In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”

But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”

At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.

Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Anne Applebaum on kleptocrats and the United States’ dirty-money problem]

After all, it had happened before. Following the cataclysm of 1939–45, Europeans had indeed collectively abandoned wars of imperial, territorial conquest. They stopped dreaming of eliminating one another. Instead, the continent that had been the source of the two worst wars the world had ever known created the European Union, an organization designed to find negotiated solutions to conflicts and promote cooperation, commerce, and trade. Because of Europe’s metamorphosis—and especially because of the extraordinary transformation of Germany from a Nazi dictatorship into the engine of the continent’s integration and prosperity—Europeans and Americans alike believed that they had created a set of rules that would preserve peace not only on their own continents, but eventually in the whole world.

This liberal world order relied on the mantra of “Never again.” Never again would there be genocide. Never again would large nations erase smaller nations from the map. Never again would we be taken in by dictators who used the language of mass murder. At least in Europe, we would know how to react when we heard it.

But while we were happily living under the illusion that “Never again” meant something real, the leaders of Russia, owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to Western capitalism. For a long time—too long—the custodians of the liberal world order refused to understand these changes. They looked away when Russia “pacified” Chechnya by murdering tens of thousands of people. When Russia bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided that that wasn’t their problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, they found reasons not to worry. Surely Putin would be satisfied by the annexation of Crimea. When Russia invaded Ukraine the second time, occupying part of the Donbas, they were sure he would be sensible enough to stop.

Even when the Russians, having grown rich on the kleptocracy we facilitated, bought Western politicians, funded far-right extremist movements, and ran disinformation campaigns during American and European democratic elections, the leaders of America and Europe still refused to take them seriously. It was just some posts on Facebook; so what? We didn’t believe that we were at war with Russia. We believed, instead, that we were safe and free, protected by treaties, by border guarantees, and by the norms and rules of the liberal world order.

With the third, more brutal invasion of Ukraine, the vacuity of those beliefs was revealed. The Russian president openly denied the existence of a legitimate Ukrainian state: “Russians and Ukrainians,” he said, “were one people—a single whole.” His army targeted civilians, hospitals, and schools. His policies aimed to create refugees so as to destabilize Western Europe. “Never again” was exposed as an empty slogan while a genocidal plan took shape in front of our eyes, right along the European Union’s eastern border. Other autocracies watched to see what we would do about it, for Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets its neighbors’ territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no qualms about the use of mass violence. North Korea can attack South Korea at any time, and has nuclear weapons that can hit Japan. China seeks to eliminate the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group, and has imperial designs on Taiwan.

[From the December 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on how the autocrats are winning]

We can’t turn the clock back to 1994, to see what would have happened had we heeded Lennart Meri’s warning. But we can face the future with honesty. We can name the challenges and prepare to meet them.

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

This fight is not theoretical. It requires armies, strategies, weapons, and long-term plans. It requires much closer allied cooperation, not only in Europe but in the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. NATO can no longer operate as if it might someday be required to defend itself; it needs to start operating as it did during the Cold War, on the assumption that an invasion could happen at any time. Germany’s decision to raise defense spending by 100 billion euros is a good start; so is Denmark’s declaration that it too will boost defense spending. But deeper military and intelligence coordination might require new institutions—perhaps a voluntary European Legion, connected to the European Union, or a Baltic alliance that includes Sweden and Finland—and different thinking about where and how we invest in European and Pacific defense.

If we don’t have any means to deliver our messages to the autocratic world, then no one will hear them. Much as we assembled the Department of Homeland Security out of disparate agencies after 9/11, we now need to pull together the disparate parts of the U.S. government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information and to stop autocracies from distorting that knowledge. Why haven’t we built a Russian-language television station to compete with Putin’s propaganda? Why can’t we produce more programming in Mandarin—or Uyghur? Our foreign-language broadcasters—Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí in Cuba—need not only money for programming but a major investment in research. We know very little about Russian audiences—what they read, what they might be eager to learn.

Funding for education and culture needs rethinking too. Shouldn’t there be a Russian-language university, in Vilnius or Warsaw, to house all the intellectuals and thinkers who have just left Moscow? Don’t we need to spend more on education in Arabic, Hindi, Persian? So much of what passes for cultural diplomacy runs on autopilot. Programs should be recast for a different era, one in which, though the world is more knowable than ever before, dictatorships seek to hide that knowledge from their citizens.

Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy. Congress has made some progress in recent months in the fight against global kleptocracy, and the Biden administration was right to put the fight against corruption at the heart of its political strategy. But we can go much further, because there is no reason for any company, property, or trust ever to be held anonymously. Every U.S. state, and every democratic country, should immediately make all ownership transparent. Tax havens should be illegal. The only people who need to keep their houses, businesses, and income secret are crooks and tax cheats.

We need a dramatic and profound shift in our energy consumption, and not only because of climate change. The billions of dollars we have sent to Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have promoted some of the worst and most corrupt dictators in the world. The transition from oil and gas to other energy sources needs to happen with far greater speed and decisiveness. Every dollar spent on Russian oil helps fund the artillery that fires on Ukrainian civilians.

Take democracy seriously. Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it. Maybe there is no natural liberal world order, but there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect; our own has deep flaws, profound divisions, terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them. Few of them have existed across human history; many have existed for a time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside, but from the inside, too, by divisions and demagogues.

Perhaps, in the aftermath of this crisis, we can learn something from the Ukrainians. For decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both. As soon as the attacks began, they overcame their many political divisions, which are no less bitter than ours, and they picked up weapons to fight for their sovereignty and their democracy. They demonstrated that it is possible to be a patriot and a believer in an open society, that a democracy can be stronger and fiercer than its opponents. Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.

This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline “There Is No Liberal World Order.”

No one can read Vladimir Putin’s mind. But we can read the book that foretells the Russian leader’s imperialist foreign policy. Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 utopian novel, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, anticipates—with astonishing precision—Russia’s strategy of hybrid war and its recent military campaigns: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the incursion into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the same year, and Russia’s current assault on Ukraine.

Yuriev’s book, like Putin’s war with Ukraine, is an expression of post-Soviet neo-medievalism, a far-right, anti-Western, and antidemocratic ideology that assigns “Russian Orthodox civilization” a dominant role over Europe and America. Yuriev, a businessman and former deputy speaker of the state Duma who died in 2019, was a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party, which envisions an essentially feudal social order overseen by a political class that rules through fear. Putin and Yuriev knew each other. The Third Empire is rumored to be popular and highly influential in the Russian leader’s circle; one Russian publication described it as “the Kremlin’s favorite book.”

[Read: What Ukrainian literature has always understood about Russia]

The narrator of the novel, which unfolds in 2054, is a Brazilian historian who describes the origins of the Russian resurgence begun by Vladimir II the Restorer and completed by his successor, Gavriil the Great. (The first empire referenced in the book’s title was that of the czars; the second was the Soviet Union.) In The Third Empire, Joseph Stalin is Iosif the Great, whom Yuriev lauds for conquering new lands, destroying worthless elites and the “internal enemies of Russia” during the purges of the 1930s, and deporting entire peoples during and after the Second World War—which resulted in mass death. Over the past 20 years, the Kremlin has carried out projects of re-Stalinization in Russia, rebranding the former dictator as an effective manager and a harsh but fair ruler. Putin is using Stalin’s tactics in the current war, too. Authorities in Mariupol report that Russian forces are forcibly deporting the beleaguered city’s inhabitants.

Early in The Third Empire, a pro-Russian, Kremlin-sponsored uprising occurs in Ukraine. Its goals include “reunification with Russia and the abandonment of involuntary integration into Europe, as well as the rejection of the anti-Russian NATO bloc.” This uprising results in an undeclared war, with Russian troops marching into Ukraine. Soon, nine regions in eastern and southern Ukraine—including Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and other areas under Russian occupation today—announce their “non-recognition of Ukrainian authorities and Ukrainian statehood” and proclaim a pro-Russia “Donetsk–Black Sea Republic.” In the referendum that follows, “82 percent of the population [vote] in favor of joining Russia.” And in Russia, 93 percent vote for “the admission of Eastern Ukraine into Russia.” Perhaps not coincidentally, in Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and incursion into Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian forces similarly took over Ukrainian territory under the guise of a locally driven initiative.

Since 2008, Putin has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine is “not even a state.” His reasoning resembles that of Yuriev’s Emperor Gavriil, who “categorically refused Ukrainians … and Belarusians the status of separate nations.” In Gavriil’s eyes, “attempts to consider them as ethnicities separate from the Russian” are “part of the centuries-old Western plot to destroy Russia.”

