Captain Maya Yoshida's equalizer spared the home team blushes as they began to look ahead to November's main event in Qatar.

Do we ever really understand our parents? Certainly not when we’re children. If we’re lucky, we begin to understand them later. We might one day realize, for example, that they carried burdens we couldn’t see. Sometimes I wonder if I might have learned something important about what was to come in adulthood had I been paying closer attention when I was little, but no, I couldn’t have related then. It is only in recent years, when the most maddening, haunting fact of parenting has become clear to me, that I’ve realized my mom and dad must have known it all along: What parents want most of all—to keep our children safe forever––is the one thing that’s absolutely impossible.

This article was adapted from Mary Laura Philpott’s book Bomb Shelter (Atria Books)

I had a revelation along these lines after a phone call from my father on a Saturday afternoon a few years ago. I was making lunch in my kitchen for myself, my husband, and our adolescent son and daughter. We were in the phase of life where our children were beginning to turn into adults, time ticking by as one teenager prepared to leave the nest after the other. As their lives grew busier with each passing year, I saw less and less of them. They were moving further out from under my wing, and I felt proud of them at the same time that I had a primal urge to swallow them whole, absorb them right back into my body.

As I sliced cabbage into ribbons for slaw, Dad told me about my mother’s garden project and a sci-fi movie he wanted to go see. Just as I was about to say goodbye, he asked if I’d heard about a new book by Garrett M. Graff. “It’s called Raven Rock.”

[Dear Therapist: I’m scared of having kids]

I had indeed heard some buzz about the book. It was the true story of the secret underground bunkers the U.S. maintained for decades starting in the 20th century, intended to house and protect high-ranking government officials in the event of a nuclear attack. The book’s subtitle says it all: “The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die.”

My dad’s bedside table is typically stacked with paperback novels about what the world would be like if the planet were ruled by Russian robots or if America had been taken over by zombies. So when he asked if I’d order him this book about hidden subterranean government control centers, I said, “Sure, Dad. Sounds right up your alley.”

“It reminds me of when I worked there,” he replied.

“Worked where?”

“There.”

“... there?”

“Yeah, at Site R—at Raven Rock.”

Oh, of course. There. The secret underground bunker he had never mentioned to me once in my life.

You think you know somebody.

I reviewed what I knew—or what I thought I knew—about my father’s career.

During Vietnam, my father was in medical school as well as the army reserve. While on a rotation in Hawaii, where he and my mother lived briefly before I was born, his responsibilities included treating soldiers and their families; across the ocean in the battle-bloody jungle, many of his peers were fighting. Born at the dawn of the Cold War, educated in the “duck and cover” years of hiding under classroom desks during bomb drills, he had never imagined war as some kind of vague, far-off possibility. He knew the truth, that whether it is happening here at home or on a continent far enough away to seem “foreign” to those who wish to distance themselves from it, conflict is raging somewhere at any given time. War is always.

[Read: How to survive the blitz]

Dad stayed in the army for a few more years after he and my mom left Hawaii, while he continued his specialized medical training. He went on to become a renowned surgeon, moving our family from city to city after I was born, dedicating his life to intellectual challenge and scientific innovation. In the operating room, he used cutting-edge equipment to restore people’s hearing and relieve patients of pain. He often traveled the world to share expertise in his highly specialized field of neurotology. When he couldn’t find the exact tools he wanted for performing microsurgery inside people’s ears, he invented them. He often prowled Home Depot for tidbits of metal and plastic, screws and hinges, then put them together and took them apart again in his basement workshop, creating prototypes for things he’d like to make on a smaller scale.

Growing up, I knew we had lived near the nation’s capital during the Bicentennial celebration of 1976, not because I remembered it—I was barely more than a baby—but because I’d seen pictures of my toddler self walking around the parade grounds waving a little American flag.

Is it really possible that I had no idea what my dad had been doing when I was young?

It wasn’t as if our family stopped doing regular things while my father was doing this not-at-all-regular job. I went to nursery school. We planted a garden, and I stepped on a bee. We found a baby bird and tried to feed it in a shoe box and buried it when it died. I found a roll of cinnamon breath mints and ate the whole thing and for one long afternoon thought I could breathe fire. These are the things I remember.

The extraordinary doesn’t wipe out the ordinary. People get married in wartime. Babies are born during pandemics. My mom drew water for my bath and flung wet clothes into the dryer and taught me to tie my shoes while my father did test runs for the end of the world.

After my dad casually dropped this news, I pressed for some details. “But what exactly were you doing when we lived outside D.C.?”

He explained that he had been a general medical officer stationed at the Fort Ritchie health clinic. He and some other officers were assigned the job of going to Camp David for routine tasks such as giving flu shots to the company of marines stationed there. My dad was not the physician to President Gerald Ford—he was far too young then—but he was at Camp David sometimes when Ford visited.

“What about Raven Rock?” I asked.

“We called it ‘Site R.’ My army corpsman, George, and I would go over fairly frequently to check on things. Sometimes we’d take the Oldsmobile ambulance to the helipad when the secretary of defense came up. Good thing the helicopter never crashed.” He chuckled.

“But the thing with the drills, what did you practice?”

“We practiced the plan.”

“I know, but … what was the plan?”

“Well, the plan was, George and I would get over there fast to open up the hospital and hope the rest of the team would get there soon. I suppose we were there to keep people alive—the people who would run the country and the military in the event of a disaster.”

[Read: This is a uniquely perilous moment]

“Oh my God, Dad. How did you feel about all that?”

“Dazzled, at first! Then kind of bored. We were never put to use, thank goodness.”

I asked if the existential weight of it ever got to him. He handed the phone to my mom.

“Every now and then … off he would go into the cave, and there we would sit at home,” she said. “I didn’t feel like we were in any real danger of having a nuclear attack—it was just drills. But every now and then I would look at you and think, Well, what are we? Lunch meat?”

Graff’s book—which I bought and read after this conversation—includes a scene in which President Ford’s press secretary, Ron Nessen, tours one of the secret bunkers in 1976:

“The last line of his evacuation instructions had been clear: ‘There are no provisions for families at the relocation or assembly sites.’ Would he have really abandoned all of his family in the country’s hour of need?”

What a question.

Was it strange for my father? To descend below the surface of the Earth, to go through the motions of what he would do if the president were rushed into an underground hospital while, above ground, human life ceased? Did he walk out of our house in the morning as I ate my toaster waffle imagining that if this thing he practiced ever came to be, he would one day walk out of this house and never walk in again? That my mother, our house, my baby brother, and I would all be blasted into hot dust?

I wondered whether my dad ever thought the whole exercise was pointless. If humanity has nuked itself into oblivion and there’s no safe world left to return to above ground, it’s not like hunkering down in a man-made fallout fortress will be any more effective than ducking and covering beneath a desk. The end still awaits whenever they open up that chamber, meaning that no one is really saved, only temporarily protected. Getting ready for an atomic bomb to fall doesn’t predict or influence whether the bomb will fall. It’s all pretend, just busywork, isn’t it?

