global geopolitics

How America’s Parallel Wars in Ukraine and West Asia Reveal a Strategy of Managed Decline

The public mood inside Russia has undergone a profound and measurable transformation over recent months, driven by Ukrainian drone strikes that have penetrated the country’s interior with increasing frequency and lethality. The attack on a beach in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea, which killed seven civilians, along with an explosion in a Moscow cafe and a strike on a festival in Omsk, have been characterised in Russian media and commentary as acts of state terrorism rather than legitimate military operations. These strikes, often carried out by small drones that are difficult to detect and intercept, serve no meaningful military purpose but have a profound psychological impact on the population, generating a sense of vulnerability that did not previously exist for most Russians living in the country’s major cities. For the first time since the full-scale invasion began, concerns over strikes on Russian territory have, according to sociological surveys, exceeded general frontline news as the most important topic for Russian citizens, with eighteen per cent naming Ukrainian strikes as the most significant issue of the past week compared to sixteen per cent focusing on the war itself.

The shift in public sentiment has been accompanied by a corresponding shift in the discourse of Russian military commentators, analysts and officials regarding the potential for strikes on European targets. The Russian Ministry of Defence has published a detailed list of European facilities where Ukrainian drones are being manufactured, identifying specific addresses across eight countries including Britain, Germany, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic. This was not, as some Western analysts initially interpreted, a mere rhetorical gesture or an exercise in information warfare; it was an act of target identification, a careful mapping of the supply chain that enables Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, made the implications of this mapping explicit, declaring that the list of addresses now constitutes a complete registry of potential and absolutely legitimate targets for Russian armed forces, and that strikes on these targets would be a matter of when, not if.

The strategic logic underpinning this discourse is straightforward and increasingly difficult for European governments to dismiss as mere bluster. If European nations are providing the weapons, the intelligence and the production facilities that enable Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, then those nations have, in Russian strategic thinking, become parties to the conflict. The argument that these facilities are legitimate military targets rests on a foundation of international legal reasoning that is contested but not without precedent, and the line between the Ukrainian battlefield and the European home front, which Western governments have sought to maintain through careful legal and political distinctions, is increasingly difficult to sustain. The Russians can point to specific factory addresses in Riga and Vilnius and demonstrate the connection between those factories and the drones striking Russian cities, making the distinction between war and peace increasingly academic.

The military means by which Russia could carry out strikes on these targets are becoming increasingly apparent, and they represent a qualitative leap in capability that European defence planners would be unwise to ignore. The Yasen-M class nuclear-powered attack submarine, launched on 28 July after nine years of construction, is among the most heavily armed attack submarines in the world, capable of carrying up to forty Kalibr cruise missiles or thirty-two Zircon hypersonic missiles. The Zircon missile travels at approximately Mach 9 and has a range of up to one thousand kilometres, with no existing interceptor capable of reliably stopping it. The Yasen-M class submarines are also designed with advanced stealth capabilities, including vibration-dampening machinery and soundproof coatings, that make them among the most difficult submarines to detect in the world. A submarine that cannot be detected, armed with a missile that cannot be intercepted, has the capacity to strike any target in Europe without warning and without effective countermeasure.

The American military predicament mirrors the European one, though Washington’s vulnerability lies not in its geography but in its industrial capacity. The United States is producing Precision Strike Missiles at a rate of only ten per month, with a peak production rate of approximately thirty per month expected sometime next year, while Russia produces roughly sixty Iskander missiles monthly. This production gap explains the pattern of American military operations against Iran: the US strikes Iran, then plays what are described as “diplomacy games,” then strikes again, using the intervals to replenish stockpiles sufficiently for the next round of operations. The PrSM missile is being produced at less than one-third the rate of its Russian equivalent, and the US Patriot interceptor stockpile has been depleted to the point where a US-Ukrainian programme to upgrade Soviet-era S-300 missile systems has been initiated simply to reduce the consumption of American interceptors. The Pentagon’s own estimates indicate that Patriot stocks have fallen from 2,300 to approximately 800 in recent months, representing the consumption of more than two years of production capacity in a single quarter of operations.

