For those inclined to see history as depressingly cyclical, the war in Ukraine offers fairly strong evidence. It all feels lifted from a familiar script in which only the actors have been switched—at anti-Russian protests, a popular placard even has the 20th century’s most evil mustache Photoshopped onto Putin’s face. But there is one protagonist who is an unusual fit for his role: Volodymyr Zelensky.

The 44-year-old former comedian turned president has exhibited great patriotism and bravery, joining his fate with that of his countrymen on the streets of Kyiv, refusing to leave despite Western offers of an airlift. If he is now, as he put it, “the No. 1 target” for the Russians, it is because he is the No. 1 Ukrainian. And what is remarkable, truly mind-blowing in the long sweep of history, is that his Jewishness has not stood in the way of his being embraced as a symbol of the nation.

In the Soviet world that shaped Zelensky and his parents, Jews were perceived as the eternal outsiders, possible fifth columnists, the “rootless cosmopolitans” of Stalin’s imagination. This of course came on top of living in a place where a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism had always existed, a legacy of pograms and Nazi collaboration. Just outside embattled Kyiv is Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were shot and thrown into a ravine over the course of two days in 1941. If Zelensky has now become synonymous with the blue-and-yellow flag of his country, it might signal an unexpected outcome of this conflict that has found Jews feeling finally, improbably, one with a land that has perpetually tried to spit them out.

[Read: A Prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky]

Zelensky grew up in the Russian-speaking city of Kryvyi Rih, in the eastern part of Ukraine. And like most Soviet Jews, his parents were highly educated but also limited as to where their ambitions and learning could take them. His father was a professor of mathematics and his mother had studied engineering. These were standard-issue careers for a certain class of Soviet Jews who knew they couldn’t come close to any of the fields that shaped society and culture—one after another turned to the applied sciences as a way to excel.

When asked about what his actual Jewishness has meant to him, Zelensky has been blasé. In an interview in 2020, he said he came from “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family,” adding that “most Jewish families in the Soviet Union were not religious.” What this hides, though, is the reality that Jewish identity didn’t exist in the Soviet Union, because it couldn’t. To be a Jew from the time of Stalin onward was to have a stamp in your internal passport that marked you as such (just as a Ukrainian or Latvian national identity was also indicated). There was very little opportunity for Jewish community, religious practice, or even bare-bones cultural expression. Unlike Ukrainians and Latvians who had national homelands within the Soviet empire where some degree of culture and language were permitted as long as it stuck to the Communist party line, Jews had nothing of the sort. Synagogues were mostly shut down or crawling with KGB informants. Until the  late 1980s, gathering for something as innocuous as a Passover seder was practically a subversive act, and teaching Hebrew was simply not allowed.

By the time Zelensky came of age, three or four generations of Soviet Jews had experienced their Jewish identity as a hollow thing, nothing but a black mark on a passport and a sense of peoplehood born of exclusion and a second-class status. All the while, no matter how steeped in Pushkin they might be, they were never able to fully claim any other national allegiance. When the Soviet Union began buckling to pressure to let Jews emigrate in the 1970s, many took the opportunity to do so, even those mathematicians and engineers who had achieved the heights allowed to them. By the early 1990s, just after the Soviet collapse, the permitted trickle became a deluge, and about 1.5 million headed to the United States and Israel.

[Read more of our coverage of the Russian invasion]

Zelensky and his family were part of the few hundred thousand Jews who stayed, content to assimilate in a post-Soviet world, in which Zelensky found success, first as an actor and then as a politician. Two intersecting trends took place over the past 20 years, both of which transformed the status of Jews in Ukraine. First, the end of the Soviet Union allowed some air to enter Jewish communal life for those who remained. In the eastern-Ukrainian city of Dnipro, not far from where Zelensky grew up, there are now 10 synagogues and a gargantuan community center called Menorah, opened in 2012, that reportedly serves 40,000 people a day—even though there are only 60,000 Jews in Dnipro. By 2019, a Pew Research Center poll found Ukraine the most accepting of Jews among all Central and Eastern European countries.

As new opportunities for Jewishness were opening up, the past decade also saw instances when Jews were on the front line of defending a democratic and free Ukraine. Prominent Jewish-identified activists participated in the 2013 Euromaidan demonstrations that forced the ouster of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014. Later that year, the Jewish governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region established and personally helped fund a militia to defend against Russian-backed separatists in the east.

Zelensky’s political rise also took place in this context. It’s uncanny in retrospect that the character he played on television in the series Servant of the People—the role that foretold his actual ascendance to the presidency—is a nobody whose rise begins when a private rant is filmed and goes viral. But there is a kind of logic to this coincidence.  Zelensky grabbed the attention of Ukrainians by playing out what has traditionally been the part of the Jew: the outsider. In this case, what Ukrainians saw in this lonely figure banging on the window was themselves, embattled, trying to hold on to their national identity amid growing threats to their independence. It may have been this aspect of his Jewishness and the way it came to dovetail with those Ukrainian anxieties that made him such a suddenly popular figure, winning 73 percent of the vote in his 2019 election.

In these days of war and uncertainty, the fact that a Jew has come to represent the fighting spirit of Ukraine provides its own kind of hope. Along with all that seems to be recurring—the military aggression, the assault on freedom—there is also something new: inclusion and acceptance in a place where it once seemed impossible.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has already led to a crisis—not only for Ukraine but also for the Kremlin. As Russian troops have advanced toward Kyiv, the European Union and the United States have responded with dramatic financial punishments that could deep-freeze the Russian economy and send inflation on an upward spiral.

There are now five ways that the aggression in Ukraine can end, according to Paul Poast, a professor of foreign policy and war at the University of Chicago. They are: a disastrous quagmire or retreat for Russia; violent regime change in Kyiv; the full conquest of Ukraine; the beginning of a new Russian empire; or a chaotic stumble into something like World War III.

In an interview for my podcast Plain English, Poast discussed these five scenarios in depth, the major factors that will shape the outcome of this crisis, the Biden administration’s response to Putin, why he feels this invasion is reminiscent of Japan’s attacks on Pearl Harbor, and the most important things to watch out for in the coming week. This is an edited and abbreviated transcript of our conversation.

Derek Thompson: Let’s start with the scenario that assumes the least amount of success for Russia, and then we’ll build toward the scenarios that assume more ambitious and potentially more disastrous plans for Russia in Europe. Scenario 1 is that Russia’s war quickly becomes a quagmire. There are already protests across the country. Russian celebrities have spoken out against the war. Russia's stock market has tanked. Russia’s currency has cratered, and the pain might be just beginning if sanctions bite down on oligarchs and businesses. Tell me what you see as plausible and implausible about a scenario in which Russia reassesses this invasion and dramatically scales back its ambitions.

Paul Poast: This is indeed a scenario that a lot of analysts have been predicting, because of exactly what you said. Looking at the Iraq War, the U.S. experience with Afghanistan, and—let’s be honest, we could go further back—the Soviet experience with Afghanistan, these are all scenarios that we label a quagmire, a mess. There’s resistance. The military forces are bogged down. And indeed, for all the reasons you just laid out, this just looks like a bad idea in hindsight. Is this plausible, and what would Russia do if this were to happen? Yes, this is very much plausible. As you said, there’s already a lot of resistance. The Ukrainians are fighting for their country. They are probably more motivated. They have more morale than the Russian troops. These would all be contributors to making this very tough for Russia to accomplish.

The big thing is how would Putin respond? It could lead Russia to scale back, maybe even recognize this was a bad idea, perhaps going all the way out of the country or at least going back to the Eastern provinces. But also, it could lead Russia to lash out further.

Thompson: Scenario 2 is “foreign-imposed regime change.”

Poast: In this scenario, the objective is to simply remove the existing government in Ukraine and put in place a government that’s friendly to Russia. Russia would turn Ukraine into what it currently has with Belarus. They would depose the existing government, with Volodymyr Zelensky ousted or in exile, and they’d install a friendly government.

Thompson: Scenario 3 you call “state death.” What is state death, and how does it represent a notch beyond regime change?

Poast: State death is a phrase that I borrowed from the work of Tanisha Fazal, a professor [who specializes in] international relations at the University of Minnesota. State death is when a state no longer exists because it is annexed or conquered, and it ceases to be independent. This would mean Russia’s objective is not just to put in a new government, like in Scenarios 1 and 2, but to actually take over the entire country and make Ukraine part of Russia. This is exactly what Russia did with Crimea.

Thompson: Based exclusively on Putin’s rhetoric so far, is he talking about this invasion as more about regime change or state death?

Poast: If you really look carefully at his words—and, to be honest, I don’t even think you have to look that carefully at his words—it very much implies that he’s thinking about making Ukraine part of Russia, as he has this desire to re-create this Soviet Union and a new Russian empire.

Thompson: That takes us to Scenario 4. This is what you call “imperial overreach.”