What is a bomb shelter but either practice for something that will never happen or a postponement of the inevitable?

When I was in college—oh, this is one of my favorite Dad stories—he used to send the most bizarre care packages. Other kids received Tupperware containers full of homemade brownies, maybe a pair of mittens or an envelope of cash if they were lucky. That’s what I got, too, if my mom was packing the box. But the packages from my dad almost never included a note and always contained canned food.

It was a strange delight, toting those boxes across campus from the post office, knowing from their heft that they were filled with nonperishable items for a pantry I didn’t have. It became a joke between my roommate and me. What would my dad send next––Vienna sausages, canned pineapple? Did he think I didn’t have access to food at school? That my dorm-mates and I might be building some sort of survival stockpile? We giggled every time one arrived—honest to God, we sometimes joked, “Here we go, another bomb-shelter box”—and stacked the cans under our beds. We ate the food, but not as fast as it accumulated.

How strange, I thought then, but also how sweet. My quirky dad, showing love via canned goods, of all things.

I am about 20 years older today than my father was when he worked in the bunker. My son left for college last fall. In two years, my daughter will leave home as well. I realize now that their leaving does not conclude my parenting, at least not in my heart. I will never stop worrying about them. I feel as if I’ve been walking around for decades now wearing an invisible explosive vest. The longer I live, the more I love, the larger this combustible bundle grows, the more I am in awe of my good fortune—and also aware that it could all blow up in an instant, flipping me head over heels into the air, vaporizing everything. Sometimes it almost knocks me down, this combination of gratitude and fear. I often feel like the universe entrusted me with so much more than I could possibly keep safe.

I didn’t understand when I opened those care packages in college. I do now.

Although the worst-case scenario my dad prepared for didn’t come to pass then, other horrors have over the years––and still do. My heart breaks for parents in Ukraine today, putting their children on trains with strangers to travel over a border to safety, watching their teenagers arm themselves to enter combat for which they haven’t been adequately trained.

Whether in a hypothetical nuclear attack, in the brutal reality of ongoing war, or in the simple, mundane truth of being a living soul trapped in a mortal human body, it is a fact: We cannot really save anyone. Not permanently. The safeguards we set up all fall away. In the best-case scenario, our babies grow up healthy and strong under our watch, then leave to set out on their own. Worst case, our attempts to protect our loved ones fail, and they are felled by something we could not stop. Knowing this––as my parents surely did during the bunker years, and as I do now as a mother––could drive us mad.

What do we do, then, if we cannot stop time or prevent every loss?

We carry on with ordinary acts of everyday caretaking. I cannot shield my beloveds forever, but I can make them lunch today. I can teach a teenager to drive. I can take someone to a doctor appointment, fix the big crack in the ceiling when it begins to leak, and tuck everyone in at night until I can’t anymore. I can do small acts of nurturing that stand in for big, impossible acts of permanent protection, because the closest thing to lasting shelter we can offer one another is love, as deep and wide and in as many forms as we can give it.

We take care of who we can and what we can.

The amount of time that elapsed between my 2-year-old self toddling along the National Mall waving a flag and my 18-year-old self moving into a dorm feels vast in my memory. But I understand now that those years didn’t feel long to my father. Between the days when the siren called him down into the bunker and the days when he started packing boxes full of shelf-stable food to send to his baby, hardly any time passed at all.

Editor’s Note: Late last year, The Atlantic published “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” a cover story by Anne Applebaum, a staff writer who has written extensively about corruption and political repression in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and around the world. In response to those concerns, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled a hearing today on how the United States should combat authoritarianism. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made the topic far more urgent. Senator Robert Menendez, who chairs the panel, invited Applebaum to testify. What follows, lightly edited for clarity, is her written submission to the committee. Some parts of this testimony have been adapted from Applebaum’s work in The Atlantic.

All of us have in our mind a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.  

But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance personnel), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with their counterparts in another, with the profits going to the leader and his inner circle. Oligarchs from multiple countries all use the same accountants and lawyers to hide their money in Europe and America. The police forces in one country can arm, equip, and train the police forces in another; China notoriously sells surveillance technology all around the world. Propagandists share resources and tactics—the Russian troll farms that promote Putin’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of Belarus or Venezuela. They also pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. Chinese sources are right now echoing fake Russian stories about nonexistent Ukrainian chemical weapons. Their goal is to launch false narratives and confuse audiences in the United States and other free societies. They do so in order to make us believe that there is nothing we can do in response.

This is not to say that there is a conspiracy—some super-secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. The new autocratic alliance doesn’t have a structure, let alone an ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. Washington likes to talk about China and Chinese influence because that’s easy, but what really links the leaders of these countries is a common desire to preserve their personal power. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like a loose agglomeration of companies. Call it Autocracy, Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to replace Western sanctions or take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.

[Veronika Melkozerova: The Western world is in denial]

They protect one another and look after one another. In theory, for example, Venezuela is an international pariah. Since 2019, U.S. citizens and U.S. companies have been forbidden to do any business there; Canada, the European Union, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors continue to increase sanctions on the country. And yet Venezuela receives loans as well as oil investment from Moscow and Beijing. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to Venezuela’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, observes that although Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s a drop in the bucket, “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”

In the face of this new challenge, Western and American responses have been profoundly inadequate. Expressions of “deep concern” mean nothing to dictators who feel secure thanks to their high levels of surveillance and their personal wealth. Western sanctions alone have no impact on autocrats who know they can continue to trade with one another. As the war in Ukraine illustrates, our failure to use military deterrence had consequences. Russia did not believe that we would arm Ukraine because we had not done so in the past.

For all of these reasons, we need a completely new strategy toward Russia, China, and the rest of the autocratic world, one in which we don’t merely react to the latest outrage, but change the rules of engagement altogether. We cannot merely slap sanctions on foreign oligarchs following some violation of international law, or our own laws: We must alter our financial system so that we stop kleptocratic elites from abusing it in the first place. We cannot just respond with furious fact-checking and denials when autocrats produce blatant propaganda: We must help provide accurate and timely information where there is none, and deliver it in the languages people speak. We cannot rely on old ideas about the liberal world order, the inviolability of borders, or international institutions and treaties to protect our friends and allies: We need a military strategy, based in deterrence, that takes into account the real possibility that autocracies will use military force.

The war in Ukraine has been launched because we did not do any of these things in the past. As he was preparing for this conflict, the Russian president calculated that the cost of international criticism, sanctions, and military resistance would be very low. He would survive them. Past Russian invasions of Ukraine and Georgia; Russian assassinations carried out in Britain and Germany; Russian disinformation campaigns during democratic elections in America, France, Germany, and elsewhere; Russian support for extremist or anti-democratic politicians—none of this received any real response from us or from the democratic alliances that we lead. Vladimir Putin assumed, based on his own experience, that we would not react this time either. China, Belarus, and other Russian allies assumed the same.