Although Yuriev did not anticipate the barrage of sanctions and the unified front presented by the West, he did foresee Russia’s willingness to engage in nuclear blackmail. In The Third Empire, Russia wins World War III because the West fears nuclear war. “American leaders hesitated to order an assault,” Yuriev writes, “while the Russians clearly showed their willingness to go to the end.” Today, Putin is counting on the accuracy of Yuriev’s prognosis. In recent years, Russia’s president has been threatening the world with nuclear weapons. For example, in 2018, he said that, in the case of nuclear Armageddon, “Russians would be victims and martyrs and go to heaven”; the West would “just croak” and “wouldn’t even have time to repent.” Few other governments treat their own people with such frank disdain.

[Read: Why we should read Hannah Arendt now]

Yuriev also imagined, with disturbing accuracy, how Europe’s dependence on Russian energy exports limited how far it would go to punish Russia. Statements by Vladimir II in The Third Empire are nearly indiscernible from contemporary speeches by Putin. “You don’t like us?” the emperor mocks a French-television interviewer. “All right then, go to war with us and conquer us … Or refuse to buy our energy products, oil and gas, so that we starve to death.” The narrator notes that the loss of Russian oil would have raised prices and “brought down the European economy.”

Putin made a similar point in 2014 about the prospect of Europe doing without Russian oil and gas. “It’ll simply kill their ability to compete,” he said. Putin is right. Resisting the international pressure to ban Russian energy imports, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz keeps explaining the “essential importance” of Russian oil and gas to the European (read: German) economy. Above all, Yuriev’s fantasy is disconcerting because it has anticipated the pusillanimity of the West.

In 2006, Yuriev predicted that the West would react to the Russian invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine by appeasing the aggressor. Indeed, the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 were mild. More alarming is that Yuriev also expected that Russia would not stop with the partial annexation of Ukraine. The invasion that began last month proved this forecast to be equally accurate. Today, alarmed by Russian aggression, the West may seek to stop the war by pressuring the Zelensky administration to accept at least some of Russia’s terms. Yuriev revels in Russia’s ability to take advantage of Western diplomacy. He writes:

Although Russia’s annexation of Eastern Ukraine was not officially recognized … the demarcation line [that] the parties undertook not to violate … was fixed. It was stipulated that Russia renounced any encroachment on the territory to the west of that demarcation. This was pure PR on the part of the United States because they knew perfectly well that Russia had no such thing in mind.

Yuriev’s road map for Putin’s foreign policy makes clear the futility of Western attempts at a diplomatic solution without regime change in Russia. Under Putin, Russia will attack again.

In The Third Empire, Russian geopolitical ambitions force the United States and the European Union to declare war. Yuriev imagines that Russia has a secret weapon that makes the country invincible to nuclear attack. (Putin is trying to alter the logic of nuclear deterrence in a somewhat different way, via the hypersonic-missile system he described in December 2018 as “invulnerable to a potential enemy’s air-defense and missile-defense systems” and “a wonderful, excellent gift to our country for the New Year.”) Ultimately, the Americans and Europeans surrender. The world comes under Russian domination. The high point of the novel is a parade on Red Square. Among the forced participants are

representatives of the American elite: President [George] Bush III and former presidents Bill Clinton, Bush Junior, and Hillary Clinton; current and former members of the cabinet, the House, and the Senate; bankers and industrialists; newspaper commentators and television anchors; famous attorneys and top models; pop singers and Hollywood actresses. All of them passed through Red Square in shackles and with nameplates around their necks. … The Russian government was letting its own citizens and the whole world know that Russia had fought with and vanquished not only the American army but the American civilization.

With such scenes, Yuriev offers important insights into the mentality of the Kremlin, the way Putin and his circle think about the West, and their attitudes toward neighboring countries. Perhaps Putin doesn’t really expect to haul the Clintons in chains through Red Square. But when Volodymyr Zelensky warns that if Ukraine falls, war will move farther into Europe, he should be believed.

Even if Russia’s recent setbacks result in a military defeat in Ukraine, Putin may attack one of the Baltic countries to undermine NATO. Western nations may decide not to risk World War III for the sake of, say, Estonia. If NATO does not respond militarily to Russia’s aggression on one of its members, the de facto disintegration of the alliance might counterbalance the military disaster in Ukraine, thereby saving Putin’s regime.

Yuriev’s novel is fiction, of course, but should still help the West calculate the risks of appeasing Putin’s aggression. Understanding Russia’s expansionist vision should play an important role in Western decisions regarding the war in Ukraine: Ukraine is not Putin’s only target.

Albright was the US representative to the UN and secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

Albright was the US representative to the UN and secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

The “return to normalcy” in American life is starting to look something like the horizon: It recedes whenever you approach it. For President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats anxious about the November midterm elections, nothing could be more ominous.

Last summer’s Delta wave dashed hopes that the deployment of COVID vaccines would quickly carry the United States back to a pre-pandemic stasis. The persistence of inflation undermined expectations from the Biden administration and Federal Reserve Board that high prices would be a temporary inconvenience. The Omicron wave that surged over the winter defied any expectation that the country was past high caseloads, crowded hospitals, and pitched battles over masking, school closings, and other public-health protections. Each time social and economic normalcy seemed imminent, it dissolved.

[Read: How to reclaim normal life without being ‘done’]

Now that may be happening again. With the Omicron wave rapidly receding in the U.S., many forecasters had projected a sharply reduced health threat and a strong economic performance through 2022, including a steady decline in the inflation rate that looms as a paramount danger to congressional Democrats in November.

But the war in Ukraine and the prospects of renewed supply-chain disruptions from COVID lockdowns across China, as well as worrisome signs that the latest Omicron subvariant may be fueling another surge in Europe, has upended those optimistic projections, especially about inflation. Once again Americans are justified in wondering exactly when—or even if—life will return to its familiar pre-pandemic rhythms.

“I think all of us feel this way—when will normalcy come? ” Leo Feler, a senior economist for the economic-forecasting project at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, told me. “I wouldn’t say this is just about Biden; it’s that we collectively, as a country, can’t get a break.”

The pandemic’s persistent disruptions to American life have neutralized what some expected to be one of Biden’s greatest political assets. When he took office shortly after the January 6 insurrection, many Democrats thought that no matter what else happened—whether, for instance, he succeeded in passing his legislative agenda or not—he was governing with a powerful tailwind. The expectation was that the nation, sometime early into Biden’s presidency, was on track to contain the coronavirus and enjoy a big economic rebound.

Encouraged by his administration’s early success in a formidable wartime-style mobilization to distribute vaccines, Biden leaned into those high expectations, portraying last July 4, 2021 as a kind of Independence Day from the virus and repeatedly promising that inflation would soon subside. Instead, the pandemic and inflation have lasted longer than most Americans expected, or at least hoped. That’s less because of Biden’s decisions than external factors, especially global disruptions to the supply chain and the refusal of a substantial number of Americans, particularly in Republican-leaning areas, to get vaccinated. But the sustained turbulence has left most Americans deeply uneasy about the country’s direction—an extremely dangerous dynamic for a party holding unified control of the White House and Congress, as Democrats do now.

The White House probably has most reason for optimism on the course of the virus itself. With the domestic caseload plummeting, red and blue states alike, as well as other institutions such as professional sports leagues, are dismantling public-health protections such as mask, vaccine, and testing requirements. Every state that imposed a mandate for indoor mask wearing has rescinded it. Recent polls have found that the majority of Americans believe the worst of the pandemic is over.

Some prominent experts are raising alarms that those expectations may soon collide with another spike. The greatest concern has been provoked by indications that caseloads and hospitalizations are rising again in Europe amid the spread of the latest variant of concern, but the limited analysis that’s conducted of U.S. wastewater systems is also finding evidence of wider presence.

For now, though, Americans seem less stressed that the lingering effects of the pandemic will threaten their health so much as it will menace their wallet. Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who conducts surveys on economic attitudes for CNBC, told me that most Americans at this point view higher prices, rather than health dangers or restrictions on their activities, as the virus’s principal impact on their life. When people think of the disruptions created by the outbreak, he says, they are most likely to ask, “Why are grocery prices ridiculous? Why is gas at $4.35 a gallon?”

[Read: The global oil market is based on a fiction]

Earlier this year, many forecasters were optimistic that the American economy was heading for a “soft landing” in which inflation would abate but job creation and overall economic growth would remain high. (The Federal Reserve Board’s interest-rate hike announced Wednesday, its first since 2018, is intended to be an early step in that process.) But uncertainty about the economy’s trajectory is notable again, primarily because of the war in Ukraine, which has already roiled energy markets and could threaten global food supplies, but also because the upsurge of Omicron cases in China has forced lockdowns there that could pose renewed threats to supply chains.