Poast: If you take seriously what Putin says in his speeches, with this desire to re-create the Russian empire, that shouldn’t end with Ukraine. There are other states, former Soviet republics like Moldova, Belarus, and Georgia—a country that Russia invaded in 2008. These countries are independent states that used to be part of either the Soviet Union or the Russian empire. So, this next scenario envisions that Putin’s objective is to only start with Ukraine. And once he successfully conquers Ukraine, the next step is to go further and bring these other former Soviet republics into Russia and to truly re-create the Russian empire.

The reason why this is called “imperial overreach” is because a common thing that happens with a lot of empire endeavors is you overextend yourself and create an ungovernable entity. That is the risk that this scenario poses, let alone the challenge of having enough military success to do the conquering itself.

Thompson: So in the short term, this scenario assumes extraordinary Russian success at conquering the country of Ukraine and essentially running the country as an extension of the Russian empire. But it also implies that this success encourages Putin to move east and south of  Ukraine into countries like Moldova and Georgia, and these further invasions create their own enormous headaches for an enlarged Russian empire. That leads us to the last scenario that you envision, which I hope is extremely unlikely. That is the major-power-war scenario.

Poast: In all the other scenarios, this is about Russia attacking the smaller states that used to be part of the Soviet Union but not part of NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an alliance of many of the Western European countries, Eastern European countries, and the United States, and includes the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which were very important to the Soviet sphere during the Cold War. This final scenario envisions that Russia, and specifically Putin, decides to go further from Ukraine into these NATO countries. He could do this for any number of reasons. He could want to rebuild the empire. He could be overconfident from success in Ukraine. Perhaps he feels like the resolve of the West is not very great. But if that happens, if he attacks a NATO country, it triggers Article 5, which is a mutual-defense clause stating that an attack on one is an attack on all. If that happens, then other NATO countries would come to the defense of that NATO country, and that ends in a war between the United States and Russia.

Thompson: What are you seeing on the ground so far that makes any of the scenarios most likely?

Poast: We’re still very early. But one thing that has jumped out at me right away is the number of casualties on the Russian side. If the numbers are accurate, there have already been several thousand fatalities, with similar levels on the Ukrainian side. To put that in perspective, in most wars we’ve studied, you see about 50 battlefield deaths a day. To have a war with well over a thousand fatalities tells you how intense the fighting is. This is an extremely intense war. That intensity, I think, is both a function of the speed and scale by which Russia has gone about carrying out their campaign. But it also points to the resistance, and there’s going to be growing resistance by Ukraine. It is absolutely devastating what we’re witnessing.

I’ll tell you how my expectations of this conflict have evolved. I’m very much on record for saying that I thought Putin would invade. But I thought this would be a limited invasion. I thought that he would take small slices of territory in eastern Ukraine. I had to update over the past week, as I heard his rhetoric, saw this large mobilization, and realized this was going to be a large invasion.

Given the size and scale of this invasion, coupled with the rhetoric, I really do think that his objective is some form of annexation, or full conquest of Ukraine. That is the scenario he is most seeking out now. When I combine that with an analysis of Russia’s operational ease, I think the most reasonable thing that we could be expecting right now is regime change in Kyiv.

Thompson: Tell me what you are looking for in the next week to determine the most likely outcome of this crisis.

Poast: Two things. First, how is the actual military campaign going? Does Russia seem like they’re achieving quick success? That will tell us whether full conquest is still likely. And second, watch Poland. I really do think that Poland could be the flashpoint. What does the refugee situation in Poland look like? What is Russia saying about the refugees? Are there any hints about whether Russia is planning any kind of move against Poland? Anything along those lines would bring us closer to the nightmare scenario of war against NATO.

Thompson: We set up a very linear decision tree—if Putin gets this far, it’s Scenario 2; if he gets that far, it’s Scenario 4—but is there any way the tree could get a little bit tangled? Where, for example, Putin fails and this war is seen as a huge embarrassment and as an economic disaster for Putin, but because of that failure and because of that embarrassment, it causes him to strike out in some other way that we’re not currently anticipating?

Poast: What makes this a very scary scenario—what makes a war between the great powers more likely than it’s been in 80 years—is that Putin might feel at some point like his back is against the wall and he has no other options, so he lashes out in desperation. In our discipline, we call this “gambling for resurrection.” You’re worried you are going to be deposed, and the only way to save yourself is to take a high-risk gamble. Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century called it “committing suicide for fear of death.”

There is a useful analogy with Pearl Harbor. In the late 1930s, Japan had invaded Manchuria and was engaged in a war with China. And the U.S., which was supporting China at the time, imposed an oil embargo on Japan. We squeezed the Japanese government until they realized they only had about a year and a half of resources left. They were desperate to stop the oil embargo. So, they took the gamble of Pearl Harbor and paid for it with a costly war in the Pacific. I think we have to consider a question: If we apply similar economic pressure to Russia, could Putin make a similar decision to what Japan did in 1941?

Thompson: This is a real dilemma, because the U.S. government doesn’t want to be in the position where we let Ukraine suffer and watch thousands of people die just because we’ve been spooked into thinking that angering Putin could cause another Pearl Harbor. That seems monstrous and inhumane, and yet I fully understand the calculus you’re describing. So, what should President Joe Biden do?

Poast: I think the Biden administration is making the right decision. I think that they need to do more to mobilize forces into Poland, into the Baltic states, to put in place what we would call a trip-wire force to discourage Putin from further invasions. But we’re facing all-bad options. The objective is to pick the least-bad option.

This week, as Russia unleashed a violent assault on Ukraine, the director of Russia’s space agency went on a rant. After President Joe Biden announced on Thursday new sanctions against Russia that would, among other effects, “degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,” Dmitry Rogozin responded with a series of tweets about the International Space Station: “Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS? If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and a fall on the United States or Europe? ... The ISS doesn’t fly over Russia, so the risks are all yours.”

At first glance, the statement seems, well, pretty unhinged. Particularly because Russia is one of the nations that operates the ISS, and has two of its own cosmonauts on board. (And, although the station’s orbital path falls mostly outside of Russia, the ISS does pass over a small part of its southern border.)

Before the specter of a space station crashing in middle America starts to seem too real, let me reassure you: The International Space Station is not about to come down. Russia can’t press a button and drop it out of its orbit 260 miles above Earth. Rogozin was referring to the fact that the space station currently relies on Russian propulsion systems to maintain its altitude in orbit, and was apparently threatening to withdraw those services if sanctions affected the ISS—and doing it in the most thuggish way possible. Nice space station you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

Rogozin’s American counterpart, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson, did not respond directly. The agency said in a statement: “NASA continues working with all our international partners”—including Roscosmos, the Russian space agency—“for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station.”

[Read: If everybody leaves the International Space Station]

For decades, officials in both countries have stuck to the same lines about the value of collaboration in space: Past conflicts and competitions aside, projects such as the ISS are bastions of international cooperation, an emblem of our better selves, especially during times of crisis. Our efforts in space are, no pun intended, above all that. That framing doesn’t always hold. In 2014, when the U.S. and other countries issued punitive measures against Russia for its takeover of Crimea, questions about the welfare of the ISS effort came up. Then, as now, there were inflammatory comments thrown around from figures like Rogozin, who is himself under U.S. sanctions for his role in the invasion of the Crimean peninsula. And then, as now, there were assurances from NASA that the two nations’ work on the ISS would be just fine. (Rogozin appeared to calm down after NASA said Thursday night that a new U.S. ban on technology exports to Russia wouldn’t extend to ISS operations.)

What happens next, beyond this moment of déjà vu, is less certain. Considering how Biden and other leaders are describing their current diplomatic relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it is unclear how long space agencies such as NASA and the European Space Agency, which includes 22 nations, can keep their working relationships with Russia untarnished by the fallout. The idea that earthly matters can’t touch something as lofty as space travel is only a platitude, not a certainty. And surely for some spacefaring nations, there must come a point when compartmentalization doesn’t seem like the simple solution it once was. In some ways, NASA has already been disentangling itself from its ties to Russia. But several international space missions this year currently rely on Russian partnership, and both American and European officials will have to reexamine those efforts and decide whether they’ve reached that point.

Americans and Russians have worked together in space since the 1970s, not long after the United States landed men on the moon and its space race with the Soviet Union drew to a close. In the summer of 1975, an Apollo module and a Soyuz capsule docked together in orbit, the first international astronaut mission in history and a show of détente between the superpowers. Astronauts and cosmonauts continued to meet in space in the 1990s, taking turns spending time in the American space shuttles and Mir, the Russian space station. The U.S. eventually asked Russia to join its efforts alongside the European and Japanese space agencies to build a brand-new space station, and together they started assembling the ISS piece by piece in orbit in 1998.

[Read: How far will Biden go to stop Putin?]

The ISS is divided into American and Russian segments, and it relies on both sides to function: While NASA supplies electricity to the entire station, Roscosmos provides the spacecraft that attach to the ISS and periodically nudge the whole thing into a higher altitude—the capabilities to which Rogozin referred in his provocative posts. These spacecraft are supposed to help decommission the ISS, when that time comes, by pushing it into a careful plunge through Earth’s atmosphere that ends over the ocean. If Russia were to suddenly jump ship, NASA and its other partners on the ISS could come up with an emergency solution before the station was in danger or became a danger itself. NASA is already exploring other propulsion options; an American spacecraft currently docked to the ISS is scheduled to test some orbit-boosting moves in April.

