important response to the invasion of Ukraine. Hard power is no response to that threat.

Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of “Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions” (Georgetown University Press, 2019).