> In a similar vein, Russia should never have got USSR's UN security council seat.

Now that's an interesting counterfactual. The legal case was weak, and certainly they didn't have to on account of Russia's strength. Other than nukes, which a few non-SC members have, a lot of mostly empty land area and a space programme, Russia's credentials as a superpower aren't great when it's not the same country as Ukraine and central Asia and doesn't also hold sway over Warsaw Pact countries. Not sure China necessarily saw them as a friendly counterweight to the West then either. On the other hand, they had the other CIS states all insisting Russia was the true continuation of the USSR, no objections and they probably thought that it would help Russia become friends. Does the world look vastly different if Russia goes through an application process to rejoin the UN and doesn't get a seat on the Security Council? Perhaps not, but I'm sure Mearsheimer et al would explain that every act of violence Russia undertook afterwards was a natural response to it...