Going forward, we cannot let this happen again. In my written testimony I will suggest some broad areas where we need to completely reimagine our policy. I will leave the necessary changes in military and intelligence strategy, especially the question of deterrence, to others who have more expertise in this area, and will focus on kleptocracy and disinformation. But I hope this hearing sparks a broader conversation. We need far more creative thinking about how we can not just survive the war in Ukraine, but win the war in Ukraine—and how we can prevent similar wars from taking place in the future.

1. Put an end to transnational kleptocracy.

Currently a Russian, Angolan, or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal to his own tax authorities or ours that these properties are his. A whole host of American and European intermediaries make these kinds of transactions possible: lawyers, bankers, accountants, real-estate agents, PR companies. Their work is legal. We have made it so. We can just as easily make it illegal. All of it. We don’t need to tolerate a little bit of corruption; we can simply end the whole system, altogether.

[Casey Michel: The United States of dirty money]

Although this testimony is being presented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which does not traditionally have oversight of the regulation of international finance, it is time to recognize the problem of international kleptocracy as a matter not just for the Treasury, but for those who make American foreign policy. After all, many modern autocrats hold on to power not just with violence, but by stealing from their own countries, laundering the money abroad, and then using their fortunes to maintain power at home and buy influence abroad. The Russian oligarchs in the news at the moment are not just wealthy men with yachts; they have been acting for many years as agents of the Russian state, representing the interests of the Russian leadership in myriad commercial and political transactions.

We have the power to destroy this business model. We could require all real-estate transactions, everywhere in the United States, to be totally transparent. We could require all companies, trusts, and investment funds to be registered in the name of their real owners. We could ban Americans from keeping their money in tax havens, and we could ban American lawyers and accountants from engaging with tax havens. We could force art dealers and auction houses to carry out money-laundering checks, and close loopholes that allow anonymity in the private-equity and hedge-fund industries. We could launch a diplomatic crusade to persuade other democracies to do the same. Simply ending these practices would make life much more uncomfortable for the world’s kleptocrats. It might have the benefit of making our own country more law-abiding, and freer of autocratic influence, as well.

In addition to changing the law, we also need to jail those who break it. We need to step up our enforcement of the existing money-laundering laws. It is not enough to sanction Russian oligarchs now, when it is too late, or to investigate their enablers, when it is too late for that too. We need to prevent new kleptocratic elites from forming in the future. It must become not only socially toxic but also a criminal liability for anyone to handle stolen money, and not just in America.

Now is the time to organize a deep international conversation, with our allies all over the world, to assess what they are doing, whether they are succeeding, and which steps we all need to take to ensure that we are not building the autocracies of the future. Now is the time to reveal what we know about hidden money and who really controls it. The Biden administration has created a precedent, revealing intelligence leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why not build on that precedent, and reveal what intelligence we have about Putin’s money, Maduro’s money, Xi Jinping’s money, or Alexander Lukashenko’s money?

Just as we once built an international anti-communist alliance, so we can build an international anti-corruption alliance, organized around the idea of transparency, accountability, and fairness. Those are the values that we should promote, not only at home but around the world. They are consistent with our democratic constitutions and with the rule of law that underlies all of our societies. Once again: Our failure to abide by those values in the past is one of the sources of today’s crisis.

2. Don’t fight the information war. Undermine it.

Modern autocrats take information and ideas seriously. They understand the importance not only of controlling opinion inside their own countries, but also of influencing debates around the world. They spend accordingly: on television channels, local and national newspapers, bot networks. They buy officials and businessmen in democratic countries in order to have local spokesmen and advocates. China’s United Front program also targets students, younger journalists, and politicians, seeking to influence their thinking from an early age.

For three decades, since the end of the Cold War, we have been pretending that we don’t have to do any of this, because good information will somehow win the battle in the “market of ideas.” But there isn’t a market of ideas—or not a free market. Instead, some ideas have been turbocharged by disinformation campaigns, by heavy spending, and by the social-media algorithms that promote emotional and divisive content because that’s what keeps people online. Since we first encountered Russian disinformation inside our own society, we’ve also imagined that our existing forms of communication could beat it without any special effort. But a decade’s worth of studying Russian propaganda has taught me that fact-checking and swift reactions are useful but insufficient.

We have a living example of how this works, right in front of us now. We can see how the Ukrainians are getting their viewpoint across by telling a moving, true story, by speaking in language used by ordinary people and by showing us the war as they see it. In doing so, they are reaching Americans, Europeans, and many others. But at the same time, the false Russian narrative is the only one reaching Russians at home; it is also reaching many people in the broader Russian-speaking world, as well as in India and the Middle East. The same is true of Chinese propaganda, which might not work here but has a strong impact in the developing world, where China presents its political system as a model for others to follow. Right now, for example, private technology groups there, including Tencent, Sina Weibo, and ByteDance, are promoting content backing Putin’s war and suppressing posts that are sympathetic to Ukraine.

In this new atmosphere, we need to rethink how we communicate. Much as we assembled the Department of Homeland Security out of disparate agencies after 9/11, we now need a much more carefully targeted effort that would pull together some of the departments in the U.S. government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information. The building blocks already exist, even if they are not currently coordinated. All of these things belong together: U.S.-funded international broadcasting, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and the rest of the services now housed at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM); the Global Engagement Center, currently in the State Department; the Open Source Center, a large media monitoring and translation service currently squirreled away in the intelligence community where its work is hard to access; research into foreign audiences and internet tactics; public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy.

The teams who work on these things should be jointly thinking about the best way to communicate democratic values in undemocratic places, jointly sharing experiences, jointly informing and engaging other parts of the U.S. government. In any given country there are different kinds of audiences and there may be different tools and tactics needed to reach them. Parts of the U.S. government may have thought about this problem, but others have not. The dysfunction and scandal that have dogged international broadcasting—with Michael Pack’s disastrous tenure at USAGM as only the latest example—needs to end. Congressional leadership is needed to put these services on a different and better footing.

Some of what we should do is simply provide more and better information to people who want it. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s online performance increased by 99 percent during the first two weeks of war in Ukraine. Viewership of YouTube videos of RFE/RL programming tripled. This proves the value of communicating with Russian speakers all over Eurasia—Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, even Germany, home to some 3 million native Russian speakers. But small increases in funding for this vital population are insufficient.

We need to provide real, long-lasting competition for the Russian state-run cable and satellite television that most of the people in these regions watch. Hundreds of talented Russian journalists and media professionals have just fled Moscow: Why not start a Russian television channel, perhaps jointly funded by Europe and America, to employ them and give them a way to work? At the same time, we should increase funding for existing Russian independent media outlets, most now expelled from the country, and provide support for the many grassroots efforts to run social-media campaigns inside and outside the country.

