When it's already in a bad state, yeah, it's far worse. And for just males in their 20s it's near a 40% difference.
Only, not just. A big part of that is migration, Russians can't go to EU so easily, but that doesn't mean those Ukrainians never will return.
No, it very much wouldn't. Russia being a threat actually guarantees NATO doesn't unravel. Russia not being perceived as a threat is what weakened NATO from the 90s thru 2020.
Russia will remain a threat until political changes, the only difference is if its gonna be more or less distant one.
It's the appeasement lobby that wants Ukraine to delude itself about Russia deals and make idiotic compromises in the name of that which is the core of the threat - if they get their way on Ukraine, the other countries nearby will have to wonder what "compromise" will these clowns demand for them, and what's the point of NATO if its just gonna send helpful suggestions for terms of surrender, we can just call France if we ever want that.
Yes, they want US global influence down. Yes, they are buddies. But that doesn't refute what I'm saying. A strong Russia necessitates NATO actually grouping up, and a stronger NATO is a stronger US.
Hence why if Russia wins, it's not even bad for the US, because NATO will also band up together. For the two player game of NATO vs Russia, Russia wins relative power: it's power increases more than the US's does. But once we factor in China in a 3 player game? China is the big loser here, just because they aren't playing. A stronger NATO hurts China. A stronger Russia hurts China as they compete for control of BRICS/whatever sorta alliance they come up with.
Past performance is more indicative of the state of things than your naive predictions. If appeasement lobby wins in US and Ukraine loses because of it, EU-NATO starts wondering what's the point of the whole organization anyway. China? EU is even softer on them than on Russia before the war, and it's gonna have an argument to have even softer if USA just goes full appeasement on Russia. After all, politics of the Pacific region are less relevant to EU than to USA.
Stronger Russia doesn't hurt China, it shifts balance in BRICS, but the BRICS total is stronger if one of the major member is not a total failure.
Still, Russia has no hope of unseating China from its future leadership of BRICS, the economics aren't the same scale, but it can try to maintain relevance, at the expense of EU and its eastern flank especially.
For a kinda similar example, look at what's happened recently with Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Iran getting stronger strengthened Israel as they were able to get Saudi Arabia to get ever closer to an Israeli alliance (they wouldn't call it that, but that's what it is). Israel's enemy getting stronger helped it. Quite simply, you aren't looking at follow on events and how different groups interact.
Israel is as strong as it was, some Arabs are forced to hold their breath and make deals with da joos, at the same time other Arabs also hold their breath and ally with the Shia heretics against Israel and West.
I for one would think twice if any Israeli strategists would manage to hold their laughter if they heard your theory that "Israel's enemy getting stronger helped it". Is it some new hit slogan from the same school of strategy as "If you kill your enemies, they win"? They are in fact quite pissed off about USA not dealing with Iran permanently earlier.
With help like that, they don't even need enemity.
As far as the US is concerned, the Ukraine war is gambling with house money. Maybe we permanently end Russia as a threat forever by adding Ukraine, but either way we add Finland and Sweden to NATO and also reinforce NATO togetherness by providing an enemy. This really hits the ability of Russia to attack the Baltics, one of the key weaknesses in a Russian attack on NATO.
At the same time it further exposes Finnish border, and does nothing about irregular operations against Baltics and if they manage to regain some control of Ukraine, also Southeastern Europe.
Meanwhile in the world of material stuff, if you want European NATO to even be able (nevermind willing) to help against China, it will need to focus more on building ships, and i mean major, long endurance warships, not tiny corvettes and AIP subs, and other very long range deployment capabilities.
The bigger a threat Russia remains, the more Europe's military powers will have to invest into strategically immobile heavy forces to put on the borders with Russia and short range aviation, things of little use if they are to help intervene against China due to how logistically nightmarish would it be to move them to the right region, nevermind the ever-present cop-out of "we can't send stuff because Russia may attack at any moment taking the opportunity us moving forces to counter China's attack gave them", such force distraction is already a major fear with the ME hotspots as those do need warships to deal with now.
As things stand, European NATO, even though it has plenty of reasons and motivations to take up those MENA problems far more than it does and relieve US naval forces to focus on Pacific, can't do it, because their navies can't scrounge together the right number of right ships, and probably not even of wrong ships.
