Ukraine's ferocious resistance to Russian domination is not merely a European crisis - it is a preview of what awaits vulnerable states worldwide if the U.S.-built international order collapses into anarchy. Territorial aggression and even the outright disappearance of sovereign nations could become routine rather than exceptional.

That warning comes from Hal Brands, a Johns Hopkins professor and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writing in Foreign Policy's Spring 2026 issue, as "Hvylya" reports.

Brands identifies a worst-case scenario in which all three great powers - the United States, China, and Russia - become "grasping, rapacious revisionists." In such a world, no major state would be committed to preserving the sovereignty of weaker nations. The result: some vulnerable countries would be "smashed, subordinated, or vivisected." The war in Ukraine, Brands writes, "might be a preview of the future, rather than an ugly reminder of the past."

The U.S.-led order had made what scholars call "state death" - the violent eradication of independent countries - shocking and rare. But without a great power committed to upholding that norm, the restraints vanish. Brands draws a direct parallel to the decades of chaos that followed the collapse of British hegemony in the early 1900s, which produced two world wars before a new order solidified.

Small and medium states are not helpless, however. Ukraine has demonstrated that countries marked for absorption can fight back effectively. Japan might do the same to avoid submission to Beijing - or simply build nuclear weapons. But these acts of defiance, while heroic, only underscore the violence and instability that a post-order world would produce.

Brands notes that fears about U.S. reliability are already stimulating nuclear ambitions in multiple countries, and new defense partnerships are emerging that create fresh tensions of their own - including the Pakistan-Saudi Arabia defense pact signed last year, which has inflamed Indian anxieties.

Also read: Carnegie analyst explained why Russia's war creates the very insecurity Putin sought to prevent.