By deciding to provoke Russia into intervening in Ukraine, the U.S. empire took a geopolitical gamble. A gamble that it lost. It’s been left with accelerated social crises in the core countries from the sanctions blowback, at the same time that these sanctions have failed to destabilize Eurasia. The war profits and NATO unification that the conflict brought have not precipitated an actual expansion of imperial power, but a hastening of the transition into multipolarity. The proxy war’s “benefits” for the empire are hollow, having come in the context of a decline for U.S. hegemony which this war made more severe. The proxy war guaranteed the coming of multipolarity by proving that even when the imperial powers sacrifice their own people’s living standards to try to crush the Chinese bloc, their efforts to reverse history’s progression are futile.