The U.S. is less tangled up with Russia in the space realm than it was the last time Russia went after one of its neighbors. In 2014, with the American space shuttles in retirement, the Soyuz was the only ride to the ISS, giving Russia a nice bit of leverage; when the U.S. banned cooperation with Russia on space activities outside the ISS, instructing companies to stop using Russian rocket engines, Rogozin joked that NASA could use a trampoline to reach the station. Today, however, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, provides transportation for NASA astronauts and their European colleagues. Where before the U.S. paid Russia millions of dollars for a seat, there are now talks of the countries swapping seats between their vehicles. Rogozin recently announced that a Russian cosmonaut will fly on SpaceX this fall, but NASA wouldn’t confirm that, saying the two agencies were still working out a potential arrangement. Such an arrangement seems much shakier now.

This is the discomfort that spacefaring nations will face as Russia presses ahead in Ukraine: Walking the thin line between appearing to punish Russia and still holding outer space as a realm apart. Biden this week described the state of U.S.-Russia relations as a “complete rupture”—why would an American company then give a Russian cosmonaut a ride to space? British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this week that he has been “broadly in favor of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration” with Russia despite geopolitical conflict, “but in the current circumstances it’s hard to see how even those can continue as normal.” So what does that posture mean for the two European satellites scheduled to launch on a Russian vehicle from a French territory in April? Russia is already backing away; Rogozin said yesterday that, in response to sanctions from the European Union, Roscosmos would stop working with its European partners at the spaceport in French Guiana and recall Russian personnel stationed there.

[Read: Maybe don’t blow up satellites in space]

And what of Europe’s next mission to Mars? A rover is expected to launch from Russia’s spaceport in Kazakhstan in September, and, if it doesn’t leave in a certain window, will have to wait two years before getting another shot at reaching the red planet. On Friday, the director general of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, said in a tweet that “we will take any decisions needed, but for now, support for our missions & colleagues continues until further notice.”

Meanwhile, the ISS is still chugging along. (In fact, a Russian spaceship gave the station its latest gentle boost after Rogozin's menacing warnings.) The U.S. intends to keep operations going through 2030. Russia has signaled a potential earlier exit than that, saying it would assemble its own home in orbit, but “Russia’s civil space program is in tatters, to the point where Putin has slashed its funding because they’re doing so terribly,” Victoria Samson, a military-space expert at the Secure World Foundation, an organization focused on responsible uses of outer space, told me. “There is time to improve relations between all the ISS partners, in theory,” Samson said. But the story of the ISS, established as a symbol of global cooperation, could end on a sour note.

On Thursday, as the fighting in Ukraine intensified, NASA published a blog post summarizing the events of that day on the ISS. Two American astronauts began preparations for spacewalks scheduled for next month. A German astronaut tried out VR goggles while spinning on the exercise bike to test whether they made the workout more enjoyable. (Space-station residents work out every day to ward off the effects of weightlessness on their muscles and bones.) One Russian cosmonaut worked on a plasma-physics experiment, while another brainstormed ways to maximize space for future workout sessions. (Can’t overstate the importance of exercising in space.) Business as usual! the report seemed to scream. No mention of any awkward chats about the dire situation on Earth that has ensnared their home countries. The astronauts living there are, literally, floating above it all, but they are still human—surely they must have acknowledged, in some way, what was happening down on Earth.

Something was wrong, and Nate Wolfe had a pretty good idea what. He wasn’t scheduled to preach that day, but early on a Friday morning, he told me, he received a text summoning him to church. In one hour, please.

More than seven years earlier, Wolfe had moved his whole family cross-country for the job as a minister in the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio. Since then the insular parish community had become his world—his “fishbowl,” he described it. But in a matter of minutes that Friday morning, he told me, Church elders fired him; Wolfe became a fish out of water.

“They didn’t want any discussion,” he told me. “They just slid a piece of paper across the table to me and said, ‘We can’t have a member with this kind of association.’” (The Church did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

This article was adapted from Kelly Weill’s recent book, Off the Edge. (Algonquin Books)

Wolfe believes that association was his “flat Earth” belief, which he’d kept under wraps in order to avoid this kind of situation. The deeply unpopular theory erroneously posits that the planet is flat as a pancake and (according to many) contained beneath a dome. Still, certain Christians, like Wolfe, preach that the idea is supported by a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Wolfe had been full-on “flat,” as believers refer to themselves, for almost a year, ever since he stumbled across YouTube videos promoting a biblical flat-Earth model when researching a sermon on the Great Flood. By 2018 he’d decided to attend Take On the World, a Christian conference promoting flat-Earth theory, about an hour from his home. Wolfe left the convention with a new group of friends and a new commitment to live publicly as a flat-Earther. He had planned to broach the topic delicately during an upcoming Church-leadership meeting, making a religious argument for the theory beginning with Genesis 1, but he never had a chance. He believes the leaders discovered his belief when they learned he’d attended the conference.

It’s not hard to see how a pastor giving an unexpected flat-Earth sermon could harm a congregation. The polarizing idea has a way of setting people at odds with one another and drawing them into other fringe conspiracy theories—no good for a house of worship. But often, as in Wolfe’s case, flat-Earthers are the biggest victims of their convictions.

Wolfe’s sudden firing, he told me, was “traumatic.” His kids had grown up in this community. The Church was filled with his closest friends. Still, almost no one reached out after he was fired. “It was just like, all of a sudden, we didn’t exist.”

Indeed, almost universal in the flat-Earth community is the experience of ridicule and social rejection. Acquaintances unfriend adherents on Facebook, and in real life, after seeing one too many posts calling NASA a satanic psyop. Employers question their sanity. Family members find somewhere else to spend Thanksgiving. The loss foregrounds practically every conversation at flat-Earth meetups, so common that some describe themselves with the language of persecuted minorities: Announcing one’s belief is referred to as “coming out,” a term most commonly associated with the LGBTQ community. Separated from loved ones, many then find themselves trapped inside the theory with the only other people who will believe them.

[Read: Do you speak Fox? ]

On both mornings of the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference, the emcee Rick Hummer asked audience members to yell out insults they’d heard since coming out as flat. The responses I heard while attending the event sounded like a collective scream of catharsis. “Crazy,” came one popular cry. “Retard,” someone shouted. “Flat-tard!”

Cindy Gruender, a Colorado woman, didn’t need to yell. She wore a Miss Flat Earth sash across her chest, like a pageant queen. She was reclaiming the title after it was given to her as an insult at a Church that she later quit, she told Colorado Community Media.

Many flat-Earthers wear rejection as a badge of honor, although not all do it as literally as Gruender. In one YouTube video, an upbeat girl who appears to be in her early teens performs joking skits about the ostracization some families faced after going flat. One sequence shows the family “nicely, but not so nicely, being ousted from the Church,” as a young boy in a pastor’s outfit tapes a sign banning flat-Earthers to the door. “But at the end of the day, you always have Jesus, the online flat-Earth community, and your family,” the girl says. “Unless your family has disowned you. Then you just have Jesus and the online flat-Earth community.”

Sadly, the girl was probably correct. Flat-Earth and other conspiracy theories are community affairs, driven by a push and pull of simultaneous rejection from mainstream society and affirmation by a small cohort of fellow believers. By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group. But many of the most successful ones suggest the existence of another group: victims. The more a person identifies with a persecuted in-group, the more likely they are to suspect evil deeds by a threatening out-group, researchers at the University of Kent and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam noted in a 2018 paper. In a 2015 study, for example, Indonesian students were more likely to buy into conspiracy theories about Western countries catalyzing terror attacks if researchers first emphasized the students’ Muslim faith and described those nations as an anti-Muslim threat. Similarly, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s KGB spread rumors throughout the United States that government scientists had engineered the HIV virus to wipe out the country’s Black and gay populations. Although the rumors were false, the theory took off with some Black Americans who remembered the country’s history of medical abuse against Black people.

In their book American Conspiracy Theories, which compiles decades of data across a range of conspiracy theories, the researchers Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent found a trend of conspiracist thinking among the disenfranchised (minorities, the poor, and people without a high-school degree) and among groups fearful of losing status. (The specific demographic breakdown of flat-Earthers is hard to come by.) “Conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with threats,” the two write. “They tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

But joining a conspiracy movement is only a short-term hack for feeling safer. Once committed to the theory, people often find themselves even likelier to be socially ostracized. This can lead to a vicious cycle of alienation and acceptance, pulling a person away from society at large and further into the circle of believers. Indeed, the Kent and Amsterdam researchers noted that conspiracy theorists come to expect exclusion and learn to brace themselves for backlash.

Nate Wolfe, the former Ohio pastor, told me he hadn’t met “a single flat-Earther that hasn’t lost someone.” “There are some that have been completely disowned from their family. There are some whose best friends of 20, 30 years, 40 years won’t even talk to them,” he said.

For Robert Foertsch, a flat-Earth believer, this has made the holidays more difficult. “There’s family tension. They’re all excited about living on the globe, and I say I know that’s a lie,” he told an interviewer in 2019.

