The recent history is not without examples of wars that ended with catastrophic results for superpowers who believed that with their huge military arsenal they were able to control countries and overthrow their ruling regimes.
Two decades after the invasion of Afghanistan, the United States was forced to withdraw humiliatingly as the Taliban marched on the capital, Kabul, to regain power.
The Soviet Union also had a similar bitter experience in Afghanistan. It occupied the country for a decade in order to protect its friendly government, but was eventually forced to withdraw due to the victories of the Western-backed Afghan Mujahideen.
One of the shortcomings of great powers is that the arrogance of their leaders sometimes sways them from the wisdom of making big decisions and prevents them from benefiting from the lessons of history.
Last February, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to attack Ukraine, believing that his army, which ranks as the second most powerful in the world after the United States, could achieve a quick military victory and force Kyiv to surrender.
But the war, which was intended to be a blitzkrieg, is increasingly derailed.
Compared to the Soviet and American experiences in Afghanistan, each of which took between a decade and two to admit defeat, Putin's Ukraine experiment was only a few months old, but its poor planning and blundered military management give the impression that it is going into a dead end.
By announcing a partial mobilization, Putin risks losing domestic support.
The scenes of thousands of young Russians seeking to leave the country through land ports or searching for a ticket abroad to escape being called up to fight in the army shows the growing anxiety among Russians about the future
The first shock to Russia at the beginning of the war forced Putin to withdraw from northern Ukraine and reduce his goals to full control of the Donbass region and some of the surrounding areas.
Seven months later, Russia's military power seemed unable to achieve smaller goals even as it concentrated its capabilities on a smaller scale.
No ideal leadership can achieve everything it has planned in wars, but when planning fails to appreciate the strength of an adversary like Ukraine and the extent of the West's willingness to support it, planning is very poor.
Russia is not only confronting Ukraine, but also the West that supports it with arms and harsh sanctions on Moscow.
But that raises some questions that call into question the efficacy of Putin's pre-emptive assessment of the war.
Did he think that Kyiv would quickly take over and that the West would stand aside while Russia worked to destroy the European security architecture?
Did he think that the United States had become too weak to rally the West against him and that Europe would remain captive to its fear of freezing in the cold and living without Russian gas?
Putin was judged badly that even his opponents could not have imagined.
Look at NATO, which Putin wanted to stop its expansion towards Russia.
It has become more cohesive after the war and is seeking to annex Russia's other neighbors.
Look also at Western influence in Ukraine.
It has grown in a way that can no longer be contained.
Also look at friends of Moscow who resisted engaging in Western efforts to isolate it, such as China and India.
They have recently become more wary of sticking with Putin and fearful for their interests.
Putin may seem desperate when he announced partial mobilization and agreed to annex the Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions to the Russian Federation, and repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons.
But it has become more dangerous than before. In contrast to the past months, in which he was able to spare ordinary Russian citizens the repercussions of the war, by declaring partial mobilization he risks losing internal support.
The scenes of thousands of young Russians seeking to leave the country through land ports or searching for a ticket abroad to escape being called up to fight in the army shows the growing anxiety among Russians about the future.
Nationalist discourse is still influential in granting internal legitimacy to war, but it diminishes over time.
Even if Putin can make up for the human shortage caused by the fighting in the army, it may take longer to get a result on the ground.
Nor is it certain that calling in more troops would make an immediate and significant difference on the ground because of Russia's difficulties in delivering supplies and deploying military equipment.
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin gained Crimea, but lost Ukraine.
With the annexation of new Ukrainian lands, Russia will succeed in imposing a new geographical reality, but in return it will perpetuate the loss of all of Ukraine and push it to deepen its relationship with the West, perhaps forever this time.
Great power struggles become more dangerous when they do not leave themselves a way out.
This is exactly what Putin is doing in Ukraine.
He has set goals for himself that he is unable to achieve and leaves no room for middle solutions that save face.
While the West sought to be more realistic in its approach to the conflict by abandoning the project to include Ukraine in NATO and help it be strong in any future settlement with Russia, Putin made it clear from the start that he does not believe in Ukraine as an existing state and considers it part of the historical territory of Russia.
Moreover, Putin's curtailing his military objectives and raising the cost of Western involvement in supporting Ukraine to regain lost territory is unlikely to push Kyiv or the West to back down.
This would have been possible if Russia had indeed been able to hold onto the gains on the ground, but on the contrary, the growing Russian weakness makes the West feel that it is already capable of defeating Russia.
Putin's escalation of the conflict raises the stakes for both Moscow and the West.
The likely annexation of new Ukrainian territory will require a greater military and financial commitment by Russia in the face of a Ukrainian army that the West is increasingly arming for years to come.
It also obligates Putin to control the large part of Donetsk that Ukraine still controls.
Moreover, Putin will remain powerless to turn the tide on the battlefield without limiting Western arms shipments to Ukraine.
So far, Russia has targeted arms supply routes that come overland through Poland, but has not directly targeted any such shipments.
Such an option could lead to a direct confrontation between Moscow and NATO.
While Putin's main objective of declaring the partial mobilization is to test the West's resolve to continue supporting Ukraine and push it back, it also signals that Russia is acknowledging that advanced Western weapons have begun to turn the tide of the conflict in Kyiv's favor.
The most dangerous aspect of this conflict remains the nuclear weapon.
Putin did not hesitate to brandish this weapon again when he saw that he was losing the initiative in the war.
Despite his decision at the beginning of the war to put the nuclear arsenal on special alert, Western intelligence did not notice any change in the status of missiles in the readiness of the Russian nuclear forces.
But any use of this weapon will force the West to intervene and raise the risks of conflict to levels that threaten to ignite a third world war.
The West's goal is still to win the war, not to avoid a nuclear attack.
Finally, the time factor in the conflict appears to be the most important, and Putin is betting on it to emerge victorious in the war.
While he hopes, by arming Europe's energy supplies in the cold winter, to unravel European unity and fuel social discontent both within the EU and across the Atlantic, Europeans' readiness to deal with an energy war with Russia reduces the effectiveness of this weapon.
He is also betting on the weakness of the Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections and thus the decline of the American commitment to continue to support Ukraine until the end.
Putin now appears more vulnerable in this confrontation, but the fact that the West should realize is that Putin becomes more dangerous and daring to escalate the conflict whenever he feels he is facing a humiliating defeat.
Compromise still exists at any time, but it is certain that no settlement anymore will help Putin claim that he has won this war.