“The fog is very thick, for sure,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. “And it doesn’t feel like it’s easing. It feels like it is intensifying.”

Both Zandi and Feler say that they remain generally confident 2022 will produce strong job numbers and overall growth. Even if the BA.2 subvariant now surging in Europe generates more cases here, Feler says, the private sector has learned how to weather such storms without significantly pausing economic activity. Companies and workers alike now “seem to have this foresight that even if there is a wave, it will ebb,” he said.

But the Ukraine war and China lockdowns, both say, will likely erase the earlier expectations that inflation would steadily decline this year. Each had forecast that by this fall, year-over-year inflation would tumble to about 3.5 percent—less than half its current level. Zandi said he thought that, come Election Day, inflation “would still be high but everyone could see the trend lines, and it wouldn’t be the cudgel that could be used in any kind of political debate to the degree it is now.”

Both men now believe inflation could rise further in the near term, and not decline as fast through the fall; Zandi thinks it will come in at about 5 percent by then, and Feler’s projection is also in that range. (Larry Summers, the Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, who was among the first to sound the alarm about possible inflation last year, this week also wrote that the latest developments in Russia and China are creating “major new inflation pressures.”) By Election Day, inflation “will be better,” Zandi said, “but it will be hard to convince people that it is.”

That’s a daunting forecast for Democrats. Polls this winter made clear that voter discontent over inflation is eclipsing the benefits Biden and his party might enjoy from the positive economic trends, such as job and wage growth.

In a maneuver that many Democrats praised, Biden, in his State of the Union address, recast his stalled Build Back Better economic plan as a blueprint to help families manage their daily expenses through help on prescription-drug, child-care, health-insurance, and utility costs. Yet the continued resistance of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to any broader economic package makes it uncertain whether Biden can enact those policies.

[Read: What Biden’s State of the Union speech was for ]

Some Democratic strategists believe the party can get as much electoral benefit in this fall’s campaign from simply advocating for those ideas as from actually passing them. But Campbell is dubious. “When you are the party in quasi-full control of government, it’s the expectation that you can actually do it,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘Hey if you elect us, we’ll do this’; you’ve already been elected to do this.” By preventing Biden and congressional Democrats from passing policies that respond to voters’ top concerns, “Joe Manchin is doing immeasurable damage to the party,” Campbell said.

The inability of Biden and Democratic leaders to steer their agenda past the opposition of Manchin (and on some fronts, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) captures the larger problem Biden faces at such an unsettled moment in history. Pollsters in both parties say that voters do not unrealistically expect a president to defang all of these threats or untangle all of these uncertainties. But they do expect him to demonstrate that he is focused on them and has a plan to make them better. And many voters don’t see that in Biden, as indicated by the surveys consistently reporting that a significant majority do not consider him a strong leader.

Voters “don’t want the Jerry Springer show” that Donald Trump’s inescapable visibility gave them, “but they would like the fireside chat,” Celinda Lake, who polled for Biden during the 2020 campaign, told me. “They want Dad to tell them what’s going on and what he’s going to do about this mess.”

With these latest international disruptions once again pushing back any “return to normalcy” timeline, economists and pollsters alike tell me it may soon be too late for anything to significantly improve Americans’ views of the country’s direction before the November election. The polling averages maintained by RealClearPolitics show that the share of Americans who said the country is moving in the right direction improved hardly at all from March through November during the midterm election years of 2010 and 2014 and rose just slightly during the 2018 campaign. (Only about three in 10 Americans say things are going well now, about the same as in 2014, and slightly lower than in 2010 or 2018—all elections in which the party holding the White House suffered significant midterm losses.)

“Things could improve, but perception lags reality,” Glen Bolger, a GOP pollster, told me. “There’s a point at which you can’t change the narrative going into the midterm election. We’re not there yet, but you can see it from here.”

Zandi said that even if the turmoil in Ukraine and China prevents economic improvements before November, conditions could look much better well before the 2024 presidential election. “You get to the other side of this and you could see inflation decline very rapidly,” he said. “Obviously Russia-Ukraine makes 2022 very vexed from a political perspective, but by 2024, I think these very positive developments are more than likely to be happening.”

But, as throughout Biden’s tempest-tossed presidency, the questions of when the nation (and the world) reaches “the other side of this” and in what shape when it does, are the crucial ones. Zandi said he now thinks there’s about a one-in-three chance the American economy could sink into a full-scale recession, depending on what happens internationally. That’s about double the odds he would have placed on that possibility last year. Feler said that although he also considers continued growth a more likely outcome, he too is more worried than he was a few months ago about a downturn. “Will we have a recession? Will we have 4 percent growth?” Feler asked, identifying the utterly divergent outcomes now swirling as possibilities. “It really depends on what happens with Omicron and China, and the future of COVID and … Russia and the Ukraine war.”

For Biden, and congressional Democrats who may rise and fall with him, the scariest thing about these challenges may be how little they are within his control.

In the time since Russia invaded Ukraine, a round of self-congratulation has erupted in the West. Moscow is threatening the liberal order, but in the eyes of leaders in Washington, Berlin, London, or Paris, the West has shown the world just how strong and unified it is. The scale of the sanctions package is unprecedented, they say; the idea of freedom has shown itself to be stronger than Vladimir Putin ever could have imagined; the collective spirit of the liberal order has been restored.

It is easy to get carried away in a wave of awe at what is happening in Ukraine, faced with the patriotic bravery of Ukrainians fighting for the right to be free, the Russian military’s apparent early struggles, and the West’s stronger-than-expected response. Germany has finally awakened; the European Union has risen to the occasion; the United States has rediscovered its moral and political leadership. This is a crisis that has reminded Europe how important America remains and how important Europe might yet become.

It is true that the free world has been galvanized, and the fundamental idea of the Western world—individual freedom under democratic law—is still more powerful and righteous than any of the alternatives. But amid all the back slapping, the West has yet to face up to the broader reality of this crisis. The Russian army’s shelling of Ukrainian cities does not mark the last desperate cries of an authoritarian world slowly being suffocated by the power of liberal democracy. This crisis is unlikely to signal the end of the challenge to Western supremacy at all, in fact, for this is a challenge that is of a scale and duration that Western leaders and populations have not yet faced up to.

Perhaps this crisis really has saved the West from its solipsistic pettiness and division. But the bigger picture is far more depressing, whether in the short term for Ukraine or in the long term for the Western order itself.

Many experts have pointed out that Putin might be able to win the war and take control of Ukraine, but he cannot hold on to it for long given the scale of public opposition to his attempted colonization. This is a war that is thus far going badly for Russia, and yet can get worse, perhaps even imperiling Putin’s regime itself. The Russian economy is also at risk of collapse under the weight of the assault that has been launched by the West.

Beyond these sober analyses, however, are more sweeping claims being made in Western capitals about the long-term implications of Putin’s decision and the inevitability of the West’s ultimate victory. In his State of the Union address, Joe Biden quoted approvingly from his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the European Parliament, in which Zelensky claimed “light will win over darkness.” Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, argued similarly. “The issue at the heart of this is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law,” Scholz told the Bundestag, “whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the 19th century and the age of the great powers.” He then added, “As democrats, as Europeans, we stand by [Ukrainians’] side—on the right side of history!”

Does light really always win over darkness, though? It can, certainly, and did on many occasions during the 20th century. But just because it triumphed in the Second World War and the Cold War does not mean it necessarily will again now or in the future, or, indeed, that this is a fair summary of history. Just because the Allies forced the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, and later saw the Soviet Union collapse, does not mean there is, as Scholz declared, a right side of history.

Even if Putin is “defeated, and seen to be defeated,” as Britain’s Boris Johnson said he must be, it still does not follow that light is destined to triumph in the decades ahead. A quick scan across the world suggests that even just since the turn of the 21st century, the picture is far less rosy than the rhetoric from Biden, Scholz, and others might suggest.

Right now, the world’s second-most powerful state, China, is committing genocide against its own people and dismantling the freedoms of a city of several million, but the West continues to trade with it almost as if nothing is happening. Even as Western governments busily sanction Russian oligarchs, they continue to let Saudi oligarchs buy up their companies, sports teams, and homes, despite the fact that their leader, according to U.S. intelligence, approved the butchering of a journalist in one of his embassies. In Syria, long after Barack Obama declared that Bashar al-Assad “must go” and predicted that he would, the dictator remains in power, backed by Putin. Across the Middle East and North Africa, the Arab Spring has largely petered out into a new set of brutal dictatorships, save for one or two exceptions. In Africa and Asia, Chinese and Russian influence is growing and Western influence is retreating. It may be comforting to say that Putin’s troubles in Ukraine now prove the enduring power of the old order, but it is difficult to draw that conclusion when looking at the world as a whole.