But although Russia is of special interest at the moment, we also need to consider, as Congress is already doing, an expansion of funding for Radio Free Asia, which has received only a third of the funding of RFE/RL, despite its potential to reach a large audience inside China and the Chinese diaspora around the world. Although relatively small, Radio Free Asia was the first news organization to uncover mass detentions in Xinjiang; RFA also provided the first documentation of China’s cover-up of the earliest coronavirus fatalities in Wuhan. We need RFA to be able to counter Chinese propaganda; to put China’s Belt and Road projects in Southeast Asia into context for audiences in Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam; to enhance its digital global initiative to engage younger, Mandarin-speaking audiences wary of Beijing’s dominant media narratives. We also need to scale up the work of the Open Technology Fund, which supports internet-freedom technologies at every stage of development. OTF makes it possible for millions to access independent journalism in closed media environments.

In all of the foreign languages that we work, we need to shift from an era of bullhorn digital broadcasting to a new era of “digital samizdat,” mobilizing informed citizens and teaching them to distribute information. These tactics may not get to everyone, but they can be targeted at younger audiences, diasporas, and elites who have influence within their countries.

In this new era, funding for education and culture need some rethinking too. Shouldn’t there be a Russian-language university, in Vilnius or Warsaw, to house all of the intellectuals and thinkers who have just left Moscow? Don’t we need to spend more on education in Hindi and Persian? Existing programs should be recast and redesigned for a different era, one in which so much more can be known about the world, but in which so much money is being spent by the autocracies to distort that knowledge. The goal should be to ensure that a different idea of “Russianness” is available to the Russian diaspora, aside from the one provided by Putin, and that alternative outlets are available for people in other autocratic societies as well.

3. Put democracy back at the center of foreign policy.

It is no accident that Americans are united in their support for Ukraine. A large, bipartisan majority, for example, back the U.S. decision to boycott Russian oil, even if it led to higher prices. This is because Americans identify with people who are clearly fighting for their freedom, their independence, and their democracy. It is a central part of how we define ourselves, and who we are.

[Ben Rhodes: We have reached a hinge point in history]

I recognize that it is naive to assume we can have the same policy toward every dictator, that we cannot give the same support to every democracy movement; I understand that there are trade-offs to make in diplomacy as in everything else. This is not the Cold War, there is no Warsaw Pact, and not every judgment about every autocracy is black-and-white. But our preference for democracy and our willingness to defend key democracies should never be in doubt. The fact is that Russians clearly doubted whether we and our allies were even willing to help Ukraine fight back. We failed, in advance, to telegraph the fact that we would. We cannot let that happen again.

In addition to being a historian and journalist, I am also on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the independent organization that Congress has generously funded for years. I want to express here my thanks for that support, as well as my hope that it will continue. NED is ahead of the curve in its thinking about these issues, has supported networks of journalists to help in international investigations of kleptocracy as well as independent journalism of all kinds, on top of its support for democracy activism all over the world. Funding NED is necessary but not sufficient, however. U.S. foreign policy is in fact made by dozens of different actors, all across the government and American society. Congressional leadership can help focus all of them not just on the defense of existing institutions, but on the creative thinking we lack.

To put it bluntly, we need to be able to imagine a different kind of future, one in which our nation and its ideas are not in retreat, but in the ascendance. We need to approach displaced diasporas all over the world as an opportunity, not a burden: How can we prepare them to take back the countries that they have lost, in Syria, Afghanistan, or Russia? We need to break the links among autocracies, to forge new and better links between democracies, to reinvent existing international institutions that are no longer fit for purpose. It is alarming, even astonishing, that the United Nations has played no role in preventing or mitigating the war in Ukraine because Russia, as a Security Council member, has so successfully blocked it from doing so. In fact, Russia and China have been seeking for years to undermine the UN and all of the other international organizations that conventional wisdom said would promote human rights and prevent exactly the kind of unprovoked war that we are seeing unfold today. It may be time to create some alternatives, to think about how the democratic world can organize alternatives, in the event that the UN is no longer interested in pursuing peaceful development.

Finally, it’s extremely important that we imagine a different future for Ukraine. A victory in this conflict, whatever that means—a Russian retreat or a negotiated settlement following Russia’s failure to conquer the country—would provide an enormous, transformational boost in confidence to the entire democratic world, including to the democratic activists in Belarus and Ukraine who oppose the war, even to democratic activists in places as far away as Hong Kong, Burma, or Venezuela.

A defeat, defined as the end of Ukrainian sovereignty, would be a terrible blow to all of them. The consequences are much higher than most in Congress and the administration seem to have yet acknowledged. Ukraine is not in NATO, but it is a de facto member of the European world and the democratic world. Ukrainian failure will have an impact on NATO’s credibility and on the democratic world’s cohesion, whether we like it or not.

We need to think about victory, and how to achieve it, not only in this conflict but in the others to come, over the next years and decades.

“When you’re at war, you’re at war,” the saying goes, and if so, you have to accept the implications. So too in the present circumstance. The United States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia. They are supplying thousands of munitions and hopefully doing much else—sharing intelligence, for example—with the intent of killing Russian soldiers. And because fighting is, as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said, “a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter,” we must face a fact: To break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and subjugation, many Russian soldiers have to flee, surrender, or die, and the more and faster the better.

Thus far the Biden administration has done an admirable job of winning the information war, mobilizing the NATO alliance, and imposing crippling (if not yet complete) sanctions on the Russian economy. It has, it appears, sped the delivery of some weapon systems (notably Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable surface-to-air missiles) to Ukrainian forces. But beyond those measures to prosecute this proxy war as a war, it is stumbling.

The recent dustup about a Polish proposal to hand MiG-29 fighter planes to the United States to then pass to Ukrainian forces, the deficit being made good by spare U.S. F-16 fighters to Poland, is a prime example of this. On March 6, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Face the Nation:

That gets a green light. In fact, we’re talking with our Polish friends right now about what we might be able to do to backfill their needs if in fact they choose to provide these fighter jets to the Ukrainians. What could we do? How can we help to make sure that they get something to backfill the planes that they're handing over to the Ukrainians? We’re in very active discussions with them about that.

Two days later, the Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said, “We will continue to consult with Poland and our other NATO allies about this issue and the difficult logistical challenges it presents, but we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one … It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it.”

What followed were a set of petulant comments and leaks about how the United States had been blindsided by the Poles, that the planes would not do the Ukrainians much good, and that the proposed exchange would pose unacceptable escalatory risks.

Each of these criticisms was misplaced, and that is putting it kindly. More of the problem lies on the American rather than on the Polish side, it would appear, where the Department of State and the Department of Defense were not coordinated—the job of the National Security Council staff. For close observers of last summer’s Afghanistan fiasco, this foul-up was disturbingly familiar. When you are at war, you need to be disciplined in your decision making, and once again, the United States was not.

Whether the MiG-29s could be successfully operated by the Ukrainians (who have their own MiG-29s) with just a few weeks of familiarization is an unclear technical point. The Poles have just under 100 fighter aircraft, of which 28 are MiG-29s. They also have 48 F-16s. The swap, from that point of view, was not only doable but sensible: The Poles would be strengthened by the F-16s. But even if the Ukrainians would struggle to use the MiG-29s effectively, the point is that Ukraine is a friendly nation fighting for its life, and sometimes, in coalition war, you do things that make a statement and build morale even if they are not militarily optimal. The Allies sent convoys of equipment to the Soviet Union at horrendous cost during World War II, in order to keep Stalin in the war, for exactly this reason. And in the same vein, the snide remarks about uncontrollable Poles come from American officials whose border is not a front line with a war zone, and who have not been willing to take in refugees by the hundreds of thousands, let alone by the million. A wartime coalition leader has to act like one, reassuring besieged and risk-taking allies even if they are not always technically correct. Instead, American officials whinged.