This type of alienation extends to other conspiracist groups, such as the QAnon community, the delirious right-wing movement that accuses former President Donald Trump’s foes of occult horrors. Given some adherents’ baffling insistence that Hillary Clinton has actually eaten children, QAnon can understandably put some believers at odds with family members, who are often bewildered by their loved ones’ convictions. “She’s isolated herself,” the son of one QAnon adherent told HuffPost. He’d distanced himself from his mother after shouting matches over her beliefs, among which was a theory that preached that Clinton had ripped off and worn a child’s face. “She has no relationship with me or my kids.” A Reddit board for people who have lost friends or family to the theory, called “QAnonCasualties,” had more than 232,000 members as of publication. “Brainwashing our kids,” read the subject line of one post, in which a mother alleged that her husband had begun inundating their young kids with both flat-Earth arguments and QAnon theories about child trafficking. “This is not the man I married,” she wrote.

[Read: The prophecies of Q]

Facing similar ostracization, many flat-Earthers find that online acquaintances are the closest ties they have. “A lot of them will just pull down the blinds and be like, ‘All I need is me, myself, and I, and my friends on the internet,’” Wolfe said.

It’s a disconnected way to live. Before believers started organizing meetups, the Flat Earth International Conference founder Robbie Davidson told me, the movement looked like “just some kooky, crazy conspiracy people online.” Adherents would host video hangouts, but the kinship they craved was fragmented by screens and laggy Skype connections. When “you sit down with someone, look them in the eyes, and see their mannerisms, it becomes real,” Davidson said.

Meetups, some of which sell individual tickets for hundreds of dollars, are crucial to the movement. “I always encourage people: Go to a meetup, even if you have to drive two, three hours,” Wolfe told me. It’s a plea I’ve heard across years of flat-Earth conferences.

“Especially if you have family who ridicule you,” Rick Hummer said during the 2018 FEIC conference, attendees should think of the event “as a big family reunion.”

Two women in the crowd at that event had traveled from Northern California, where their homes were in the heart of a raging wildfire. One showed me pictures that a first responder had just snapped of her neighborhood, which was reduced to ash. The other was waiting to learn whether her home was still standing. Her mother, who lived in an area evacuated because of the fires, was missing. She felt “a little guilty” coming to the FEIC as her world burned, she told me, but the flat-Earth family she met at the conference was helping her keep her mind off things.

But soon the two-day conference would end, and the pair would return to what remained of their homes, and to the families and friendships they had already feared losing to flat Earth. One of the women approached the microphone during a question-and-answer session with celebrities of the flat-Earth movement. Already that day, I had heard conference attendees discuss a conspiracy theory about the wildfires, suggesting that they were the result of government ray guns. Her question, however, had nothing to do with forest-fire plots, or even the specifics of flat-Earth theory. She wanted to know how she could “come out” as a flat-Earther on Facebook without losing friends.

When I discuss the flat-Earth movement with outsiders, many express dismay that the adherents act as if they’re living on a different planet than the rest of us. They want to know what can snap conspiracists back into our shared reality. But for many flat-Earthers, their belief endures because of the community. Flat Earth is their family, the circle of friends who stand by them. It’s the rest of the planet, they think, flat or otherwise, that has left them and their movement behind.

This article was adapted from Kelly Weill’s recent book, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything.

To paraphrase one of Barack Obama’s favorite phrases, the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. Were Vladimir Putin to offer his own rendition of these words, it would probably go something along the lines of: The arc of history is long, but it bends backwards.

This, at least, appeared to be the thrust of the Russian president’s message this week when he offered a rambling and ahistorical speech dismissing Ukraine’s right to exist and then days later announced Moscow’s intent to invade the country in order to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.” In his telling, if Ukraine had once been part of the Soviet sphere, it should be part of Russia. And just as Russia defeated the Nazi regime in Germany, it would do so again—this time in Kyiv.

Putin is not the only world leader who has harkened back to an ahistorical past to justify his decisions in the present. Right-wing nationalists around the world have sought to portray themselves as the primary defenders of a glorious past that their enemies would seek to deny or forget. By whitewashing uncomfortable legacies and seeking to cultivate a politics of historic grievance, Putin has attempted the same. But in his justification for the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s ahistoricism has bordered on delusion. Whether the Russian people or the rest of the world share in it, for now, appears to be immaterial: If there’s one audience this revisionist history is designed for, it’s Putin himself.

The evolution of Putin’s historical revisionism can be seen throughout his public statements over the years. In 2005, he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Two years later, Putin bemoaned the aftermath of the Soviet era and the pernicious, unipolar world—one led not by Moscow, but by Washington—that it had created. Last year, in perhaps the clearest articulation of his worldview, Putin said that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people—a single whole.” On Monday, he took that sentiment even further, declaring Ukraine to be “an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space” whose independence was a product not of self-determination (Ukrainians resoundingly voted in favor of independence from the Soviet Union in a 1991 referendum), but rather “a mistake.”

Unlike his 2014 address announcing Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, which was largely framed as a moment of celebration, this was an angry speech—one ostensibly designed to make Russia’s people angry too, and to justify what was to come. “In territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape,” Putin said in another address ahead of the invasion. “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”

It’s hard to know what Putin means by historical future (which is, on its face, an oxymoron), though we can take an educated guess. When Putin speaks of Russia today, he speaks of a country whose greatness is defined by its past—namely, its imperial history and its victory during World War II—which he believes must guide its present. “Putin weaponized history by giving it a function,” Orysia Lutsevych, the head of the Ukraine Forum at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told me. As far as the Russian president is concerned, “history is the fortune teller of the future.”

[Anne Applebaum: Calamity again]

Such historical narratives can be compelling, especially when they elicit the kind of nostalgic nationalism that has proved potent elsewhere, including in the United States (where Donald Trump’s Republican Party has dubbed itself the defender of “patriotic education”), India (where Hindu nationalists have appealed to pride in India’s past to undermine its secular present), and Hungary (where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán often invokes the territories the country lost after the First World War). “Putin is not the only person who is old enough to have felt that sense of deep, personalized humiliation and shame that came with the loss of power of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War,” Keir Giles, the author of ​​Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West, told me. “Anything that reasserts Russia as that great power with a greater status than others and the right to a global presence and global influence in others’ affairs will be popular in those sectors of the Russian population.”

Still, it’s difficult to gauge just how big that sector is or how pervasive the narrative has been among those who don’t share Putin’s semi-mythological view of history. A recent CNN poll, published the day before the start of Moscow’s military invasion of Ukraine, found that though roughly half of Russians support using military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, only 36 percent support doing so as a means of forcing a reunification of the two countries. The lack of support for the latter was most clearly evidenced by anti-war protests that have broken out across Russian cities.

When I spoke with Denis Volkov, the director of the Moscow-based Levada Center, Russia’s last independent pollster, in early February, he told me that though the majority of Russians fear war, few would feel comfortable voicing opposition to it if it came due to fear of reprisals. Indeed, more than 1,700 arrests have already been made. Besides, Volkov said, “public opinion will be no limit to the Russian government.”

Though Putin may feel obliged to justify his war of choice to the Russian people, who with Ukrainians will share the costs of a bloody and drawn-out conflict, his revisionist history is designed to appeal to no one more so than himself. By restoring Russia’s control over its former territories, Putin not only corrects what he sees as a historic wrong, but also cements his place in Russian history as the leader who restored the country to its rightful status.

The irony is that in his quest to make Russia great again, he risks achieving just the opposite. Invading Ukraine has already resulted in wide-ranging sanctions and has all but ensured Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Even Putin’s friends in Europe, such as Orbán and Czech President Milos Zeman, have gone out of their way to reiterate their support for Ukraine and their commitment to a joint European Union stance.

[Read: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine toppled the old world order]

“Putin’s views have become more and more extreme over time to the point where they are now more or less unrecognizable and have few points of contact with history as it’s understood in the outside world,” Giles said. “He’s operating in a different plane of reality and in a different century.”

Abe noted that had Ukraine kept some of its nuclear weapons following the breakup of the Soviet Union instead of exchanging them for a security ...

No fossil fuel is more important to understanding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than natural gas. Russia sells gas to Europe via pipelines; Europe relies on it to heat its buildings, power its industry, and generate electricity. This interdependent relationship has gone on for decades, and although it may soon come to a close, it has limited the West from imposing harsher sanctions on Russia than it might have otherwise: The sanctions were “specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue,” President Joe Biden said yesterday.

On Wednesday, I talked with Nikos Tsafos, the James R. Schlesinger Chair in Energy and Geopolitics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C. He has been thinking for a long time about the role that natural gas plays in global energy security. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Robinson Meyer: I think a lot of people have heard that natural gas has become a more important fuel over the past decade. Has the role of natural gas changed in Europe?

Nikos Tsafos: First, for Europe, natural gas has been forever interwoven with geopolitics. Western Europe started to import gas from the Soviet Union in the late ’60s. That trade between West Germany and the Soviet Union was a core element of ostpolitik, the German approach toward the Soviet Union—basically like, We fought in World War II, you occupy half of our country, let us try to, like, mend fences and get along. So from the beginning, it has an incredibly clear geopolitical overture. I’m kind of wondering if that is changing. I don’t want to overstate it, but [halting work on Nord Stream 2] is a little bit of a turning point for the Germans.