The Western conceits that history is linear and that problems always have solutions make it hard to process evidence that challenges these assumptions. Even if Putin is unable to “win” his war in Ukraine, what if, for example, he is prepared to go further than anyone imagines in suppressing the population in whatever territory he does control? Or what if he is able to take Ukraine by force, declares it part of a Greater Russia, and threatens the nuclear annihilation of Warsaw, or Budapest, or Berlin, if the West intervenes in any way in his new territory? We might have on our hands a Eurasian North Korea, but thousands of times more powerful.

Perhaps Putin is willing to pay a price for this territory that the West finds inconceivable, forcing the U.S. and Europe into a new—and hopefully cold—war. This could last for decades: In 1956, Hungary attempted to break away from Soviet rule but was repressed in brutal fashion. It did not win its freedom for another three decades.

Even this is perhaps an optimistic scenario for the world beyond Ukraine. Whether Scholz likes it or not, the West is already in an age of competition in which “power is allowed to prevail over the law.” In fact, it always has been. The law didn’t stop the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, after all; raw American power did.

Today, the challenge is not power replacing law but power being diffused. Russia, for example, is wielding its power not just in Ukraine but across Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. Chinese power today does not just stalk Taiwan but makes its presence felt worldwide. And then there are all the other states—Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia—that believe the changing balance of global power offers an opportunity to assert themselves.

In his State of the Union address, Biden argued that in the battle raging between democracy and autocracy in Ukraine, the democratic world was “rising to the moment,” revealing its hidden strength and resolve. But is this true?

Biden listed to Congress the sanctions the West had imposed on Russia, including cutting off its banks from the international financial system, choking the country’s access to technology, and seizing the property of its oligarchs. The list is impressive, and one that analysts believe could well asphyxiate the Russian economy.

Yet Western leaders should not flatter themselves just because of the paucity of prior responses: The sanctions that have been placed on Russia might be enormous compared with the meagre ones rolled out over the invasions of Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas, or over China’s genocide of its Uyghur population, but there remain significant holes in the package, through which the West’s moral and geopolitical weaknesses are all too obvious.

Today, the reality is that the Russian state is paying for its war against Ukraine with the funds it receives every day from the sale of oil and gas. Though the Biden administration is taking steps to ban the import of Russian energy, and Britain and the EU have said they will phase out or sharply reduce their dependence on it, each and every day for now, Russia receives $1.1 billion from the EU in oil and gas receipts, according to the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. In total, oil and gas revenues make up 36 percent of the Russian government’s budget, the German Marshall Fund estimates—money, of course, it is now using in a campaign to terrorize Ukraine, for which the West is sanctioning other parts of Russia’s economy. It is an utterly absurd situation, like something from a satirical novel.

In fact, it is from a satirical novel. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, set in World War II, an American serviceman called Milo Minderbinder creates a syndicate in which all the other servicemen have a share, buying food around the world. One day, Milo comes flying back from Madagascar, leading four German bombers filled with the syndicate’s produce. When he lands, he finds a contingent of soldiers waiting to imprison the German pilots and confiscate their planes. This sends Milo into a fury.

“Sure we are at war with them,” he says. “But the Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders. Maybe they did start a war, and maybe they are killing millions of people, but they pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I can name.”

Today, Europe’s attitude seems not too dissimilar to Milo’s: The Russians may have started a war and may be slaughtering thousands of people, which the West is fighting to stop, but Russian energy keeps European homes warm, and at a reasonable price.

On top of the short-term challenge of the war itself, there is an altogether more difficult long-term challenge to the Western order. Put bluntly, it is possible both to believe that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will be a disaster for Russia, giving the West a much-needed shot in the arm, and to believe that the challenges the West faces from disrupting states like Russia will remain daunting in their enormity.

In some ways, the big picture remains unaltered by the blood-drenched catastrophe in Ukraine: The West faces a Chinese-Russian alliance seeking to reshape the world order, one that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger spent so much political capital to avoid. Only now, instead of this axis being led by an autarkic and sclerotic Muscovite empire, the senior partner is a technologically sophisticated giant that is deeply integrated in the world economy. Furthermore, unlike it was during the Cold War, the United States is now unable to bear the burden of a global confrontation with both China and Russia on its own; it needs the help of partners in Asia to curtail Beijing, and greater resolve from Europe to hold off Moscow.

Yet has the West faced up to the scale of this challenge? Does it collectively even agree what the challenge is? Though there has been a sea change in European thinking toward Russia, it’s far from clear whether there is agreement across the West that a civilizational battle is being fought between East and West, between democracy and autocracy, as Biden declared. Europe has united in opposition to Russia’s invasion, but as time goes on, and Europe’s own dynamics change, Europe’s interests may well diverge from those of the U.S. (as they appear to have done over their positions toward China).

For so long, as Noah Barkin has written, Germany has pursued a policy of change through trade, a policy that is now clearly based on a fallacy but that was common wisdom across the West, to the likes of Bill Clinton and David Cameron. In reality, China took the trade but ignored the change.

Germany and others are beginning to shift away from this policy, but that should not blind the West to the challenges that change itself poses. While it is true, for instance, that the war in Ukraine has awakened the EU and its most powerful state, Germany, the bloc’s structural challenge remains the same: It is a force in world affairs without the capacity to defend its members. It remains a construct of the postwar American world, dependent on American power for its defense. Though Germany’s sharp increase in defense spending is seismic, if Europe genuinely wishes to share the burden of American global leadership, it still has much further to go. And even if it did more to share that burden, were Europe to become more powerful in the world, would it really subjugate its interests to the wider American-led West? Why should it when it has different economic interests to protect and enhance?

Whatever happens in Ukraine, it is not clear that the level of Western unity currently on display is likely to last. It is not even clear that such unity could survive another term of Donald Trump, let alone decades of parallel political development, American fatigue over defending Europe, or the need to rebalance the Western alliance to incorporate Asian powers that fear China’s rise.

If 2022 really is a pivot in Western history, like 1945 or 1989, then it is reasonable to wonder what changes we can expect to see to the way the West is structured. The end of both the Second World War and the Cold War produced a flurry of institutional reforms that shaped the new worlds that were being born. In 1951, just six years after the fall of Nazi Germany, six European states, including France and Germany, took the first step on their journey to today’s EU. In the early 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany was united, and a single European currency was agreed. The following decade, former members of the Warsaw Pact joined the EU.

Where, then, are the modern contemporaries to the grand figures of the postwar West who brought about European integration, economic rehabilitation, and common defense against the Soviet Union? The challenges today are new, and so new institutional scaffolding is required to rebalance the Western world’s share of rights and responsibilities; to unite the liberal democratic world; to ensure its primacy over autocratic challengers. Instead, Western leaders talk about the reinvigoration of the institutions designed in the aftermath of the last world war to ensure a new one did not begin. That war has gone. A new one is being waged.

Listening to Joe Biden give his first official State of the Union address on Tuesday night, I thought: This is strong, it is clear, it’s the right message in the right language. It reflects the speaker in an honest way. And it also brings something new to this tired form.

But each of those judgments rests on assumptions about speeches in general and State of the Union addresses in particular. So let me lay out my reasoning and then get to the details of the speech.

What makes a speech “good”? Or “effective”? Or viewed as “eloquent”? Or perhaps eventually as “memorable” or “historic”?

These are trickier assessments than they might seem, and can take time to settle in. The value and effect of a speech depend on some circumstances that a speaker can control, or at least be aware of: the message, the audience, the expected length of the speech, the expected tone, from jokey to statesmanlike. But they also depend on aspects of timing and fortune beyond anyone’s control. Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” pledge to Parliament in 1940 is remembered in a particular way because of how the next five years of combat turned out. As are Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “date which will live in infamy,” John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

By contrast, George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration one month into the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is remembered in a different way, because of what happened afterward.

(I know how it feels to be involved in a statement that history has made look foolish. While working for Jimmy Carter in the White House, I was the writer on the trip where he gave a New Year’s Eve toast, in Teheran, to the shah of Iran as an “island of stability” in the turbulent sea of the Middle East. That was the official U.S. outlook at the time, which I did my best to express. Within little more than a year, the shah was out, and the Iranian Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini was under way.)