But perhaps the most pernicious note here was the hand-wringing over escalation. On the face of it, that is an absurd notion. Javelins kill Russian soldiers. Stingers kill Russian pilots and soldiers. A MiG-29 is just one more weapon that would kill Russian pilots and soldiers. And having already hinted that the United States would supply more sophisticated surface-to-air weapons to Ukraine, the notion that transferring fighter planes would escalate the conflict is simply preposterous.

The American fear of escalation has been a repeated note throughout this conflict. But to the extent American leaders express that sentiment, or spread such notions to receptive reporters, they make matters worse, giving the Russians a psychological edge. The Russians can (and do) threaten to ratchet things up, knowing that the West will respond with increased anxiety rather than reciprocal menace. We have yet to see, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin telling the world what a wretched hand the Russians are playing militarily, and how superior ours is—a message he is particularly fit to deliver.

As for the nuclear question: We should not signal to the Russians that they have a trump card they can always play to stop us from doing pretty much anything. Nuclear weapons are why the United States should refrain from attacking Russia directly, not why it should fear fighting Russians in a country they invaded. Only a few years ago, the United States Air Force killed Russian Wagner mercenaries by the hundreds in Syria; American and Russian pilots tangled in the skies over Korea and possibly Vietnam. Nuclear deterrence cuts both ways, and the Russian leadership knows it. Vladimir Putin and those around him are ill-informed but not mad, and the use of nuclear weapons would threaten their very survival.

When the Ukrainians are willing to spill their blood, seemingly without limit, in a wholly admirable cause, American hesitation is heartbreaking. New Hampshire license plates bear the state motto Live Free or Die, attributed to the Revolutionary War General John Stark. The Ukrainians are acting on that belief, which previous generations of Americans acted upon as well.

And it is all completely unnecessary. In many ways, American decision makers are still acting on the basis of widespread prewar analysis of the Russian military that has proved utterly unjustified by events. The Russians do not have what is technically termed escalation dominance. NATO (and above all, American) air power could sweep the skies over Ukraine clear of Russian aircraft, and after a week or two of smashing Russian air defenses, devastate its ground forces. The Russian army is not advancing implacably; it is plagued by incompetence, poor supplies, corruption, terrible morale, bad tactics, and a cause in which its soldiers do not believe. Russian reserves are not like the Israeli reserves, the Finnish reserves, or for that matter the American National Guard: They are badly equipped and do not train. The truth is, with enough arms, the Ukrainians can break the invaders, and in some areas they have begun to do so.

It is not just the fact and the atmospherics of arms supply to Ukraine that matter now, but scale and urgency. The United States has said that it has begun shipping $200 million in aid. That sounds well enough, but when Javelin missiles cost in the low six figures each, that is less than it sounds—and at least an order of magnitude less than is necessary. As the leader of NATO and of the free world, the United States needs to think much bigger than it has thus far. The stream of arms going into Ukraine needs to be a flood.

This is a war of desperate importance not just to Europe but to international order and freedom everywhere. American officials need to rise to the moment. They cannot snipe on or off the record at allies, they cannot dodge the extent of what needs doing, and they most definitely cannot talk as though they are afraid of what Putin may do. That is the most ruinous error of all. They need to say, and say repeatedly, that a Russian war with NATO would only consummate the destruction that the Russian military is suffering at this very moment.

In the movie The Untouchables, the cop Jim Malone tells Eliot Ness what bringing down the gangster Al Capone is going to require: “You wanna know how to get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife; you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital; you send one of his to the morgue … Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?”

Putin and his subordinates are, in fact, less politicians than gangsters, and need to be treated as such. Instead of talk of off-ramps, for example, there should be promises of war-crimes trials (names included) for those who kidnap mayors, shoot at fleeing civilians, and target maternity hospitals; instead of worry about escalation, there should be promises of the eradication of the Russian army in Ukraine should it use chemical weapons. Instead of carefully titrated military aid, there should be a massive effort to arm people who know why they are fighting and are good at it.

This is all bloody and brutal stuff. But, to quote Clausewitz again, “If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand.” We are dealing with an enemy that is vicious but weak, menacing but deeply fearful, and that is likely to crack long before our side does—if only we have the stomach for doing what needs to be done.

Have you been watching the war in Ukraine via TikTok? Supposedly, everyone has been. “This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones,” the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in February. That same week, all kinds of publications started referring to the invasion as “the first TikTok war”; New York Magazine coined the portmanteau “WarTok.” TikTok is a new global platform, and smartphone saturation is new in Ukraine, so perhaps it’s a reasonable claim. But is it a useful one?

The history of war is also a history of media, and popular memory associates specific wars with different media formats. Vietnam was the first television war. The first war in Iraq, in 1991, was the first cable-news war, or the first CNN war. (The network famously pulled off a “coup” by successfully broadcasting live from Baghdad.) Twelve years later, the American invasion of Iraq was “supposed to be CNN’s war” again, but instead became the Fox News war. It was also called “the YouTube war,” in which, as one journalism professor put it, soldiers made “personal and at times shockingly brutal” homemade videos of gunfights, suicide bombings, and other violence, many set to rap or metal music. MTV turned some of this footage into a 2006 documentary titled Iraq Uploaded; then, the following spring, the U.S. military blocked troops from accessing YouTube on military computers. So the YouTube war ended. The Iraq War continued.

The internet incentivizes quickly assembled narratives—ideas you can prove with a fistful of links—and each new war of the internet age has thus been dutifully described as the first of its kind, the first to be associated with the latest trend in digital media. In 2012, Israel and Hamas were said to have engaged in the first war of tweets. In 2013, The Daily Dot referred to the Syrian civil war as the “the first full-blown conflict presented to the world by YouTube and LiveLeak.” In 2016, Time announced the “first Facebook war,” referring to a livestream of Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting to oust the Islamic State from Mosul, in northern Iraq, while The Atlantic quoted a former State Department staffer’s claim that, in making use of Instagram and Twitter, ISIS had become “the first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital territory.”

In this way, global events with stark differences in meaning and costs of life are understood as a collection of online incidents. Wars are named after platforms, whether or not the platforms in question really determined how people thought about that war, or experienced it, or documented it, or fought it. This is sort of tasteless, but also, because we live in a time during which media formats are iterating faster and faster, a little arbitrary. If history plans to call this “the TikTok War,” it should have a compelling case for why.

Let’s start in practical terms: Are people watching and documenting this war through TikTok more so than they are watching and documenting it otherwise? TikTok has 130 million users in the United States, and supposedly 1 billion globally; according to The New York Times, the volume of war content on TikTok “far outweighs” what can be found on Instagram, where videos about the war are also netting significantly fewer views. So, maybe, yes.