The broader pattern of American munitions depletion extends well beyond the Iran theatre. Javelin anti-tank missiles delivered to Ukraine will not see US stockpiles restored until 2030, according to Pentagon budget documents, and the 944 missiles procured in 2024 are not scheduled for delivery until August 2030. This industrial timeline reveals the fundamental constraint on American military power: the United States is fighting a war of attrition against adversaries whose industrial production capacities substantially exceed its own, and the gap is not closing. The United States is leaning increasingly on its European, Japanese and South Korean allies to shoulder the burden of military production, stripping their national resources to channel them into weaponry that serves American strategic objectives. This burden-sharing arrangement, which has been openly discussed in US policy circles, is not a partnership but an extraction, and it has implications for the cohesion of the Atlantic alliance that have yet to be fully understood.

The European response to this evolving situation has been characterised by a combination of public defiance and private anxiety, with governments continuing to supply weapons to Ukraine while expressing concern about the potential for escalation. The Baltic states are particularly vulnerable, given their geographic position and the concentration of drone production facilities on their territory, and they have been the subject of particular attention in Russian discourse. The publication by the Russian Ministry of Defence of specific addresses in Riga and Vilnius represents a warning that is difficult to ignore, and the strategic logic of targeting these facilities, if Russia were to conclude that escalation was necessary, is clear: striking drone production facilities in the Baltic states would carry fewer risks than striking Britain or Germany, while still sending an unmistakable message about the costs of European complicity. NATO’s Article Five commitment, while legally binding, has never been tested in circumstances where a member state is struck for hosting facilities that directly enable attacks on a nuclear-armed adversary, and the ambiguity of the response that such an attack would generate is itself a source of strategic risk.

The interconnectedness of the Ukraine and Iran conflicts has been noted by strategic analysts across the spectrum, and the links between the two theatres are becoming increasingly explicit. Reports from Chatham House have suggested that the European Union may be considering a “grand bargain” in which European military support to secure the Strait of Hormuz would be exchanged for American assistance in reaching a peace deal in Ukraine. The logic of this arrangement is as simplistic as it is perilous: linking two separate crises through geopolitical bartering would expand the theatre of war rather than contain it, and the notion that exchanging favours can lead to stability has been described by strategic analysts as a dangerous illusion. The United States is fighting proxy wars on multiple fronts simultaneously, but its industrial base and financial resources are finite, and the exhaustion of its munitions stockpiles is a material reality that no amount of diplomatic theatre can conceal.

The broader strategic context in which these wars are being waged is one of American decline and multipolar emergence, and the United States is responding to this decline not by accepting it but by attempting to accelerate the destruction of the global order faster than it itself declines. This is the logic of controlled demolition, and it is visible across every theatre of American military engagement. The US cannot match China’s productive capacity, cannot outproduce Russia in missile manufacturing, and cannot compete with the multipolar world’s combined economic resources. Washington’s only remaining advantage is its capacity for disruption, and it is using that capacity to degrade the energy exports of West Asia, disrupt global supply chains and destabilise the economic foundations of its rivals. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are not separate conflicts; they are interconnected components of a single American strategy to deny the emergence of a multipolar world order that would inevitably relegate the United States to a secondary role.

The implications of this analysis for European security are profound and deeply unsettling. The United States is no longer the reliable security guarantor that European states have relied upon since 1949; it is a declining hegemon that is willing to sacrifice the stability of the European continent to preserve its global primacy. European nations that continue to facilitate the Ukrainian war effort by hosting drone production facilities and supplying American-made weapons face the prospect of becoming targets of Russian retaliation, and the NATO alliance that has guaranteed their security for generations may not survive the strain. The warning that Russian missiles may fly to targets in Europe should not be dismissed as propaganda; it is a strategic possibility that European governments must take seriously, even as they continue to support Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression. The question is not whether Russia has the capability to strike European targets; it is whether the strategic logic of doing so will eventually overcome the constraints that have prevented it thus far, and that question remains open.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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