Why many different kinds of speeches can be “good,” and what makes them that way

Some speeches are meant to excite or inspire. Political-rally speeches are in this category, the more so the closer they come to Election Day. Speeches to inspire the whole nation should obviously not be partisan. For instance, JFK in 1962: “We choose to go to the moon … not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skill.” Speeches to energize the base can be partisan as hell, because voters are about to choose one side or the other. For instance, FDR just before Election Day in 1936: “[My opponents] are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

[Read: What Biden’s State of the Union speech was for]

Some speeches are meant to console or commemorate. Robert F . Kennedy’s most moving speech may have been his unscripted statement of grief and resolve, at a street corner rally before a largely Black crowd in Indianapolis, when sharing the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated, in April 1968. This was two months before Kennedy himself was shot dead. Ronald Reagan gave his State of the Union address in 1986 a few days after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and he began with a tribute to the seven dead astronauts. I believe that Barack Obama’s most powerful address was his eulogy in 2015 for the slain parishioners at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Some speeches are meant to explain. The example all aspire to is FDR’s first Fireside Chat in 1933, on the reasons behind the banking crisis. (He began, “My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.”)

Some speeches are meant to motivate, organize, and instruct in the short run. After the “Bloody Sunday” marches in Selma, Alabama, Lyndon B. Johnson gave his most powerful speech, in urging Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”

Some speeches are meant for reflection and guidance in the long term. Lincoln’s second inaugural in 1865. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. George Washington’s farewell address in 1796, and Dwight Eisenhower’s in 1961. The commencement address by George Marshall at Harvard in 1947, the Nobel Prize lecture by William Faulkner in 1950, the “Moral Equivalent of War” speech by William James at Stanford in 1906. Having told my embarrassing “island of stability” story, I’ll add that I think a different speech I was involved in, Jimmy Carter’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977, on the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy, stands up well: “I understand fully the limits of moral suasion … But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody … In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted.”

Some speeches are meant to get the speaker out of an immediate bind. Bill Clinton’s career is packed with examples, from the town meetings in New Hampshire that made him the “comeback kid” in 1992; to his State of the Union address in 1995 after his party had lost 54 House seats in the midterms, delivered with Newt Gingrich seated behind him as speaker; to his State of the Union in 1999, while being impeached. This last speech was about economics and domestic-reform measures and it did not mention his legal problems. After introductory formalities it began, “Tonight, I stand before you to report that America has created the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history”, and it never looked back.

Some speeches are meant to be enjoyed purely in the moment, like a play or concert. Some are meant to be reread or studied on the page. Some are dignified by quotations and fancy language. Some are best when plainspoken and spare. Some fall into categories even beyond the ones I’ve named.

Here is the point of this long setup. It is as hard to define a “good” or “bad” speech as a good or bad song. It all depends—on who the speaker is, what the circumstances are, and what is the register in which the speaker sounds most convincing and authentic. Let’s apply those standards to this speech.

What Biden was trying to do, and how he did it

The questions about a speech like this are: Does it sound natural to the speaker? (A speechwriter’s skill is not so much the ability to “write” as the ear for the way the speaker would like to put things.) Does it make use of the times and circumstances? And does it tell us anything new?

By those standards I thought Biden’s speech was a real success, and one that might have been underappreciated because of the plainness that was in fact its main virtue.

The language. Some speakers sound natural when uttering phrases that seem headed straight for the Famous Quote books. Churchill. FDR. John Kennedy. A handful of others.

But most people seem puffed-up and strained when reaching for a fancy phrase. They can sound like highschool actors, overemoting, “To be, or not to be.” Nearly all of us are better in the mode Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower brought to the presidency, at their best: eloquence through plainness.

Early in his career, Biden favored fancy speechmaking. In his maturity he has embraced, as he should, his simpler and authentic-sounding “listen, folks” style.

In this speech, as I’ll note below, Biden sounded like himself, rather than like a person intent on Speaking for the Ages. Even his cadence showed it. He gave the whole speech at a rapid clip, even when this meant talking over applause lines. Perhaps in part this was to deal with the lifelong stuttering challenge that John Hendrickson has so powerfully and beautifully described. But to me it came across as a person intent on delivering a message, rather than hoping to be admired while delivering it.

Even the fit-and-finish details of the speech suggested a man on a mission. State of the Union addresses are notorious for their unsubtle, groaning-hinges transitions. “Turning now to affairs overseas,” or “We cannot be strong abroad unless we are strong at home.” The transitions in this speech are notable for not existing. Biden just made a point, then made the next one.

The substance. Joe Biden sat through dozens of State of the Union addresses as a senator, and sat on-camera through eight of them as vice president. Everything about this ritual is familiar to him.

So were the three main topics of his discourse: dealing with the Ukraine emergency, dealing with the economy, and dealing with the pandemic. Coordinating with other countries was part of his experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president, and comes naturally to his dealmaking nature. Ordinary-American economic issues were part of his identity as Scranton Joe. And the pandemic was the emergency he inherited on arrival. His treatment of them sounded like a briefing from a person in the middle of running multiple response teams, conveying which emergencies they were dealing with on which fronts. I’m always thinking of aviation-world analogies, and this reminded me of an experienced controller giving a rundown on where a skyful of airplanes were headed, and what his team needed to focus on next.

The backstage view. Being president is impossible. John Dickerson made the case in this cover story four years ago. I have written about it as well. To “succeed” in the job, a person needs a broader range of skills than any real human being has ever possessed. Public eloquence. Private persuasive power. IQ. EQ. Stamina. Luck. A generous imagination, but also cold-bloodedness. A thousand traits more. The question is not whether any president will “fail.” It is in which particular way, and how the world will judge the over/under.

Joe Biden was not explicitly making the case for himself, in handling the complexities of his role. (Although of course every speech, by every president, is implicitly an advertisement for the incumbent’s fitness.) But having heard nearly as many of these State of the Union speeches as Biden himself has, I thought this one amounted to a look at what a president’s job is. State of the Union speeches have rightly been mocked, including by me, as to-do lists. To me, this speech came across as a realistic view into the to-do urgency that makes up a president’s day.

What follows is an abbreviated version of an approach I’ve tried before, of annotating the SOTU transcript. You can read the whole official speech from the White House if you prefer. I’ve used the version that was on Biden’s TelePrompter, and I’m leaving out more than half of it, indicated by ellipsis (…) in interests of space. Comments are in bold, with the words or lines they’re referring to in italics. Here we go.

Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President, our First Lady and Second Gentleman. Members of Congress and the Cabinet. Justices of the Supreme Court. My fellow Americans. Of course, this is the first time that a president has begun with this salutation. As was true throughout the speech, Biden under- rather than oversold the moment.

… Six days ago, Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to shake the foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways. But he badly miscalculated.

[Read: Vladimir Putin united America]

He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead he met a wall of strength he never imagined. An attempted “line,” which Biden sensibly moved right past rather than waiting for a response.

He met the Ukrainian people. What I am referring to as plain-style eloquence.

From President Zelenskyy to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, inspires the world.

Groups of citizens blocking tanks with their bodies. Everyone from students to retirees, teachers turned soldiers, defending their homeland. This will not be studied for rhyme, or emphasis in delivery. But it is very powerful.

In this struggle, as President Zelenskyy said in his speech to the European Parliament, “Light will win over darkness.” The Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States is here tonight.

Let each of us here tonight in this Chamber send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world.

Please rise if you are able and show that, Yes, we the United States of America stand with the Ukrainian people. One of the performance-art aspects of SOTUs is which part of the chamber will cheer which lines. This was a graceful and appropriate way for Biden to induce a standing ovation from all.

Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos. As a matter of sentence rhythm, this is not the way Churchill, Kennedy, et al. would have phrased it. But, once more, powerful in its intent. They keep moving.   

… American diplomacy matters. American resolve matters. This could not be plainer. Nor truer, at the moment.

… [Putin] thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready. Here is what we did. See above.

We prepared extensively and carefully… I spent countless hours unifying our European allies. We shared with the world in advance what we knew Putin was planning and precisely how he would try to falsely justify his aggression. “I am going to tell you about the actual work of being president.”

We countered Russia’s lies with truth.   

And now that he has acted, the free world is holding him accountable.

Along with twenty-seven members of the European Union including France, Germany, Italy, as well as countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and many others, even Switzerland. Even Switzerland!!!!

We are inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine. Putin is now isolated from the world more than ever. I do not think we have heard these words before in a SOTU …

Tonight I say to the Russian oligarchs and corrupt leaders who have bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: No more. Nor this word.

The U.S. Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs. I believe the camera panned to Merrick Garland at this point. Many people thinking, with me, Get busy with these task forces!

We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets. We are coming for your ill-begotten gains. Nor these words. Nice emphasis on your.
…
And tonight I am announcing that we will join our allies in closing off American air space to all Russian flights—further isolating Russia—and adding an additional squeeze on their economy.

