WWII was pretty compelling evidence of why Britain needed a global empire, but nonetheless the empire was dissolved.
There is a pretty good argument here for at a minimum reforming NATO. Some major points include that the US appears to be bluffing about having useful support to offer Eastern Europe through the NATO structure, also appears to have different defence priorities than Europe does, NATO itself failed to preserve peace and Europe looks like it has militarily atrophied to a pretty significant extent under NATO.
It is not clear how the situation will ultimately be interpreted, but the US's involvement here is pushing Europe towards being the next middle east. That isn't a great outcome.
Exactly. Very similar situation to NATO - there isn't any evidence it needs to exist. The premise depends on an assumption that the status quo is necessary, when in fact it is not.
The Empire ended because WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory for the UK, that left the UK in a bad shape economically and heavily dependent on the USA. The USA didn't like the Empire, but the UK government didn't fully realise how much things had changed until the Suez Crisis.
I don't think it destroys NATO. Weakens it of course. But we had an trial when Trump acted like he was abandoning Ukraine when they had a go at Zelensky in the White House and cut information sharing to Ukraine. Rather than the defences collasing, European leaders made it clear they'd take over.
We don't have much choice really. Western Europe + Turkey are not going to put up with Russia rolling into Western Europe or Turkey. We have nukes and more money, people and kit than Russia.
Actually I'd say events did kind of follow that agenda. Trump looked at abandoning Ukraine and backing Russia which would have been close to abandoning NATO but it became clear Europe would fight on without him.
Please tell me what would happen if Putin states "Job well done in Ukraine, all Nazi's are killed", and then withdraws his troops. NATO is going to invade Russia?
That's a dangerous prediction to make. Russia spends a ton of money supporting it's nuclear weapons/fleet ($10B in 2022 alone). Even if half fail it wouldn't make a difference.
Put yourself in the shoes of a senior Russian official in charge of spending that money. There's no way for him to get caught. If his superiors ever find out that he 'misplaced' the funding needed to keep their nuclear weapons ready for action, tracking him down will be the least of their concerns.
There's multiple different types of nukes in Russia. So again it's dangerous to assume every part of their large organization is corrupt. Especially given how important this stuff is.
There's also multiple things that all have to function for a nuke to function. I don't want to under-state how bad even a 10% chance of these working is, but I think there's a only a 10% chance of any given nuke reaching its target and exploding as intended. Some of that's correlated and applies to all the nukes, some of it isn't.
Just for the sake of examples as I don't have any real insight, consider a tritium-boosted weapon that's expected to have a yield of 1MT. If this is set to detonate at the altitude that maximises the area of destruction, but the tritium was last replaced in 1990 and has been slowly decaying without replacement since then, then it's a nasty fireball in the sky that you can sit directly underneath with minimal risk.*
Part of the reason the Soviets went for ever-bigger nukes was that they couldn't aim very well (also a reason for the US to briefly attempt air-to-air nukes, which is how I know you can hang around under an exploding fission bomb without ill effect). If the avionics are all filled with some combination of Soviet-era vacuum tubes but the vacuum leaked, and/or old-and-leaky electrolytic capacitors that no longer hold charge, they won't even reach any specific target.
US anti-missile defence has been improving over the years. I wouldn't want to hubristically claim they're now "good" (I mean, look at the US space industry outside SpaceX), but the defences are likely to be better than they were when the USSR was still a peer.
Someone might have decided it was much cheaper to get fuel for a nuclear a nuclear reactor by replacing a bomb's core with the same volume of depleted uranium.
And of course, if they are ordered to fire, the submarines might accidentally sink themselves instead, like the Kursk did.
* My best guess is that an unboosted primary is about 15kt, but this is still true for somewhat larger primaries as https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ says a 1MT nuke maximising 5psi overpressure damage area would be at 3120 m altitude. I assume that if I were in-the-know for exactly what yield was in the un-boosted primary, I'd be under some obligation of secrecy.
