The economics and politics actually matter! The public do not want a war, and they do not like forseeing one, they want their own pricing issues dealt with, and they have power at elections. Whereas Russian and Chinese leaders can simply impose whatever level of hardship they need that doesn't provoke full scale open revolt and mass slaughter in their own streets.
Slavoj Žižek talks about "wartime communism", the tendency towards centralized control during extreme situations like a war or pandemic, because it is absolutely necessary for effective results at scale, when the problem is narrow and well-defined. Capitalism tends to do better at peace when there is no single fixed objective.