The Ruble has lost 30% of its value. The Russian stock market has lost 40% of its value and trading remains suspended. Russia’s economy is reeling and Putin alone is to blame. Powerful to keep calling him just “Putin.” And around this time Biden ad libs, “He has no idea what is coming,” emphasized that way.

… And we remain clear-eyed. The Ukrainians are fighting back with pure courage. But the next few days weeks, months, will be hard on them. Preparing for grim news in these coming days …

I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming.

But I want you to know that we are going to be okay. Not fancy, but an important part of the duties of the job. A president’s mission, in a time of crisis, always boils down to recognizing the fear, hardship, and sorrow of today; expressing confidence about tomorrow; and offering a plan to get from now to then. Biden’s whole speech is a demonstration of that formula. This line is the summary version of Step 2.

When the history of this era is written Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger. First part undeniably true. Let’s hope the second part is also …

… In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security. Notable because so many have assumed the opposite.

This is a real test. It’s going to take time. So let us continue to draw inspiration from the iron will of the Ukrainian people. One more time, then I’ll give this theme a rest: This may not count as a Ringing Phrase, but it’s an important concept, and plainly true.

… He will never extinguish their love of freedom. He will never weaken the resolve of the free world.

We meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced. This would have been the start of the speech, if not for the news from Ukraine. Again, note that he’s not even pretending to make a transition.

The pandemic has been punishing.

And so many families are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food, gas, housing, and so much more.

I understand. The essence of Biden’s pitch, in times of economic distress. Skipping past the next few paragraphs, which are the pitch for his economic plan …

… And as my Dad used to say, it [economic legislation] gave people a little breathing room.

And unlike the $2 Trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people—and left no one behind. The “partisan” part of Biden’s argument is: We are trying to help you. The other side wants to enrich them.

And it worked. It created jobs. Lots of jobs.

In fact—our economy created over 6.5 Million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America. The New York Times did a pettifogging “fact check” for this claim, saying it was “partially true” because employment figures go back only to 1939. Oh, come on.

Our economy grew at a rate of 5.7% last year, the strongest growth in nearly 40 years, the first step in bringing fundamental change to an economy that hasn’t worked for the working people of this nation for too long. A “phrase,” but Biden rolls right through it.The effect, again, is that he is concentrating on the contents, not the packaging.

For the past 40 years we were told that if we gave tax breaks to those at the very top, the benefits would trickle down to everyone else.

But that trickle-down theory led to weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits, and the widest gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century. Over the past generation, the Republicans have been careful to use phrases like “death tax” (for “estate tax”) in all of their statements. “Trickle-down” is the one phrase on which Democrats have shown similar consistency and “message discipline.”

Vice President Harris and I ran for office with a new economic vision for America.

Invest in America. Educate Americans. Grow the workforce. Build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down. We will keep hearing this, too.

Because we know that when the middle class grows, the poor have a ladder up and the wealthy do very well … I’m condensing the infrastructure section that follows …

This was a bipartisan effort, and I want to thank the members of both parties who worked to make it happen.

We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks.

We’re going to have an infrastructure decade. Write your own caption. Condensing the next part about competing with China …

And we’ll do it all to withstand the devastating effects of the climate crisis and promote environmental justice.

We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, begin to replace poisonous lead pipes—so every child—and every American—has clean water to drink at home and at school, provide affordable high-speed internet for every American—urban, suburban, rural, and tribal communities. Internet access is a huge problem in much of America. Meta-point: Bill Clinton’s 1995 SOTU address, after the Democrats had been nearly wiped out in the midterms, was enormously long, and mostly made of nitty-gritty specifics like this. Pundits made fun of it for its length and boringness. Polls later suggested that the national audience paid attention and cared about these details. I went into this in my book Breaking the News and in this magazine.

4,000 projects have already been announced. And tonight, I’m announcing that this year we will start fixing over 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.

When we use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America—we are going to Buy American: buy American products to support American jobs Condensing the “Buy American” and Intel-investment parts …

— And Intel is not alone. A “transition”!

There’s something happening in America.

Just look around and you’ll see an amazing story.

The rebirth of the pride that comes from stamping products “Made In America.” The revitalization of American manufacturing. I agree. For more, see this. 

[David Frum: This is no time for protectionism]

Companies are choosing to build new factories here, when just a few years ago, they would have built them overseas.

That’s what is happening. Ford is investing $11 billion to build electric vehicles, creating 11,000 jobs across the country. GM is making the largest investment in its history—$7 billion to build electric vehicles, creating 4,000 jobs in Michigan.

All told, we created 369,000 new manufacturing jobs in America just last year. My proposal: Every story about “our inflation-racked economy” needs to have a counterpart story on “our record-fast job growth.” They’re both part of the same reality. More here.

Powered by people I’ve met like JoJo Burgess, from generations of union steelworkers from Pittsburgh, who’s here with us tonight. Ever since Ronald Reagan kicked off this tradition, “guests in the first family’s box” has become the great cliché of SOTU addresses. Biden went lighter on it than usual.

As Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown says, “It’s time to bury the label “Rust Belt.”

It’s time. Yes. And the line we are waiting for here is “This revived part of America is the Chrome Belt.” Or “It’s America’s Newest Frontier.” “It’s the Freshwater Belt.” “It’s the Real America and the Next America.” Or something to complete the thought. Counterargument: proposing any specific name might start a little argument on whether the new name is silly—see: “Washington Commanders”—and Biden is better off just moving straight ahead.

But with all the bright spots in our economy, record job growth and higher wages, too many families are struggling to keep up with the bills. Transition!

Inflation is robbing them of the gains they might otherwise feel.

I get it. That’s why my top priority is getting prices under control. Going to condense this next part …

One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer.  

I have a better plan to fight inflation.

Lower your costs, not your wages … Instead of relying on foreign supply chains, let’s make it in America …

Economists call it “increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”

I call it building a better America. Replacing the “Build Back Better” of his currently stalled legislation.

My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit. One person’s opinion (mine): It is politically necessary for him to mention the deficit, but Biden kept the discussion relatively under control. More on this theme below.

— First—cut the cost of prescription drugs. Just look at insulin. One in ten Americans has diabetes. In Virginia, I met a 13-year-old boy named Joshua Davis. This young man is the instant national favorite as guest-in-the-first-family’s-box …  

Imagine what it’s like to look at your child who needs insulin and have no idea how you’re going to pay for it.  

What it does to your dignity, your ability to look your child in the eye, to be the parent you expect to be. This is the kind of line that would sound fake from many politicians but that Biden has made authentic to him.

Joshua is here with us tonight. Yesterday was his birthday. Happy birthday, buddy …Similar point about this different phrase. The one in the previous paragraph sounds Biden-esque because we all know the stories about his father being laid off. This one has an average-person approachability that would seem faux-chummy from, say, Ted Cruz, but fits what the impression we already have of Biden..

Drug companies will still do very well. And while we’re at it, let Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, like the VA already does. Editorial note: Amen! …

Second—cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combatting climate change.  

Let’s provide investments and tax credits to weatherize your homes and businesses to be energy efficient and you get a tax credit; double America’s clean energy production in solar, wind, and so much more; lower the price of electric vehicles, saving you another $80 a month because you’ll never have to pay at the gas pump again. The kind of detail, again, that could be called “boring” on pundit panels but that Bill Clinton built his reelection campaign on. Same for the following few paragraphs.

Third—cut the cost of child care. Many families pay up to $14,000 a year for child care per child …
My plan doesn’t stop there. It also includes home and long-term care. More affordable housing. And Pre-K for every 3- and 4-year-old …  

So that’s my plan. It will grow the economy and lower costs for families.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get this done. And while you’re at it, confirm my nominees to the Federal Reserve, which plays a critical role in fighting inflation.  

My plan will not only lower costs to give families a fair shot, it will lower the deficit.

The previous Administration not only ballooned the deficit with tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations, it undermined the watchdogs whose job was to keep pandemic relief funds from being wasted. See previous remarks on mentioning-but-not-belaboring the deficit.

But in my administration, the watchdogs have been welcomed back.

We’re going after the criminals who stole billions in relief money meant for small businesses and millions of Americans. See FDR on blunt language against well-heeled crooks.

And tonight, I’m announcing that the Justice Department will name a chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud.

By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office.  

The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year. For decades, Democrats have pointed out that deficit trends have been much lower under their administrations than under the GOP. But they have been abashed about making that argument. Maybe Biden, who has seen it all, is going to try.

Lowering your costs also means demanding more competition. Shorthand introduction follows to “modern anti-trust theory.” In my view this is really important; glad it is getting some airtime in the speech. For more, see Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Wu, Lina Khan, and others.

