We must dare to dream, amid the horror, carnage and war crimes, that Vladimir Putin could soon be defeated – or at least forced into an ignominious stalemate.

Russia’s conventional forces have proved staggeringly incompetent, crippled by appalling leadership, communications, coordination and logistics. Four of Putin’s generals have been killed, and it has suffered a massive loss of equipment, with Moscow instead relying on a savage, Syria-style annihilation of homes and civilian facilities. President Zelensky and his men have outperformed all expectations; Britain can be proud of the help and training it gave them.

Europe, in denial prior to the invasion, has been jolted into a dramatic show of unity, pledging to spend more on defence and to detach itself from Russia’s energy orbit. The scope and scale of the Western sanctions has been far greater than expected, inflicting immense pain on Russia, and the public sense of outrage has turned into a historically generous embrace of millions of refugees.

There is now a growing sense that Russia is about to sue for peace, and that the agreement it signs will be a humiliation. No, Ukraine will not join Nato, pace George W Bush; it would need to adopt a Swedish-style neutrality; and Russia would retain some stolen territory, for now. Crucially, however, Kyiv would keep its army under the 15-point plan in discussion, and Putin wouldn’t even come close to achieving his aim of destroying Ukraine, as detailed in his grotesque speech prior to the invasion.

It is too soon to know in the fog of war and propaganda whether this relatively optimistic scenario will materialise, or if Russia is bluffing, playing for time as it inflicts death and destruction. Ukraine alone must decide whether such a deal makes sense for it. But even if a peace agreement is inked, Western elites need to tread extremely carefully, and avoid plunging back into their habitual delusion and hubris.

For all of the good news about Russia’s weakness, this war has also exposed many critical failings in the Western alliance. This has been an almost purely US-European project.

The lack of support has come not just from China but also from all the other emerging powers, without exception. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have refused to join the Western alliance; the former’s absence is especially shocking as it is the world’s largest democracy. Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil and others have also refused to properly take Ukraine’s side, while Israel has navigated an understandable tightrope.

The West looks ever smaller and lonelier: we are not taking the new economic and demographic powerhouses of the 21st and 22nd century with us. This is hardly surprising: we belatedly shun Russia, but continue to promote mass murderers elsewhere. The fact that Iran is about to be welcomed back into polite society is obscene. We desperately need to reverse this long-term decline, and build what Lord Frost calls a new League of the West, as well as rebuild our economies through free-market reforms.

Even though America played the key role in imposing sanctions on Russia – its control of the dollar continues to give it near-total global supremacy for now – the country’s role has otherwise been noticeably limited, and it is keen to move on. Antony Blinken is already discussing how to lift sanctions, arguing that they would require an “irreversible” Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. Joe Biden is proving calamitously weak and indecisive and is no leader of the free world; the American public is not especially interested in Ukraine; and this war won’t cancel America’s pivot to Asia, especially given the pathetic performance of Putin’s army.

Putin thus becomes a European and a British problem. But has the Old World changed enough to contain Russia by itself? With Germany plunging into recession, will the early promise to cut off Russian gas really materialise? Berlin’s supposed 2027 deadline to wean itself off was already a cop-out. Will the Greens and others really support reopening nuclear power stations and coal mines, as well as massively greater defence spending, when peace returns?

And what of Britain? If we really felt that we were in an emergency, we would be rushing to diversify our energy supplies at any cost. We would be giving the green light to fracking as well as renewables, unveiling massive, concrete plans for a whole series of nuclear power stations to act as back-up to wind and solar, and turbocharging North Sea oil and gas. Some of the latter appears to be taking place, but overall I detect a worrying lack of seriousness. The pressure to return to pre-war normality and the obsession with net zero, even in the short term and even in times of war, is as inescapable as it is debilitating.

Just as importantly, will we have the courage to boost defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, and to cut expenditure in other areas – the welfare state, foreign aid – to pay for it? I’m not too sure. Yet if Britain and the EU don’t act, nothing will change: Putin or his successors will continue to threaten Eastern Europe. There will be no resolution and no real dissuasion. Britain and France also need to talk more openly about their nuclear weapons: avoiding a nuclear conflict should be the world’s top priority, but deterrence requires extreme clarity.

The shock and awe of the sanctions has bred further complacency: our newly emboldened intelligentsia seems to believe that China too could be cowed into submission through economic means. This is absurd. The Chinese are the world’s factory; they also control a vast share of global minerals and key metals. They are a rival civilisation, not a declining, dysfunctional gangster-state like Putin’s Russia. Imposing Russia-style measures on China would implode our economies immediately. We cannot afford to be in denial about the immensity of the challenge.

If, as looks increasingly likely, Putin is too weak and too arrogant to win his hideous war, it will have proved a narrow escape for the West. The Ukrainians haven’t been so lucky: their nation lies in ruins, their people in mourning. The West cannot afford not to change if we are to contain, and ultimately defeat, Putin and all of the other monsters at our doors.