But now, in the European gas market, two more things have changed over the past 10, 15 years.

One was that Europe was, until recently, a relatively major producer of gas, from the Netherlands, the North Sea, and the U.K. So even though you were importing gas overall, you weren’t incredibly import-dependent. Go back to the early ’90s, and you’re producing like 60, 70 percent of your gas. But over the last 15 years, largely because of geology, that production base gets wiped out. So right now the European Union is, like, 95 percent dependent on imports, if you take out the U.K. So you have this massive shift in dependence: You were a big producer, but everything is now imported.

The second story is that demand has flatlined and declined. Like the peak—well, the peak was 2010, but that was a cold, cold year. The real peak was probably in the early 2000s. So that’s also a different story than the U.S. Here, we talk about coal-to-gas switching, and gas consumption is through the roof. In Europe, if you look overall, the system is using as much gas as it was 15, 20 years ago, depending on how you do the math. So the security perspective is, I’m not consuming more gas, but I’m importing more because my production is declining.

And because of the declining production of Europe, but also because of a number of shocks you had in 2006—when the Russians and the Ukrainians fought for the first time over contract terms—you also have a much greater awareness of security of supply. It becomes part of an overall [strategy]—let’s overhaul the domestic market, give choice to consumers, unbundle the pipelines from the producers, bring competition, build infrastructure, make sure the infrastructure can be used. But that is coming together while Europe is becoming much, much less self-sufficient in natural gas.

Meyer: There have been some apocalyptic scenarios shared around how Russia could respond to sanctions. What worries you and what do you think is likely?

Tsafos: Look, I have sort of crystallized my thinking around two extremes. There is a scenario where shit happens in Ukraine and gas gets disrupted.

Meyer: You mean there’s a pipeline issue, like a mechanical failure, that’s not a response to sanctions.

Tsafos: Exactly. Someone blows it up by accident, or someone blows it up and blames the other side. Who knows? You don’t need too much imagination to assume that if a major conflict happens in and around Ukraine, like, the flow of gas could be interrupted through Ukraine.

But the role of Ukraine is smaller today than it was in the late ’90s. There was a time when 90 percent of the gas that comes from Russia to Europe went through Ukraine. Now it’s less than a quarter. So all the stuff people say, like “Nord Stream 2 is going to kill Ukraine and [gas] transit,” like, yes, Nord Stream 2 is the final nail in the coffin of a Ukrainian transit story that has been in demise for 25 years. So if you talk about that scenario, you ask, “Okay, now who gets gas from Ukraine?” It’s Ukraine, it’s Slovakia. It’s Austria and Italy. You do the math and you realize the Italians, actually, are quite okay because they have a strategic stockpile—they’re the only country in Europe that has a serious strategic gas stock—and the other countries can probably make do

So that’s one extreme. The other extreme is that we go to zero in the pipelines from Russia.

Meyer: That’s zero in the gas Russia is sending over to Northern and Western Europe?

Tsafos: Yes, zero. So you ask yourself, How do you get to zero? There are maybe three ways of getting there. One is the Europeans do it, one is the Russians do it, and the last is the Russians do it by retaliation. I don’t find any of those to be super compelling.

So if the Europeans do it … it’s like why would you, right? It’s a stupid thing. It hurts you way more than it hurts them, because they don’t make that much money selling gas. They make way more money selling oil. And they have $640 billion in reserves, so they can live without the cash for a few months. That’s why the U.S. has never been able to get the Europeans on board with sanctions that affect existing flows from Russia.

Would the Russians do it preemptively? That also is kind of stupid, right? Because what’s the fastest way to get all of Europe riled up? I like to say, if the Russians have cut off the gas, then we’re probably in some form of World War III, and then that’s the least of your problems. It’s essentially an act of war toward Germany, Italy, Turkey, and, like, everyone in Europe.

As a result of that, even if you assume really high sanctions—which I don’t think the West is going to do, because the Europeans won’t let the Americans do it—it’s such a massive response that I think it’s insulated. It’s just too big.

Meyer: You’re describing a funny tension here, which is, natural gas is very strategically important but relatively not financially important. Is the oil market any different?

Tsafos: Yeah, the oil market is different because the oil market is global, so you can always reroute things. Gas is also a fuel used much more for space heating, and space heating is a totally different thing than driving a car. If you don’t drive the car, it’s annoying, but you probably do one trip instead of three, you pair your supermarket trip with your work trip, and you can make do. And if you don’t drive your car, no one dies, right? But if you don’t have heat in the middle of the winter, people die.

And gas is different in that it’s not as fungible as oil. You can’t move it around the world as easily, so it’s much harder to plug a hole. All those things make [gas] rather different.

Meyer: What role has climate policy played in Europe’s shifting gas usage?

Tsafos: Not a huge amount. Can I do some math that shows you there was some impact? Sure. But to give you a sense, if Germany had never shut down a nuclear-power plant, for instance, and had used all that nuclear power to eliminate gas from the power sector, the impact would be about 4 percent on European gas demand. You can go into the weeds of individual markets, but overall it hasn’t affected the trajectory of demand.

What it has affected is that Europe, like the U.S., has no medium-term climate strategy. The Europeans have this thing where they tell everyone that by 2050, we don’t want to use gas. Well, what happens until then?

I remember asking European officials this 10 years ago. And they were like, “Oh, we want to diversify our sources of energy and we want to decarbonize.” But hold on a minute. Diversification is accomplished by someone making an investment to bring you gas. Decarbonization is accomplished by you not consuming this gas. Do you not see, like, a tension in those two things? And they’re like, “Yeah, but, like, we want them both.” So something has to break somewhere.

Meyer: Is Europe constrained by these two goals? Is its desire to decarbonize as quickly as possible preventing it from confronting the large role that hydrocarbons from Russia play in its current energy system?

Tsafos: If I’m intellectually honest, I’ll say that Europe has done an incredible job diversifying its system. Their re-gasification capacity to import LNG [liquified natural gas] has tripled. They’ve built a bunch of LNG import terminals. This whole claim that Europe should’ve signed up for U.S. LNG—it’s like, who do you think made U.S. LNG possible? It was Europeans! This idea that Europeans have been sitting and doing nothing is kind of rubbish. I don’t think you can say that the European climate push has come at the expense of the gas market.

What is challenging for them is this time element. A long-term contract for gas has to become a short-term contract at some point for it to work with decarbonization.

Meyer: What is animating the market today? Is it something we haven’t discussed?

Tsafos: It is. If I look at European markets, all the stuff that we’re talking about—Ukraine, climate, all this—it’s coming at the backdrop of insanely high prices.

My sense is the market just broke. The underlying driver of this is insufficient gas storage. Last summer, we didn’t refill storage in Europe very quickly, and people just panicked. They panicked because they thought they were not going to make it through the winter. Now, at no point has there been an actual physical shortage of gas. It’s all been forecasts of a shortage. And at some point the market broke, because once prices got crazy, nobody wanted to buy gas in July to store until December, when gas is at its highest prices ever.

To give you a sense of the math, the record-high price for gas in the Netherlands before last year was 35 euros per megawatt. That was the highest price ever. We have been over 35 euros every single day since July.

Now people are talking about Ukraine and are like, “Oh, gas is at 80 euros per megawatt.” But 80 euros per megawatt is an insane number. It’s the equivalent of about $146 a barrel. When oil went to $146 for one day in 2008, the whole world collapsed, like Oh my God, we’re all going to die. We’re processing this crisis in Ukraine against a backdrop of insanely high prices. Which is why the Europeans are like, Man, the prices are whatever. We’re already experiencing the biggest energy shock ever. We’ve adjusted to this for the past six months.

Meyer: Is there a particular aspect of the Ukraine story for people to watch across the whole energy-security space?

Tsafos: There’s two macro stories that I always go back to. One, I worry that there is a narrative of Look how stupid Europe is; they messed up the transition. Why is this happening to them? We should not make the same mistakes. I don’t think it’s true in any way. I think there’s a danger of interpreting this crisis as an indictment of the energy transition, when it’s in no way an indictment of the energy transition.

The second story is that, you know, energy security is hard. I write a lot about Europe on Twitter, and people are like, “Oh, we don’t have this problem in Texas.” And it’s like … were you not alive last year?

So I would love for some general humility that this is a complicated system. It’s tough. It breaks. We just have to keep at it. And you cannot, at any given time, totally upend everything. I see arguments like, “Oh, once we get out of hydrocarbons, this stuff wouldn’t happen.” But when I write about, like, seasonal balancing—that stuff is not going to go away. People say, “We’ll use heat pumps,” but how are you going to balance seasonally in the electricity system? “We’ll use hydrogen.” Okay, but how are you going to balance the hydrogen system?