For months, researchers at the U.K.-based Centre for Information Resilience have been sourcing and verifying video from various social platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, and then aggregating clips into an easily navigable map of the ongoing conflict. (Videos are laid out geographically, dated, sorted into content categories, and annotated with available details, as well as a “violence level.”) But most of their footage comes from TikTok. When I spoke with Benjamin Strick, the director of investigations for CIR, about his team’s monitoring of Russian troop movements in January and February, he said that “80 to 90 percent” of the videos they were able to document and verify were originally posted to TikTok by civilians. They’re “living their normal lives,” he said, “taking videos of their dogs, taking videos of their food or their parties, and at times they’ll see these massive vehicles driving around, these military units, and they’ll take videos of them.”

Even so, and even in this narrow sense, the war in Ukraine is not literally the first TikTok war. Strick cited widespread use of the app during civil wars in Libya and Syria, and pointed to CIR’s ongoing project Myanmar Witness, which sources documentation of human-rights abuses partly from social media. “There’s a lot of soldiers and police who will even talk about the activities that they do against civilians on TikTok,” he said. Meanwhile, others point out that TikTok was often used by Azerbaijani soldiers during the Nagorno-Karabakh War, and that it hosted plenty of on-the-ground footage of the Taliban’s violent 2021 takeover in Afghanistan. Last spring, while Israel was bombing Gaza, Vox dubbed a parallel struggle over the social-media portrait of the conflict “the TikTok intifada,” and pointed to a viral video showing civilians running away from the site of an air strike, as well as videos made in support of Palestine by beauty bloggers.   

This does seem to be the first war that Americans are watching, in a concerted way, on TikTok—and that could make some kind of difference. The first TikTok war can refer to the first war to be seen on TikTok, or the first to be interpreted via the culture and the rhythms of the TikTok app. “Ukrainians appear to viewers less as distant victims than as fellow Web denizens who know the same references, listen to the same music, and use the same social networks as they do,” Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker, in the most compelling argument so far about how TikTok might be shaping people’s understanding of the conflict. This fosters “a sense of intimacy,” he said.

But every new media format is said to be more immediate, more immersive, and more moving than the one that came before—a fact, or supposition, that commonly intersects with the labeling of wars according to their preeminent broadcast channels. In the 1930s, Virginia Woolf wondered whether photographs of war could ever unite viewers in disgust and aversion to it. President Lyndon B. Johnson wondered in 1968 whether the “vivid scenes” from Vietnam, as shown on TV, might have swayed Americans against the fighting there.

In the case of Vietnam, the story was particularly easy to debunk. Popular support of the war declined steadily, with no evidence of imagery-incited turning points. Historians have noted that newsreels shown in American movie theaters during World War II had larger audiences than most TV news broadcasts had later on, and that they featured more graphic and disturbing combat imagery. An essay published in The New Yorker in 1966—titled “Living-Room War”—is often invoked to bolster the popular narrative of “new media brings new immediacy,” but it argued that broadcasts of the first television war actually “diminished” its reality, with images of “men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall.”

Scott Althaus, a political-science and communication professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied decades of public-opinion data about American wars, told me he’s skeptical of claims that the mere existence of a novel media format has large or measurable effects. “In the Vietnam War, on television news, the typical story was Walter Cronkite sitting in front of a map saying, ‘Here’s what happened today,’” Althaus said. Individuals tend to misremember where they encountered the most startling images from a war, and how the images affected them when they saw them; as a culture, we do this at scale. “It’s just a very complicated question of how much particular images or kinds of information are going to shape the average person’s reaction to what’s going on,” he said.   

He has doubts about the developing story around TikTok too. According to a Pew Research Center survey from last year, 48 percent of American adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” and only 6 percent regularly get news from TikTok. Still, these numbers refer strictly to adults, and TikTok content can be aggregated on other platforms, including by traditional news outlets. “Today, with social media, you’ve got an upward flow of information that’s originating in people’s pockets,” Althaus said. “Who is providing the information is different today. The complexity of the pathways that this information follows and spreads is far more complicated.” People continue to get plenty of their news from TV, radio, and newspapers, whether in print or online. “It’s unlikely that TikTok is fundamentally shaping the information flows that the average person in the world or in the United States is receiving about this conflict,” he told me.

To the extent that TikTok does affect perceptions of the war, it may be more confusing than, say, YouTube or Twitter. TikTok is a remix app, in which users cut together audio and video pulled from anywhere—and during this conflict, they have already done so to create misleading content that is difficult for the average viewer to pick apart. TikTok’s potent recommendation algorithm also generates individual experiences of the war that vary widely from one user’s feed to another. While some TikTok users are seeing graphic footage of war, others are not.

Most of the videos I’ve come across from Ukraine, for example, have been shared by women who appear to be my age or slightly younger, many of whom speak English and have an internet-informed sense of humor. A recent video in my TikTok feed, of young people sitting on top of sleeping bags in a basement while several of them record on smartphones, looks familiar—like a slumber party that I know is grim only from off-platform context. Even conflict researchers have had to train the TikTok algorithm to show them the right content—videos with tangible information about fighting and casualties. Although the average Twitter or Facebook user may not be able to avoid scrolling into news about the war, a TikTok user with little interest in global news could easily skip it altogether.

Whether this really is “the first TikTok War,” wishful thinking colors the very claim. People have good reason to look for some new, crucial difference between the images of one war and those of all other wars that came before. If something is new, then maybe we’ve escaped the same old story in which lots of people die for no reason. If something is new, then maybe it can be different. But to look for that difference in the offerings of a technology company is obviously sad and misguided. In years to come, we will surely see, I don’t know, the first Twitch war, or the first Discord war, or the first war on some new platform that hasn’t even been developed yet.

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine will have “severe” effects on the world economy, the International Monetary Fund warned Saturday. Grain and fuel prices have surged to historic peaks. This seems like an awkward time to offer hope. Yet hope remains.

Our world is much more resilient than it was even a generation ago, especially with regard to food. The food shock of 2022 is not a good-news story. The news is bad. But our “bad” is less bad than ever before.

Russia and Ukraine are massive growers of grain, especially wheat. Russia produces about 10 percent of the planet’s wheat; Ukraine about 4 percent. Some of that production is consumed at home, but after their domestic use, Russia and Ukraine together provide about one-quarter of all the planet’s wheat exports. They are important exporters of corn and barley as well, and of cooking oils, especially sunflower oil. Now the Russian invasion has closed the ports through which Ukraine’s wheat moved to world markets. Insurance costs have jumped for all shipping in the Black Sea. Spring crops will probably go unplanted in Ukraine; Russian crops face sanctions and embargo. Russia and its ally Belarus also are—or were—important exporters of the fertilizer that other food-raising countries use to grow their own crops.

The upheaval will touch every food consumer on Earth, even those living in food-secure countries such as the United States. Food prices are set in efficient global markets. All countries face similar prices, whether they are sellers into those markets or buyers from those markets. If the price goes up for anyone, it goes up for everyone.