I’m a capitalist, but capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism.

It’s exploitation—and it drives up prices.

[David A. Graham: Biden seizes the center]

When corporations don’t have to compete, their profits go up, your prices go up, and small businesses and family farmers and ranchers go under …

And as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. The kind of specific that Bill Clinton used to effect.

That ends on my watch.

Medicare is going to set higher standards for nursing homes and make sure your loved ones get the care they deserve and expect.

We’ll also cut costs and keep the economy going strong by giving workers a fair shot, provide more training and apprenticeships, hire them based on their skills not degrees. Shorthand reference to another very important reform and concept.

Let’s pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and paid leave.  

Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend the Child Tax Credit, so no one has to raise a family in poverty.

Let’s increase Pell Grants and increase our historic support of HBCUs, and invest in what Jill—our First Lady, who teaches full-time—calls America’s best-kept secret: community colleges. Amen to all of this. See more here.

And let’s pass the PRO Act when a majority of workers want to form a union—they shouldn’t be stopped.  

When we invest in our workers, when we build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out together, we can do something we haven’t done in a long time: build a better America.

For more than two years, COVID-19 has impacted every decision in our lives and the life of the nation. This is what I mean about not even pretending to have a transition. And that’s fine—the organizing theme of this speech is Let’s keep moving.

And I know you’re tired, frustrated, and exhausted.

But I also know this.

Because of the progress we’ve made, because of your resilience and the tools we have, tonight, I can say we are moving forward safely, back to more normal routines. Condensing what follows. We’re all tired, frustrated, and exhausted …

Here are four common sense steps as we move forward safely. Condensing this, too, but it has the virtue of specificity. …

And we’re launching the “Test to Treat” initiative so people can get tested at a pharmacy, and if they’re positive, receive antiviral pills on the spot at no cost. Leaving this in, because it is specific and will be new to most people …

Even if you already ordered free tests tonight, I am announcing that you can order more from covidtests.gov starting next week. Personal note: We ordered, received, and have used these tests.

… We have lost so much to COVID-19. Time with one another. And worst of all, so much loss of life.

Let’s use this moment to reset. Let’s stop looking at COVID-19 as a partisan dividing line and see it for what it is: A God-awful disease. Doing his best to deflect the culture war on vaccines, masks, disease itself. There’s no point in trying to rebut the opposing views; the best strategy, on the politics and the substance, is to move on like this.

Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.  

We can’t change how divided we’ve been. But we can change how we move forward—on COVID-19 and other issues we must face together. Another “transition.”

I recently visited the New York City Police Department days after the funerals of Officer Wilbert Mora and his partner, Officer Jason Rivera…. Condensing “fund the police” argument to skip to its conclusion …

We should all agree: The answer is not to Defund the police. The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.

I ask Democrats and Republicans alike: Pass my budget and keep our neighborhoods safe. Condensing gun-violence section that follows …

Repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued.

These laws don’t infringe on the Second Amendment. They save lives.

The most fundamental right in America is the right to vote—and to have it counted. And it’s under assault. “Transition.” The sentence that follows is of great democratic importance, and in a way is what Biden is talking about rather than talking about the January 6 attacks. (To which he devoted a whole, powerful speech on January 6 of this year.)

In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert entire elections.

We cannot let this happen.

Tonight, I call on the Senate to: Pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And while you’re at it, pass the Disclose Act so Americans can know who is funding our elections.

Tonight, I’d like to honor someone who has dedicated his life to serve this country: Justice Stephen Breyer—an Army veteran, Constitutional scholar, and retiring Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Breyer, thank you for your service. Anyone who saw the speech saw Breyer’s gracious response here. SCOTUS justices are supposed to sit stone-faced during the speech, the one notorious exception being Samuel Alito shaking his head No, no when Barack Obama criticized the Citizens United ruling. Breyer set a more becoming example.

One of the most serious constitutional responsibilities a President has is nominating someone to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

And I did that 4 days ago, when I nominated Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. One of our nation’s top legal minds, who will continue Justice Breyer’s legacy of excellence.

A former top litigator in private practice. A former federal public defender. And from a family of public school educators and police officers. A consensus builder. Since she’s been nominated, she’s received a broad range of support—from the Fraternal Order of Police to former judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans.

And if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the Border and fix the immigration system. Transition? We don’t need no stinking transitions! Condensing what follows, so I don’t need to mention the attempted chant by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert of “Build the wall” …

That’s why immigration reform is supported by everyone from labor unions to religious leaders to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Let’s get it done once and for all.

Advancing liberty and justice also requires protecting the rights of women. Saving time by skipping transitions. And, of course, a powerful statement in the line that follows. The TV we were watching panned to Amy Coney Barrett on the “under attack” line.

The constitutional right affirmed in Roe v. Wade—standing precedent for half a century—is under attack as never before. Condensing what follows …

While it often appears that we never agree, that isn’t true. I signed 80 bipartisan bills into law last year. From preventing government shutdowns to protecting Asian Americans from still-too-common hate crimes to reforming military justice. Biden’s election-year argument on issues from the economy (jobs versus inflation), controlling the pandemic, managing the alliance (unified against Putin), to managing domestic politics will necessarily be: Actually, we’re doing a good job. This section is part of his presenting that argument.

And soon, we’ll strengthen the Violence Against Women Act that I first wrote three decades ago. It is important for us to show the nation that we can come together and do big things.

So tonight I’m offering a Unity Agenda for the Nation. Four big things we can do together. They are: opioids, mental-health programs—including attention to social media—care for veterans, and a new campaign to “end cancer as we know it.” The detailed description was full of the kinds of specifics that historically voters have cared about. Condensing …

As Frances Haugen, who is here with us tonight, has shown, we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit. A Facebook whistleblower. This is a big callout by Biden.

… Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan faced many dangers. Won’t mention the odious Boebert outburst around this part.

I know.

One of those soldiers was my son Major Beau Biden. The decent members in the chamber were respectful through this part.

We don’t know for sure if a burn pit was the cause of his brain cancer, or the diseases of so many of our troops. Skipping to anti-cancer program.

… To get there, I call on Congress to fund ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

It’s based on DARPA—the Defense Department project that led to the Internet, GPS, and so much more.  

ARPA-H will have a singular purpose—to drive breakthroughs in cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and more. So far, none of these diseases is politicized, the way COVID has become. And virtually every family in America is affected by one or more of them. This is the kind of big-tent appeal Biden would like to make. Or, as he put it in the following line:

A unity agenda for the nation.

We can do this.

My fellow Americans—tonight , we have gathered in a sacred space—the citadel of our democracy. Biden briefly paused before starting this paragraph, one of the few such punctuation-points in his delivery. This is clearly the “and now we come to the end of the speech” transition.

In this Capitol, generation after generation, Americans have debated great questions amid great strife, and have done great things. Everyone in the chamber knows what else has happened in the Capitol, 14 months ago, and Biden’s pitch is stronger with this audience for not needing to spell that out.

For the record, I’m leaving in the whole rest of the “in conclusion” section:

We have fought for freedom, expanded liberty, defeated totalitarianism and terror.

And built the strongest, freest, and most prosperous nation the world has ever known.

Now is the hour.

Our moment of responsibility.

Our test of resolve and conscience, of history itself.

It is in this moment that our character is formed. Our purpose is found. Our future is forged.

Well, I know this nation.  

We will meet the test.

To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity.

We will save democracy.

As hard as these times have been, I am more optimistic about America today than I have been my whole life.

Because I see the future that is within our grasp.

Because I know there is simply nothing beyond our capacity.

We are the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we have faced into an opportunity.

The only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities.

So on this night, in our 245th year as a nation, I have come to report on the State of the Union.

And my report is this: The State of the Union is strong—because you, the American people, are strong. There it is! Back in Japan I loved the phrase matte mashita from the audience at kabuki performances. It means “We’ve been waiting for it!” and it greets the appearance of familiar characters or scenes. A State of the Union address traditionally requires a sentence saying “The State of the Union is …” Matte mashita! Biden is one of the few to save the big reveal for the very end of the speech. I think this is a nice touch.

We are stronger today than we were a year ago.

And we will be stronger a year from now than we are today.

Now is our moment to meet and overcome the challenges of our time.

And we will, as one people.

One America.

The United States of America.

May God bless you all. May God protect our troops.

This is Biden’s trademark ending for all of his speeches, and it is gracious and heartfelt.

In this speech he told us what his work involves, in his own words. Some people will agree, many others will disagree, and most Americans won’t have registered the speech at all. But I think he used the opportunity as well as he could have.

