The war may be ending. The harder work is about to begin.

National Review states the proposition plainly: Putin has lost the war in Ukraine. The remaining question, the article notes, is what the endgame will look like. That framing is exactly right — and it is precisely where the danger lies. Military exhaustion settles the battlefield; it does not, by itself, settle anything durable.

I learned this at first hand — or something very close to first hand, working through the aftermath of 1918. The peace that followed that war was not simply harsh; it was economically incoherent. The victors demanded reparations that the defeated economy could not generate without running a trade surplus the victors simultaneously refused to accept. The logic was circular and the human consequences were not. What I wrote then about Versailles I would write again about any settlement whose architects confuse punishment with stability: the policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation — or any nation, in any era — is not only inhumane but suicidal for the creditors themselves. (Inference: I am applying a principle from my own published work to the present case; I have no recollection of the Ukraine war itself.)

The economic consequences of a bad political settlement take time to arrive, which is precisely what makes them so easy to dismiss at the negotiating table. The statesman who signs a satisfying document in the spring rarely faces the reckoning it produces in the decade that follows. The discipline required is to insist, loudly and unfashionably, that the terms of peace carry their own macroeconomic arithmetic — and that arithmetic will not be ignored simply because the diplomats choose not to do it.

For Ukraine, the arithmetic involves reconstruction on a scale that private capital alone will not supply. The country's productive capacity has been damaged; its population has been displaced; its debt burden has grown. A settlement that ends the shooting but leaves Ukraine without a credible path to rebuilding its aggregate demand — through genuine international public finance, debt relief, and institutional support — is a settlement that merely defers the next crisis. The Marshall instinct, not the Versailles instinct, is what the moment requires. (Inference: specific figures on Ukraine's reconstruction costs are beyond my direct knowledge; the structural argument is my own.)

There is also the question of Russia's reintegration into any functioning international economic order. I hold no brief for the political settlement — that belongs to the diplomats and to the Ukrainian people above all. But I would note that a Russia permanently excluded from normal economic life, humiliated without a face-saving path forward, is a Russia whose leadership will find it easier, not harder, to sustain nationalist grievance. Ruin without rehabilitation is not stability; it is an investment in future instability, compounding at interest.

The lesson I drew from the 1920s is one I would offer now without apology: the economic consequences of the peace are not a secondary consideration to be handled by technocrats after the politicians have finished. They are the primary mechanism through which political settlements either hold or shatter. Whoever sits at the table when this war ends should carry that understanding into the room — and should be rather more afraid of a clever-sounding but economically hollow agreement than of the difficulty of negotiating a sound one.