Again: Sudden increases in global food prices are not good news. But also again: Some context is necessary. Four points of context, actually.

1. We live in an age of food abundance.

Maybe you retain some memory of old predictions about global famine? A best-selling book published in 1967 carries the lurid title Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? Among other predictions, the authors identified India as the nation most inevitably doomed to mass starvation and economic collapse.

So … guess which country is the world’s second-largest producer of wheat in 2022, accounting for more than 13 percent of all output? That’s right, the former alleged basket case India. Since the 1960s, Indian wheat production has increased by nearly an order of magnitude, to almost 110 million metric tons last year. Indian wheat exports will probably exceed 7 million metric tons this year, up from the previous peak of 6.5 million in 2012–13.

India also exported nearly 18 million metric tons of rice in the 2020–21 marketing season, more than any other country. That’s impressive, but not as dazzling as the performance of Vietnam, which has vaulted from exporting basically nothing as recently as 1989 to second place among rice exporters in the 2020s. (The United States ranks fifth.)

[Read: Debating the link between food prices and revolution]

2. Many food-importing countries can cope.

The world’s largest wheat importer is Egypt. I spoke with Mirette Mabrouk, the director of the Egypt Program at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, D.C. Based on my conversation with her, I’d characterize the food outlook for Egypt as serious but not critical. Egyptian authorities estimate that their reserves will be sufficient for at least the next six months, perhaps the next nine. Egyptian governments have been in the business of managing food reserves for 5,000 years. From the days of Joseph’s storehouses to now, they have accumulated some considerable management capacity.

Egypt buys wheat through a system of reverse auctions: posting a tender for a certain quantity, then accepting the lowest bid for that tender. Since the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt has operated a system of subsidized bakeries that sell low-priced loaves to qualified buyers. More recently, Egypt has begun to convert to direct cash assistance provided through cards that function very much like American electronic-benefits-transfer cards. In a crisis, the Egyptian government can effectively provide more cash assistance to low-income buyers.

This is not to minimize the shock Egypt is facing as the price of wheat rises from a familiar $250 or $300 a metric ton to $500 a metric ton. It is to emphasize that the shock will land on state finances as much as or more than on the Egyptian poor.

Many other major wheat-importing countries are either rich (Italy, Japan, South Korea) or led by reasonably effective governments (Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey) that can emulate Egypt and deliver assistance to the hard-pressed. The countries to worry most about are those wracked by war and political instability: Yemen above all, but also Ethiopia, Mali, and other disrupted states.

3. Global emergency aid can help.

Where famine does threaten, the international community can save lives. In 2021, international relief agencies provided in-kind or cash food assistance to 13 million Yemenis. Such programs will cost more in 2022, but not impossibly more. Before the war in Ukraine, the United Nations’ food program projected a Yemen aid budget of $2 billion for this year. That number will likely go up by 25 percent or more, but the money can be found.

An even more terrifying food crisis faces Afghanistan under its new Taliban rulers. The Taliban’s self-imposed international isolation has been followed by a cruel drought. Millions of lives are at risk. India has committed considerable food aid. The war in Ukraine does not make feeding Afghanistan’s population easier, obviously, but it’s only a very incidental aggravating factor. Afghanistan’s agony would be no less agonizing if Vladimir Putin had chosen peace in Ukraine rather than war.

[David Frum: Where’s the cheap beef?]

4. High prices are not bad news for everybody.

Higher prices for food consumers mean higher incomes for food producers. In most of the world, consumers hugely outnumber producers. There is one region, however, where producers remain so numerous that higher prices can improve the livelihoods of millions: sub-Saharan Africa.

About two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans farm for a living. When prices rise, farmers produce more and earn more. Sub-Saharan farmers could produce a lot more. African farmers could soon double or even triple their output of grains, livestock, and other products if they use more intense farming methods, the economic-consulting firm McKinsey estimates.

Higher prices could encourage African farmers to adopt more advanced seeds and other modern methods. They could prod governments to invest more in rail and roads in order to move crops to market, and to clarify property laws in order to support commercial farms that produce for the international marketplace. Sub-Saharan food output grew twice as fast from 2000 to 2018 as it did in the 1980–99 stretch. That boom was driven by higher food prices, especially in the peak years of 2006 to 2013, according to a 2021 study.

African agriculture can be extended as well as intensified. The South African agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo calculates that 60 percent of the world’s remaining unused arable land is located in sub-Saharan Africa.

Higher food prices will be a stress and a burden for hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Higher food prices will test the stability of governments. Higher food prices may become an important part of Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda, which will blame Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression—and Western sanctions against Russia—for the higher cost of food.

But a stress is not a crisis, and a crisis does not have to be a catastrophe. Good management can mitigate the stress, and begin to identify and capture opportunities. Dealing with the food-price increases that this conflict will bring will not be easy. But it can be done.

First came the shock: the sight of missiles and artillery shells slamming into apartment buildings, helicopters pirouetting in flames, refugees streaming across the border, an embattled and unshaven president pleading with anguished political leaders abroad for help, burly uniformed men posing by burned-out tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, Russian police spot-checking cellphones on Moscow streets for dissident conversations. Distress and anger and resolution were natural reactions. But the time has come to think strategically, asking what the West—and specifically the United States—should do in this crisis and beyond.

French Marshal Ferdinand Foch once said that the first task is to answer the question De quoi s’agit-il?, or “What is it all about?” The answer with respect to Ukraine, as with most other strategic problems, is less straightforward than one might think. At the most basic level, a Russian autocrat is working to subjugate by the most brutal means possible a free and independent country, whose independence he has never accepted. But there are broader issues here as well. The other wars of the post–Cold War could be understood or interpreted as the consequence of civil war and secession or tit-for-tat responses to aggression. Not the Russian attack on Ukraine. This assault was unprovoked, unlimited in its objectives, and unconstrained in its means. It is, therefore, an assault not only on that country but on all international norms of decent behavior.

A broader world order is at stake; so too is a narrower European order. Putin has made no secret of his bitter opposition to NATO and to the independence of former Soviet republics, and it should be expected that after reducing Ukraine, he would attempt something of a similar nature (if with less intensity) in the Baltic states. He has brought war in its starkest form back to a continent that has thrived largely in its absence for nearly three generations. And his war is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad.

In short, the stakes are enormous, and with them the dangers. And yet there is good news in the remarkable solidarity and decisiveness of the liberal democracies, in Europe and outside it. The roles of Australia and Japan in responding to the Russian invasion are no less significant than those of Britain or France. In that respect, Ukraine 2022 is not Czechoslovakia 1938, not only because it is fighting ferociously, but because the democracies are with it in material as well as moral ways. It differs, too, in that this time the aggressor is not Europe’s most advanced economy but one of its least; its military is not the fearsomely effective Wehrmacht but a badly led, semi-competent, if well-armed horde, better suited for and inclined to the massacre of civilians than a fight against its peers. Russia’s failure to command the air, its stalled armored columns, the smoking ruins of its tanks and armored personnel carriers all testify to the Russian army’s weakness. So too does the continuation in office of the long-serving chief of general staff and defense minister who planned and led this operation, a debacle in the face of every advantage of positioning, timing, and material superiority.