I get incredibly annoyed when people say we’re in a disorderly transition, because disorder as compared to what order? Order like … the 1970s? It’s just a messy system. It was messy when it was all hydrocarbon-based and it will be messy when it’s all renewable-based. We’re not going from hell to heaven here. We’re just trying to reduce carbon, and that’s tough enough.

Russian President Vladimir Putin pines for the old Russian empire and takes Ukraine’s independence as a personal affront. But the invasion of Ukraine is not a limited regional dispute between neighbors. Putin is also motivated by a deep opposition to democracy more broadly. That is why he has waged a long-running shadow war to destabilize free societies and discredit democratic institutions in the United States and around the world. Ukraine is one flash point in a larger global struggle between democracy and autocracy—one that stretches from the steppes of Eastern Europe to the waters of the Indo-Pacific to the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

The scope of that wider struggle was on vivid display on February 4. In Beijing, the world’s two most powerful autocrats—Putin and China’s Xi Jinping—cemented their deepening alliance. In the United States, where American leaders should have been unified in championing democracy against these aggressive adversaries, the opposite happened: The Republican National Committee formally declared the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, to be “legitimate political discourse.”

Much has been said about the assault on American democracy by a radicalized Republican Party, but its international consequences have not gotten the attention they deserve. Republican leaders are abandoning core tenets of American democracy even as the stakes in the global contest between democracy and autocracy are clearer and higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War. They are defending coup-plotters and curbing voting rights while Russia tries to crush Ukraine’s fragile democracy and China menaces not only Taiwan but democracies everywhere, from Australia to Lithuania.

Putin is not just a garden-variety nationalist; he is a paranoid, chronically underestimated, implacable enemy of democracy. And while Russia poses an immediate threat to peace in Europe and to the integrity of our elections at home, it is Xi’s China that represents the greatest long-term challenge to the future of democracy. The United States faces a serious and sustained competition with China that may shape the rest of the 21st century as profoundly as our Cold War with the Soviet Union defined the latter part of the 20th century. The world is very different than it was during the Cold War, and China is bigger, richer, and more integrated into the global economy than the Soviet Union ever was. But the competition with China is a similarly multidimensional struggle that is economic, cultural, technological, diplomatic, military, and ideological all at the same time. That means the U.S. will have to invest and compete across all these dimensions—while bolstering democracy at home and abroad.

[Anne Applebaum: Calamity again]

Deterring Russia and competing with China are different challenges, and each requires its own strategy, but strengthening American democracy is crucial to both missions. Putin and Xi understand that the promise of democracy—freedom, rule of law, human rights, self-determination—remains powerful enough to capture the imaginations of people everywhere and poses a threat to their regimes’ global ambitions as well as their grip on power at home. That’s why they are determined to discredit or co-opt the idea of democracy, including by promoting divisions and dysfunction in democratic societies like the United States, and by bragging about the ability of their autocracies to deliver better results. America and our allies should be working just as hard to prove them wrong. We need a strong democracy in the United States to win the global argument with autocracy. A strong democracy is also a precondition to mobilizing the resources necessary to deter aggression and compete economically and militarily. By contrast, a weak and fractured democracy at home will only embolden our adversaries and invite further aggression.

For all these reasons, the Republican Party is playing right into Putin’s and Xi’s hands. Trump has always had a personal attachment to Putin, which we don’t need to belabor here, and a long-standing admiration for dictators and disdain for democracy—going all the way back to his admiration for the brutal Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square decades ago. It was dismaying but not surprising that Trump praised Putin’s move to recognize and occupy separatist enclaves in Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.” That’s what we have come to expect from Trump. But even Republican leaders who still take a Reaganesque view of America’s role in the world and talk a good game about deterring Russia and competing with China are undercutting those goals by aiding and abetting Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions.

This is not just another political dispute; it’s a five-alarm national-security crisis. The hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi.

The failure by Republican leaders to defend American democracy is all the more tragic because many of them know better. Some may be genuinely attracted to authoritarianism and disdainful of pluralism and equality. Many others are making a Faustian bargain to preserve their own power at the expense of fundamental democratic norms and institutions—a move as cynical as it is short-sighted.

Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared in a major speech about China in July 2020 that “free nations have to work to defend freedom.” Yet a week after Joe Biden’s victory in a free and fair election that November, Pompeo said, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” Whether or not he believed that statement doesn’t matter. Coming from the secretary of state standing at the State Department podium, it was a performance of authoritarian mendacity that would have made North Korean propagandists blush.

[Read: Why Hillary Clinton fears the GOP’s next moves]

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri rails often against China and has said the United States should “lead the free world” to confront a Chinese Communist Party that is “a menace to all free peoples.” Yet Hawley led the effort in Congress to overturn the 2020 election, and the image of his raised fist saluting insurrectionists on January 6 is an indelible memory of that dark day for American democracy. His reelection campaign is now selling coffee mugs with the photo for $20.

Senator Marco Rubio, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged his colleagues to stand up to China and “prove our democracy can work again, our system of government can function. That it can solve big problems in big ways.” Yet he helped lead a filibuster to defeat the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would have strengthened a cornerstone of American democracy, and also blocked a bipartisan commission from investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Some members of the GOP are still capable of courage. Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois are braving the ire of their party to serve on the House committee investigating January 6. Bipartisan efforts are under way to reform the Electoral Count Act and make overturning future elections, the way Trump tried to do in 2020, more difficult. Republican senators are also working with Democrats to prepare crippling sanctions in response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. Some Republicans have even woken up to the fact that competing with China requires moving past the conservative economic orthodoxy that for decades starved the United States of needed public investments in innovation, infrastructure, and industrial capacity. Nearly 20 Senate Republicans supported both the $1.2 trillion infrastructure legislation that Biden signed into law in November and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which would help America compete with China by investing billions in research, innovation, and advanced manufacturing, including the semiconductors that are in such short supply. (The House is now focused on passing its own version of this legislation, and the president is eager to sign a bill.)

Getty; Paul Spella / The Atlantic

But these bright spots are the exceptions that prove the rule. A solid majority of Republicans in both houses of Congress rejected the infrastructure legislation, and the party remains in lockstep opposition to important economic measures that would help America compete with China, including on clean energy and education. Those Republican leaders promising tough sanctions on Putin’s economy and inner circle seem helpless to tamp down the pro-Russian sentiment in their party ignited by Trump, fanned on a daily basis by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and now embraced by a growing number of GOP members and candidates—as well as the continuing right-wing love affair with Hungary’s would-be autocrat, Viktor Orbán.

Cheney and Kinzinger notwithstanding, Republicans are largely going along with the Trump-led attack on American democratic institutions and legitimacy at precisely the time when we need to set an example for the world. Recall that on January 6, nearly 150 Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the presidential election just hours after the sacking of the Capitol.

One of the ringleaders of the effort to challenge the election results, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, later said what was obvious to everyone who watched the assault on the Capitol that day: It was a “violent terrorist attack.” That was enough to make him an apostate in Trump’s Republican Party, and Cruz had to beat an embarrassing on-air retreat on Fox. To regain his standing, he started pushing a bizarre and baseless conspiracy theory that the insurrection may have actually been a “false flag” operation planned by the FBI. It was not.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The contested significance of January 6]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may still be willing to call January 6 a violent insurrection, but he blocked a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate it. More broadly, McConnell and his allies have pushed power politics to the breaking point in a way that has shredded the norms and trust that democracies need to function—most infamously with their abuse of the filibuster and preventing President Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy. Under McConnell’s leadership, every single Republican in the Senate—every one—continues to block legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, while Republican-led states pass ever more draconian restrictions on voting that disproportionately affect people of color and poor people. Political scientists say that while these legislative tactics may lack the dramatic images of an insurrection or a coup, their effect on democracy can be devastating. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in these pages last summer, “When contemporary democracies die, they usually do so via constitutional hardball.”

Levistsky and Ziblatt, the authors of the influential book How Democracies Die, say things have gotten much worse for American democracy in just the past few years. Whereas they previously saw the Republican Party as “abdicating its role as democratic gatekeeper” but “did not consider the GOP to be an antidemocratic party,” now they see “the bulk of the Republican Party is behaving in an antidemocratic manner,” including rejecting basic principles such as unambiguously accepting electoral defeat and condemning violence and extremist groups. Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, “Unless and until the GOP recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk.” For Putin and Xi, it’s a dream come true.

Sometimes it seems as if Liz Cheney is the only prominent Republican able to connect the dots between these domestic challenges and our international standing. “Attacks against our democratic process and the rule of law empower our adversaries and feed communist propaganda that American democracy is a failure,” she noted in a speech last year.

This is not a new insight. During the Cold War, prominent anti-communists supported the civil-rights movement because, as Harry Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, discrimination and segregation threatened “the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.” The Justice Department’s amicus brief in Brown v. Board of Education argued that “racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.” And Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “Our American system, like all others, is on trial both at home and abroad … The extent to which we maintain the spirit of our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile.”