President Joe Biden sought to repair Americans’ faith in his leadership with a forceful State of the Union address last night that portrayed him as a resolute champion of financially squeezed families at home and freedom abroad.

Repeatedly through the speech, Biden rejected stark political choices. Vigorous at points, meandering at others, the speech was neither a full-scale course correction, like Bill Clinton’s 1996 declaration that “the era of big government is over,” nor a stubborn reaffirmation of the strategies Biden employed during his trying first year in office. The president at times gave each faction in his party reasons to cheer, but did not align entirely with either liberals or centrists.

Instead, the address showed Biden and his advisers trying to define a distinctive political space centered on providing kitchen-table assistance to average families, encouraging greater national unity, and reasserting America’s role as the leader of the small-d democratic world against challenges from aggressive autocracies symbolized by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The speech was the performance of a president who remains confident in his political compass, even as the steep and persistent decline in his job-approval ratings since last summer has caused many people in both parties to question it. Throughout, Biden underscored his determination to combine positions often considered incompatible.

Toward Republicans, Biden was alternately conciliatory (proposing “a unity agenda” and praising their involvement in the bipartisan infrastructure bill) and confrontational (denouncing Donald Trump’s tax cuts and the surge of red-state laws rolling back civil rights and liberties). He pointedly renounced one of the most polarizing battle cries of his own party’s liberal vanguard, calling to “fund the police” rather than “defund the police,” while reasserting his commitment to criminal-justice reform and gun control, both enduring priorities for the left.

[Read: Biden’s chance at redemption]

On the economy, Biden both celebrated the past year’s gains in jobs and growth and acknowledged that for many Americans, inflation is overshadowing those advances. He cheered big domestic investments from such giant American corporations as Intel, General Motors, and Ford, but also promised tougher antitrust enforcement and a crackdown on companies that evade federal taxes. He praised international diplomatic and military cooperation but offered an unabashedly nationalistic economic vision centered on promoting more domestic manufacturing and supply-chain self-sufficiency.

Likewise, Biden took credit for reducing the federal deficit, even as he proposed sweeping new spending programs. Rushing to the head of a rapidly moving parade, he celebrated America’s reopening after the latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic, but also outlined steps he’s taking to prepare for another potential resurgence. And seeming to acknowledge the inevitable, he never mentioned the massive Build Back Better legislation that Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has single-handedly derailed. But he reiterated his support for almost all of its central provisions.

Few presidents have come into a State of the Union address needing a second wind as badly as Biden did last night. A flurry of national polls released just before the speech showed his job-approval rating sinking to 40 percent or lower, the equivalent of a blinking red light on a car dashboard. In surveys by ABC/Washington Post, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist, and Suffolk University/USA Today, only about 30 percent of independent voters said they approved of his performance, about as low a point as even Donald Trump ever reached among independents. Those surveys, and other recent polls by CBS and Fox News, have all shown Biden posting especially weak numbers among two key Democratic constituencies: Hispanics and young adults. Those are all scary results for Democrats; in midterm elections, about 85 percent of the voters who disapprove of a president’s performance vote against his party’s House and Senate candidates.

Perhaps most ominous for Biden, the recent Suffolk, ABC/Washington Post, and Fox polls all found that only about one-third of Americans now view him as a strong leader, with about three-fifths rejecting that description.

“He comes across as an old man who’s not all there all the time, and that’s not what you want in the White House,” the Republican pollster Glen Bolger argues. “People are saying we traded in a bully for someone who just doesn’t have his act together.” Most voters, Bolger adds, “don’t have faith in him to show the leadership to get us out of these problems.”

Privately, some Democratic pollsters largely agree that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, his stalled legislative agenda, growing inflation, and the continued turmoil from the pandemic have created an impression that Biden is reacting to events rather than controlling them. Sarah Longwell, the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project, an organization of Never Trump Republicans, has regularly conducted focus groups among voters since 2020. “What comes up a lot is you don’t see him,” she says of the reactions to Biden in recent months. “You have to be more visible; people have to see your hands on the wheel, have to see you are trying on the things they care about.”

[Read: Does Biden have a second act?]

Political strategists in both parties say that since last summer, Biden has faced what amounts to a three-sided squeeze. With conservative media fanning the flames, Republicans have been stoked to raging opposition. Democratic-base voters, particularly younger people and hard-core liberals who were never enthusiastic about Biden, have grown more disillusioned and frustrated as he’s been unable to steer his legislative agenda past the combined resistance of Senate Republicans and Democrats Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Independent voters, meanwhile, have been disillusioned less by these ideological and partisan considerations than by dissatisfaction over inflation and the pandemic. For any of those groups, in recent months “there is really not much Joe Biden can point to as a win,” says the Republican consultant John Thomas.

The crisis in Ukraine has given Biden his first big opportunity for a reset. He’s drawn widespread praise from foreign-policy experts in both parties for uniting NATO, the European Union, and other Western nations in a surprisingly robust and cohesive response grounded in economic sanctions against Russia and military aid to Ukraine.

In his speech yesterday, Biden advanced from that beachhead by repeatedly stressing the value of alliances and international cooperation. That presented a stark, if implicit, contrast with Trump, who as president frequently feuded with allies while praising Putin (an instinct he’s continued to display even in the past few days). Floyd Ciruli, the director of the University of Denver’s Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research, says the global outrage over Putin’s invasion has triggered a “wave” of support for nations linking arms to support democracy and resist aggression. “At any of these moments in national tragedies or threats, you need the whole wave moving in the right direction” to lift a president, Ciruli told me. “This is a very tough time; we are very polarized, and there is obviously going to be criticism from Republicans. But nonetheless I do think he has a wave, and if he can ride it well in the next few days, it benefits him.”

No equally obvious pivot point is available to Biden on domestic issues. Even with Omicron receding and jobs and wages growing, inflation continues to generate widespread anxiety over the economy and the nation’s overall direction. And although many Democrats still hope to resurrect the domestic economic agenda that Biden touted last night, no one can say with any confidence what, if anything, Manchin will agree to pass through the Senate. (His initial comments after the speech were hardly encouraging.)

Yesterday’s speech offered important clues about how Biden hopes to navigate that difficult landscape. Democratic strategists have been arguing for months over whether Biden should tout the genuine gains in jobs and wages or if doing so would make him seem tone-deaf to the continued economic strain of families hit hardest by inflation. Last night, his answer was to claim credit for the gains—and to link them to the American Rescue Plan Democrats passed early last year—while also promising to combat inflation through tougher antitrust enforcement and proposals to control costs for prescription drugs, utilities (through his agenda to promote clean energy), child care, and health insurance.

The challenge in highlighting those proposals is that all of them (except the antitrust enforcement) are included in the sweeping legislation Manchin has blocked in the Senate. By showcasing those ideas, Biden risks reminding voters that he has been unable to move his agenda through Congress despite Democrats’ control of both the House and the Senate (albeit by historically narrow margins). In other words, by addressing voters’ doubts that he shares their concerns about rising prices, Biden risks exacerbating their doubts that has the skills and strength to drive his agenda into law.

Biden last night revealed his solution to that conundrum too: He simply presented his plans on prescription drugs, medical and child-care costs, and climate change as aspirational goals without ever mentioning that they are stuck in Congress. That choice points him in the same direction as the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees, which are now focused less on selling what Democrats have actually passed into law than on drawing contrasts with Republicans based on what each side is trying to pass. “As the incumbent party, it’s always stronger to have delivered, than to [just] have a plan for it, but I’d rather have a plan for it than have no answers for it, which is what we’re getting from Republicans,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic communications strategist.

Biden previewed other likely campaign themes in his speech. Drawing boos from Republicans, he denounced the tax cuts the party passed under Trump. And, more than he had in one setting before, he took direct aim at the proliferating red-state laws restricting access to voting and abortion and targeting young transgenderpeople.

Republicans in turn showed how much they intend to lean into those same fights by selecting Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds to give their response; her sharp remarks centered a succession of GOP culture-war arguments on crime, immigration, masking, abortion, and “parents’ rights.” The widening cultural gulf between the parties was evident in the juxtaposition of Biden telling young transgender people “I will always have your back as your president” and Iowa’s Republican-controlled state legislature preparing to finalize, as soon as this week, legislation backed by Reynolds that would bar transgender girls from competing in high-school or college sports.

Biden still faces all the political and policy challenges he did yesterday; State of the Union addresses have rarely functioned as a true reset for any president, especially because in the modern era they are typically watched by voters who already agree with him. It’s highly unlikely that Biden has climbed out of the political ditch. But the speech showed nervous Democrats that he has a theory of how he will do so. And that’s a start.