I'm not sure we are living in a unipolar world anymore. We are, at the very least, heading towards a multipolar world with the US, China, and Russia as the three great powers.
US, EU, China, India.
Russia is a big country by size and resources, so it will be important, but it is a small (and getting smaller) country by population size and economy.
Dragging a bunch of people out of unemployment to go die in trenches or to build IFV's that get blown up 2 weeks later makes your GDP larger but your citizens poorer.
Regarding "unemployment" - they've got historically low unemployment and an acute labor shortage at the moment. Also very widely reported.
Russia has lost a significant portion of their export customers and is now losing a lot of productive capacity to keep the war going.
On the military side, their ICBMs can still destroy cities. But their ability to take out a carrier strike force no longer exists at a credible level: some of the key links in the kill chain barely exist any more. They have no real expeditionary capability and can't project power much beyond their immediate borders.
> their ability to take out a carrier strike force
A Project 22350 could absolutely disable a carrier strike group:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/europe/russia-warship-hyperso...
And that's ignoring their new sub lineup, which also field Zircon's among other systems.
> Their economy is growing
As the other commenters said, that's a war economy, plus some creative bookkeeping/regulation.
> and they are integrating with several other regional players.
The past few years have shown the CSTO¹, EEU², CIS³, etc. are a joke.
> They are energy and food self-sufficient
So are Canada, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia…
> relatively large and well educated population
Aging and dying. "Demographic crisis". Same for Japan, but at least Japan's doing better in most other metrics.
> launch payloads into space on the regular
"Regular", in the sense that the launch rate collapsed by over 80% in the late 1980s, and hasn't recovered⁴, even as the US and PRC have been exploding.
> export complex things like nuclear reactors.
So do Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands— Most advanced economies, really.
> On the military side, they are one of the only that could sink an entire carrier battle group or an entire city in a flash.
Their flagship needs a tugboat following for when it bursts into flames⁵. They've built a grand total of 36 "5th-generation" combat aircraft, which are apparently less advanced⁶ than most countries' newer 4th-gen fighters⁷. They've even used up their stockpiles of tens of thousands of ancient tanks (at least the ones that hadn't already been rusted and looted irreparably) at a rate⁸ they'll never be able to replace.
Nuclear weapons aren't hard if you have a civilian nuclear energy sector. Rockets are old tech unless you're looking at non-chemical propulsion, reusable boosters, etc. Lots of countries could do those things within a couple years if needed, but we don't because they don't usually make enough sense unless you're already a superpower in other ways⁹.
Russia does a large number of flashy things, but it's for prestige, momentum, and autarky, and they can do less and less of it each year, rather than expressing any actual economic power.
They probably could have done quite well by focusing on tech/cultural, manufacturing, and resource exports. But wealthy nations won't buy from them now they've gone mask-off with the genocidal aggression, and their civil society is too corrupt to the core to fix itself.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Nagorno-Karabakh_War#Ru...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union#Econom...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93Commonwealth_o...
4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327132/payloads-launche...
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admir...
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57#Stealth
7. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/stealth-aircra...
8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/09/russian-ta...
The economic growth measurements are by Western institutions. Considering they're cut off from SWIFT and the most sanctioned and demonized nation on earth, they're actually doing pretty well (remember, they were supposed to completely collapse like a house of cards).
> CSTO¹, EEU², CIS³, etc. are a joke
BRICs combined GDP is larger than the G7, and growing. Sans Russia and China, that's where the future population growth (and economic opportunities) are.
> Canada, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia
Brazil and Indonesia are absolutely up and coming major powers.
> Aging and dying. "Demographic crisis".
While still declining, their demographic situation has largely stabilized. It's better than the rest of Eastern Europe and even better than many Western European countries.
> "Regular", in the sense that the launch rate collapsed by over 80%
In the 1980s it was the USSR. We're talking about just Russia, a much smaller population and economy. And they launched at least 20 large payloads just last year, including a number of military sats.
> Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands
Yes, you're making my point.
> Their flagship needs a tugboat
An old aircraft carrier is not their "flagship"; NATO ships also age out. Look into Project 22350 and Yasen class subs. Both carry Zircons and could disable a CBG.
> They've built a grand total of 36 "5th-generation" combat aircraft
If you're talking about the Su-57, it only went into serial production this year (2024) and their prototypes already have more air-to-air kills than the F-22 (via the R-37 which out ranges anything in NATO inventory).
I kinda suspect China is the same, but we’re yet to see, and hopefully never see any invasion of Taiwan..
I agree with your implication. The military forces of Russia are not paper tigers. Don't believe the hype. But at the same time, you don't want to fight proxy wars? Ok. Great. Then don't screw with other nations. If they hadn't messed with Ukraine, they wouldn't be fighting a proxy war.
The system works, again, because each of the major powers are comfortably confident in their ability to destroy the other 3. There is therefore, nothing to stop us from fighting a proxy war with Russia, because Russia will never use hard power to do anything about it. Unless Russia is suicidal, and they aren't, they will not escalate to a direct conflict with us.
If there's anything that their gloriously failed sneak attack on Ukraine has shown us, it's that yes, yes they are. Imagine if the most advanced weaponry they were facing wasn't small amounts of slow-coming ancient hand-me-downs employed by people who have barely even trained to use them . . . .
Ukraine would of course be toast without arms and intelligence from the West, but neither have any interest in starting or perpetuating the war. Russia's folly is convenient for the West though.
I don't think this is strictly true. Cutting Russia of from unimpeded Black Sea access and draining their resources in a (for America, cheap) proxy war are both in Western interests.
Before February 2022, I would have bet a big sum on Putin never authorizing a full-scale Ukraine invasion. There was just too much to lose and too little to gain theoretically…yet he did it anyways.
The US economy has more of a closed loop in that it consumes much of what it produces.
China on the other hand imports most essential commodities and pays for them with the proceeds of exports.
Yes, "simplifying" to the point of getting it completely backwards.
This is both a problem (i.e. the reason that doesn't work is because it's pretty explicitly not a military problem) and kind of amazing.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of losing the fight?
This isn’t sophistry, war is just extension of politics by other means. The vast majority of unfixable problems the US faced in Afghanistan were political, you can’t kill your way to a functional multiparty democracy.
China has the economic and manufacturing clout and is building up its military, but outside of the 'Global South' and various needy countries it has little soft power.
The US has stumbled somewhat mostly due to the overreaction to 9/11 and Bush's disastrous presidency, followed by the overcorrection of the Obama and Biden presidencies. But it still has the biggest and most powerful military, and NATO has been shocked out of its long complacency.
What the US has going for it is the possibility of renewal and reinvention, that is its strength and its enduring power. The US will keep on innovating, hopefully also in the political realm, and will retain global leadership. That's assuming that the Trump led Republican nihilist suicide cult doesn't destroy it first.
But you're right. We definitely don't live in a unipolar world. But that's a good thing. More people around the globe enjoy the benefits of peace when each of the major powers are all comfortably confident in their ability to annihilate the other 3.
There used to be coups all the time in Latin America. Not so much anymore. All of Asia is rising and enjoying the benefits of peace. And don't even get me started on how much better off Africans are with the ascendancy of China than they ever were under the US and Russia.
The world 70 years ago was a bleak place for the global south. War, famine and disease ruled the day. Today, in any dimension of human development along which a person would care to take a metric, most of the global south are far better off.
huh, why were there coups?
A strong US and EU in alliance would be dominant combination.
If the EU got their act together, and were able to wrest Africa from the US and China, they would be the dominant power on the globe. I don't even think they would need the US.