It’s still true today. Chinese and Russian propagandists jump at every opportunity to denigrate American-style democracy as leading not to freedom and opportunity but to gridlock, instability, and ultimately national decline. By contrast, they claim that their authoritarian systems—which they describe as the “true” democracies—produce better results. For example, to counter Biden’s Summit for Democracy in December, the Chinese Foreign Ministry put out a report that promised to “expose the deficiencies and abuse of democracy in the US,” and specifically highlighted the January 6 insurrection. “The refusal of some US politicians to recognize the election results and their supporters’ subsequent violent storming of the Capitol building have severely undercut the credibility of democracy in the US,” it crowed. The Foreign Ministry also published a white paper titled “China: Democracy That Works.” And the Chinese and Russian ambassadors published a joint op-ed assuring the world, “There is no need to worry about democracy in Russia and China,” while warning that “certain foreign governments better think about themselves and what is going on in their homes.”

[Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: The biggest threat to democracy is the GOP stealing the next election]

The autocrats know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function, or if authoritarianism does indeed produce better results. This is more than a popularity contest. It’s a debate that could well determine whether Ukrainians, Poles, and Hungarians save their fragile democracies or slip into an authoritarian sphere of influence dominated by the Kremlin. It could lead countries across Asia and Africa to reject China’s financial coercion and maintain control of their resources and destiny. Or it could result in Beijing remaking the global order to its own design, writing rules of the road that suit its ambitions for new technologies like artificial intelligence and erasing universal human rights long enshrined in international law.

These are the stakes of the argument between democracy and autocracy. And when Republicans undermine American democratic institutions and trash our democratic norms, they make it harder to win that argument. They make it harder for the United States to encourage other countries to respect the rule of law, political pluralism, and the peaceful transfer of power. Those values should be among America’s most potent assets, inspiring people all over the world and offering a stark contrast with authoritarians whose power depends on squashing dissent and denying human rights. Instead, America has shown the world the ugly sneers of the insurrectionist and the conspiracy theorist.

On a practical level, a strong democracy at home is also necessary for us to mobilize the resources and sense of national mission needed to compete with a rival that’s bigger and richer than any we’ve ever faced. Xi doesn’t need to painstakingly cobble together legislative coalitions to make investments in infrastructure and innovation, or to reorient his military around new weapons systems—he just does it by fiat. Biden’s job as the leader of a raucous, restless democracy is much harder. But the United States must find a way to shake off its paralysis and make those investments. We can’t afford for our political system to be hopelessly polarized, poisoned by conspiracy theories, weakened by disinformation, or left open to interference from foreign rivals.

Only with a healthier politics, strong democratic institutions, and some measure of national unity will we be able to deliver the results we need to compete. That’s the only way we’ll be able to meaningfully reduce the inequality that saps our cohesion or build the resiliency to withstand the effects of climate change or future pandemics. A well-functioning democracy that can balance interests and make hard choices is necessary to do the work of refocusing our military budget and posture away from the global War on Terror to the very different contests unfolding in the seas and skies of the Indo-Pacific, and in outer space and cyberspace. To stay strong in the world, the United States must be able to negotiate—and ratify—treaties, either to cement new alliances or defuse threats like the Iranian nuclear program. Right now, with one major party devoted to division, not unity, more focused on stoking the culture war than strengthening national security, none of this looks likely anytime soon.

Over the years, Republicans have often invoked Ronald Reagan’s Cold War dictum “Weakness only invites aggression”—usually to argue for less diplomacy, bigger defense budgets, and more military intervention. Yet they seem blind to how their attacks on American democracy make our country look to our adversaries.

Getty; Paul Spella / The Atlantic

Whether Putin continues testing NATO’s resolve, and whether the trajectory of our competition with China veers toward conflict, will in part be driven by Russian and Chinese perceptions of America’s decline or resilience. When our democracy looks weak, our country looks weak, and as Reagan said, that only invites aggression.

At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, Chinese leaders watched carefully as the financial crisis devastated the U.S. economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drained American resources and resolve. For decades, Chinese foreign policy had been constrained by Deng Xiaoping’s direction to “hide capabilities and bide time,” waiting for the “international balance of power” to shift toward China and away from the United States. With America on its heels, President Hu Jintao announced in 2009 that China was no longer content to hide and bide but now would aim to “actively accomplish” its goals. It started making more aggressive moves in the region, testing how hard it could push—accelerating a naval buildup and asserting claims to wide swaths of water, islands, and energy reserves in the South and East China Seas. At a 2010 regional summit in Vietnam that I attended as secretary of state, we organized many of China’s neighbors to stand up to Beijing and insist on freedom of navigation in the contested waterways. The Chinese foreign minister was livid and warned his counterparts: “China is a big country. Bigger than any other countries here.” At the time, it seemed like the foreign minister was venting the frustration of an aspiring regional hegemon that had underestimated the staying power of the United States and pushed too far too fast. Today, the minister’s warning reads as a precursor of the “wolf-warrior diplomacy” that China now uses to intimidate its neighbors.

[Anne Applebaum: The bad guys are winning]

China’s belligerence in the region and beyond has accelerated greatly under Xi, along with a lurch toward tighter authoritarian control and persecution at home. Xi’s aggression not only reflects his personal ambition, but also stems from a perception of accelerating U.S. decline. Rush Doshi, a scholar who has closely studied decades’ worth of Chinese Communist Party documents and pronouncements and now serves on Biden’s National Security Council, has observed that the combination of Brexit, Trump, and the coronavirus pandemic convinced Chinese leaders that the time was right to challenge the U.S.-led international order like never before. Doshi argues in his book, The Long Game, that the January 6 insurrection helped convince Xi that, as he put it shortly afterward, “time and momentum are on our side.” The sack of the Capitol, and the democratic disarray it represented, reinforced the notion of a “period of historical opportunity” for China to seize the mantle of global leadership.

After the election, when Trump was whipping up his followers to reject the results and oppose the peaceful transfer of power, a senior Republican official explained to The Washington Post why party leaders were doing nothing to stop him: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” With the United States competing against a powerful adversary adept at playing the long game, Americans cannot afford to be so painfully short-sighted.

Vigorous debates and hard-fought campaigns are healthy, but building a new bipartisan consensus around protecting our democracy is a national-security imperative. We must put patriotism before politics. When I was secretary of state, people around the world asked me how I could serve with President Obama after the long, difficult campaign we had waged against each other for the 2008 Democratic nomination. People were especially surprised in countries where losing an election might lead to exile or prison, not a seat in the Cabinet. My answer was simple: The good of our democracy comes first.

Republican leaders who care about democracy and are serious about competing with China and deterring Russia must stand up to Trump, stop promoting the Big Lie about the 2020 election, and embrace efforts to provide accountability for January 6. They should start taking domestic white-nationalist terrorism as seriously as they do international violent extremism, abandon their war on voting rights, and pass crucial reforms they have so far opposed, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. State and local Republican officeholders responsible for administering elections, from secretaries of state to members of county canvassing boards, will have to steel themselves against the mounting pressure they are already facing from Trump and his allies. Republican donors who don’t want to live in a banana republic should put their mouth where their money is and declare that they’ll only contribute to candidates who support democracy.

Ultimately, it’s voters—all of us, really—who must be democracy’s last line of defense. This isn’t just about the next presidential election. Democracy will be on the ballot this year as well, in state, local, and congressional races across the country. If Americans fail to rise to this challenge, and our democracy continues to come apart at the seams, the consequences will be felt far beyond our own borders. We must come together to strengthen our institutions, protect our elections from foreign interference, and defend civil rights for all. That will send a powerful message that will resonate not just in Washington but in Moscow and Beijing.

Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine confronts President Joe Biden with complex challenges at a time when he is already beleaguered—but it also presents him with an opportunity for a reset on the core foreign-policy promise he made to voters during his 2020 campaign.

As a candidate, Biden offered voters not so much a change in specific international policies as an alternative approach to interacting with other nations. In managing America’s foreign policy, Biden pledged to be steady and stable, competent and collaborative. He promised Americans that working with allies would produce better outcomes on global challenges, and prove that democracies were capable of holding their own against ascendant autocracies. And he presented all of that as a stark contrast to the unilateralism, impulsiveness, and frequent chaos of Donald Trump’s relations with the world.

But through his first year in office, Biden’s record on delivering that change was, at best, mixed; his moves to revitalize international organizations and alliances were overshadowed by tension and disillusionment at home and abroad over his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Discontent over Afghanistan sent Biden’s approval for handling foreign affairs tumbling, and served as an early trigger in the broader decline of his approval rating, from which he still hasn’t recovered.

[Franklin Foer: How far will Biden go to stop Putin?]

Now in the Ukraine crisis, a wide variety of foreign-policy experts agree, the Biden on display looks more like the version he promised 2020 voters: a senior statesman coordinating a unified Western response against an autocratic threat to the global order.

“We've been transparent with the world,” Biden said this afternoon in remarks announcing a new round of sanctions against Russia. “We've shared declassified evidence about Russia's plans and cyberattacks and false pretext so that there could be no confusion or cover up about what Putin was doing. Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war, and now he and his country will bear the consequences.”

Peter Feaver, a public-policy and political-science professor at Duke University who served as a special advisor on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, thinks Biden has produced a more coherent and effective allied response than Barack Obama did when Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, or than Trump might have done in this circumstance. Even with some legitimate Republican criticisms, like that against Biden’s resistance to earlier sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, “he’s done better given the hand that he was dealt” than either of those predecessors, Feaver says.

Biden’s success at corralling America’s allies for sanctions against Vladimir Putin didn’t stop the Russian leader from fully invading Ukraine. And it may also prove insufficient to erase the American public’s doubts about Biden’s foreign-policy performance that the Afghanistan withdrawal created. But it has demonstrated that even in a more fractured and fractious world, the U.S. can still play a unique role in convening a global response to a major international challenge—and that Biden personally can “sit at the head of the table,” as he’s put it.

“Clearly the U.S. drove this whole policy, and clearly the U.S. was a true leader,” said Ivo Daalder, Obama’s U.S. ambassador to NATO, now the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “If there’s one issue where Biden and Trump were diametrically opposite to each other, it’s that Biden fundamentally understood the importance of allies and Trump denigrated the importance of allies. There is no way that Donald Trump, [his Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo, or anyone else would be able to lead the alliance to the place they are now.”

The political threats to Biden from the invasion are not difficult to identify. Energy prices are rising at a time when inflation already dominates America’s economic concerns. The broadcast images of Russian attacks inside Ukraine show the real-time demise of a democracy in vivid and poignant terms. The GOP has been divided, with Trump, and like-minded conservative commentators such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson, essentially excusing Putin’s attack. But most Republicans have quickly added the invasion to their preexisting case against Biden: They are insisting that Putin felt emboldened both by Biden’s “weakness” and that the U.S. must ramp up domestic oil and gas production, which Biden has taken some steps to limit, to reduce Putin’s leverage in global energy markets.

Yet, even with all these obvious risks, it’s possible that Putin’s aggression and Biden’s effective management of the Western alliance have nonetheless created a proof-of-concept moment for the president’s core foreign-policy argument: that, by restoring cooperation with traditional U.S. allies, he can produce relatively better outcomes for American interests and global stability than Trump could.

“The United States is not doing this alone,” Biden declared this afternoon. “For months we have been building a coalition of partners representing well more than half of the global economy … to amplify the joint impact of our response.”

After Trump’s frequent belittling of international organizations, Biden from the outset displayed renewed respect for NATO, the European Union, the G7, and the United Nations. Biden rejoined the Paris climate accord, and his administration worked hard to coordinate a global response to the coronavirus pandemic. And at every opportunity, he spoke the language of global cooperation common for presidents from both parties since the 1930s—at least until Trump. Biden offered something close to a mission statement for his vision of foreign affairs in his first speech on his first trip to meet with the G7 and NATO members last June: “At every point along the way, we are going to make it clear that the United States is back and the democracies of the world are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges and issues that matter most to our future.”

But that soaring rhetoric was undermined by last summer’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The tumultuous process appeared neither competent nor collaborative. As Daalder noted, Afghanistan “undermined” both of Biden’s core contrasts with Trump: his promise to provide a steadier hand and his pledge to work more closely with allies. Biden “said a competent foreign policy is a foreign policy that works together with allies and friends and … for reasons that history at some point will explain, we just didn’t do a very good job on that when it came to Afghanistan.”

[Read: The betrayal]

Allies complained not only about the substance of Biden’s decision, but about the insular process by which it was reached. Biden and his team seemed to hold the view that “they were going to do what they were going to do and the allies were not going to like it, so why spend a lot of time on it?” James Steinberg, a former deputy secretary of state for Obama, told me.

But the damage was done. “Even the Brits and others who had been with us all along … felt that this decision had been made in Washington without sufficient consultation with them and over their warnings that bad things might happen,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security and former chief foreign-policy adviser to John McCain, told me. Although the withdrawal fulfilled an agreement that Trump had negotiated with the Taliban, Biden’s unblinking determination to press forward despite warnings from inside and outside the administration caused friends and critics alike to view him as headstrong and impulsive—exactly the qualities he criticized in Trump.

Then the Biden administration roiled the waters again by announcing a deal (in partnership with Britain) to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia that supplanted that country’s previous agreement to buy conventional subs from France. Biden later apologized to French President Emmanuel Macron, but the incident reinforced a sense that his administration’s actions were diverging from its words about global cooperation.

Now, though, Biden and his team, Steinberg noted, have kept America’s allies moving toward the common destination of signaling a high price to Putin without micromanaging each step of how they get there. Rather than becoming offended, Biden has recognized that European leaders such as Macron and the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, have their own reasons to pursue direct conversations with Putin and their own timetables in taking steps such as Germany’s recent suspension of its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia. The Biden administration “gave them room to run,” Steinberg said, “and it paid off at the end of the day because there is strong alliance solidarity.”

Republicans are, so far, split. Trump, Carlson, and the Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance have suggested that the U.S. has no stake in this fight, while others, such as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, say that Biden’s sanctions are too modest and too slow.

But foreign-policy experts generally agree that no one has put forward any alternative approaches that offer a realistic prospect of fundamentally changing Putin’s calculus about Ukraine—short of a full-scale deployment of NATO forces to defend it, an idea that few anywhere have suggested.

[Anne Applebaum: Calamity again]

Some conservatives, such as commentators Rich Lowry and Hugh Hewitt, have argued that Trump’s mere presence in the White House would have deterred Putin from acting—in Lowry’s eyes because the Russian leader would have been uncertain about how the U.S. might react. Trump made a similar claim this week during his interview on a conservative podcast.

But those assertions ignore the actual signals Trump sent to Putin while in office, particularly on Ukraine. Trump made clear how little he valued Ukraine’s independence when he delayed military aid to pressure its government into manufacturing dirt on Biden—the scheme that prompted his first impeachment.

Against the backdrop of such behavior, Steinberg said, although fully deciphering Putin’s plan is impossible from the outside, his thinking more likely flowed in the opposite direction than Trump and his defenders are suggesting.

While Trump was in office, Steinberg argued, Putin probably felt that America might simply accede to his goal of blocking the further integration of Ukraine into the West. With Biden, that possibility vanished. “Once Trump lost and [Putin] realized he couldn’t get it handed on a platter, he had to use more aggressive means.”

Pollsters agree that the chaotic Afghanistan exit took a measurable bite from Biden’s public standing. It damaged not only his approval rating on foreign policy (which started out as one of his best attributes but has fallen to about 40 percent or less in multiple recent national surveys), but also broader assessments of his competence and leadership. Jeremy Rosner, a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council who is now a Democratic pollster focusing on foreign-policy attitudes, says that Biden’s performance during the Ukraine crisis offers him only limited opportunities to repair the damage to his image, even though he’s played the West’s limited hand about as well as he could. “There’s an asymmetry in how foreign policy works these days for presidents,” Rosner told me. “If you mess it up, it can really hurt you; if you do well at it, there’s not much upside.”

Also limiting the potential upside for Biden, Rosner said, is the reality that even the strong Western response cannot prevent ugly developments in Ukraine. “This could help a little bit, but there’s probably not going to be any sort of big bump, especially because what’s happening on the ground is already—and is likely to become even more—gruesome,” he said.

Sustaining a solid front against Putin over Ukraine will grow more difficult as time passes. U.S. consumers will likely pay more for gasoline, at least temporarily, and the consequences for energy availability and supply will be far greater in Europe, which is heavily reliant on Russian natural gas. “It’s quite possible that’s Putin’s strategy here—feeling he can weather this for a period of time and then sanctions fatigue will set in,” Steinberg said. Still, most experts agree that the brazenness and scale of Putin’s attack will make it easier to sustain public support for tough steps, at least at the outset.

The outcome in Ukraine isn’t likely to ever provide Biden with what Feaver calls a “Desert Storm” moment of clear victory that dramatically lifts his public standing; if anything, the images from the country are likely to get worse, not better, in the days and weeks ahead. Inexorably, at each stage of this confrontation, critics will also demand tougher sanctions than the allies have offered. But Daalder believes that the Ukraine crisis may prove a “transformative moment” that seals a broad international commitment to confronting Putin through the modern equivalent of the U.S.-led policy of “containment” against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Reflecting that possibility, Biden’s remarks today emphasized, to a striking extent, military steps to deter any further Russian aggression. Putin may seize Ukraine, but his victory could isolate him from the world more than ever. Ukraine’s agony is a terrible crucible, but it may help Biden forge stronger bonds among the world’s democracies—and in the process resolve some of the doubts he’s opened about his own capacity to lead them.

As Russian forces launched several missiles at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv the night of Feb. 23, thousands of citizens hunkered down in subway stations. On Thursday Feb. 24, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko imposed a curfew and halted public transit so that subway stations could be used as round-the-clock shelters.

As it turns out, Kiyv’s metro system was built to serve this very purpose. Completed in the 1960s when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, it includes stations built deep underground, designed to double as bomb shelters in the event of an enemy attack. Kyiv’s Arsenalna station is considered to be the deepest in the world, located 346 ft (105.5 m) below ground.

Air raid sirens could be heard throughout the city in the early hours of Thursday, a warning for people to seek shelter. In addition to the subways, people are hiding out in the basements, places of worship, and other designated bomb shelters.

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