Under these conditions, the U.S.-led coalition of liberal-democratic, chiefly European states should have three objectives. The most obvious aim of Western strategy is the liberation of Ukraine, restoration of its free government and institutions, rebuilding of its economy, and guarantee of its independence by placing it in a position of well-armed security against a similar attack in the future. That will include a welding of this country to the European Union. Ultimately, it may include its incorporation into the NATO alliance that has saved many of its neighbors from a similar fate.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Putin’s no chess master]

Doing this will require defeating Russian forces, but the objectives vis-à-vis Russia have to go beyond this. Ideally, this conflict will end with the overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who bears singular responsibility for it not only morally but also politically. This was not only a war of choice—it is his war of choice, and he has been dangerous and malevolent in its conduct. His fall from power could come about as a result of elite discontent leading to a coup of some kind, or mass upheaval.

However, neither outcome can be predicted and, for the time being, neither seems imminent. Moreover, although Russian dissenters from the war have shown remarkable courage, the regime is skillfully tapping deep reserves of xenophobia and chauvinism through its complete control of Russian media outlets. In that respect, Russia is in many ways a functioning fascist state, in the grip of a nationalist ideology and an all-powerful leader. For that reason, then, and barring a new Russian revolution, the Western objective must be to leave Russia profoundly weakened and militarily crippled, incapable of renewing such an onslaught, isolated and internally divided until the point that an aging autocrat falls from power. Targeting Putin alone is not enough.

Finally, the West has the opportunity, and faces the necessity, of changing the story of democratic decline and weakness to one of strength and self-confidence. Europe’s remarkable response to the invasion is a long step in this direction, as is the American leadership that has rallied so many to oppose Russia and stand with Ukraine. China is watching the invasion of Ukraine; so, too, are Iran and lesser authoritarian regimes, waiting to see whether such opportunities are available to them, or too perilous to attempt. The Western powers must induce them to take the latter view by the visible successes that they achieve. There are internal audiences as well, particularly in the United States. After a decade of deeply self-critical contemplation of America’s internal divisions, this is the moment to restore confidence in the ideals and beliefs that have made the United States at once powerful and free.\

Western strategy should rest on three pillars: vigorous and imaginative military support to Ukrainian regular and irregular forces; sanctions that will hobble the Russian economy; and construction of a militarily powerful European alliance that can secure the border with Russia as long as that country remains a menace.

The means at hand are obvious, even if the manner of their exploitation is not. The most obvious is the armament of Ukraine, which has already begun. It is a moral imperative. When people are willing to fight for their freedom against an enemy whose methods and aims are so clearly evil, the West owes its effectual support to those taking up arms. But it is also a strategic imperative, intended to hamstring the Russian military and weaken Putin’s position.

Support to the Ukrainian military and, should Ukrainian cities fall, to the continuing insurgency has the prospect of exceptional success. A country greater in size than France and only slightly smaller than Texas, with built-up areas, forests, and, in the west, mountains, hundreds of thousands of armed men and women, a potential supply of thousands of foreign veterans, and a will to fight born of patriotism and anger is virtually unconquerable if adequately armed. The key is to think about that on the right scale.

Michael Vickers, who was the mastermind of the CIA program supporting the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, lays out the lessons of that campaign in his forthcoming memoir, By All Means Available. A well-armed and determined population, Vickers contends, can defeat even a brutal superpower—and Russia is no longer that. The important thing is to move at scale and with urgency in support of such an insurgency. The tide turned in Afghanistan in a relatively short period of time, when the Afghanistan Covert Action Plan went from $60 million in fiscal year 1985 to $250 million the next year, a sum doubled by Saudi support. Remarkably, the CIA did not ask for this increase and may have opposed it, but congressional supporters led by the redoubtable Charlie Wilson carried the day. In less than a year, the program went from supplying 10 metric tons of weaponry to more than six times as much. Within another year, the sum of money and resources was doubled.

Not just the sheer quantity of support but its breadth made a difference—including man-portable air-defense systems such as Stinger missiles, heavy machine guns, sniper rifles, and secure communications technology. And with it went a change in objective from bleeding the Red Army to defeating it.

[Brooke Harrington: The Russian elite can’t stand the sanctions]

The conditions in Ukraine are, if anything, more favorable than in Afghanistan. In Poland and several other frontline states, the West has allies infinitely more reliable than Pakistan was during the Afghan War. Poland’s border with Ukraine alone is 330 miles long and would be impossible for Russia to seal. In Ukraine, the West has a technically sophisticated population that can handle whatever advanced weapons are needed. And in the Russian army of this moment, it faces a force that has already been badly bloodied, proving itself logistically incompetent and poorly motivated. As the Russians conscript civilian vehicles to supply their stranded forces, including the 40-mile “convoy” north of Kyiv, which has been better described as a linear prisoner-of-war camp to which the captors are not obliged to provide rations, the invaders find themselves in logistical difficulties that appear well-nigh insuperable. The resources to equip the Ukrainians are there; the task is to do it on the largest possible scale, and fast. That is the lesson of Afghanistan: scale and urgency.

Carl von Clausewitz famously said that the maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect. That applies to Ukraine. Adapted civilian technologies (suicide drones, for example) and civilian computer-hacker militias have a role to play in its defense. The key is to give full rein to the creative covert operations and military talents that the United States and countries like Britain and Poland have in abundance.

By all accounts the second pillar of Western strategy—sanctions—has already had an effect on the Russian economy, which is only roughly the size of Italy’s. As in the case of material aid to Ukraine, the key is speed and scale, because the purpose is to shake the polity and not just put pressure on it, to cripple the economy and not just squeeze it. The French finance minister said as much and then retracted the remark; he was right the first time. The tools are economic rather than military, but many of the dynamics of war will apply—responses and reactions by the opponent, unforeseen consequences and second- and third-order effects, and collateral damage.

As a number of observers such as Edward Fishman have pointed out, it is possible to apply these sanctions even to Russian energy production, inducing customers to steadily reduce purchases so as to limit the gains Russia gets from short-term increases in the prices of oil and natural gas. Sanctions will also have much wider results, however, as can be seen from the stream of companies exiting Russia, such as Microsoft. Whether from fear of getting on the wrong side of the law, or future sanctions, or pressure from employees and shareholders, Western companies will leave Russia and should be encouraged to do so. Chinese companies, themselves dependent on Western expertise and intellectual capital, will not be able to replace all that the West has provided to Russia; they, too, will not wish to cross a sanctions regime that forces them to choose between Russia’s modest economy and the thriving markets of the United States and Europe. Nor will Russia find a sentimental friend in China: That is a quality unknown in Chinese government or business. Indeed, the Russian people should be constantly reminded of their leaders’ willingness to turn their country into a vassal state of Beijing, even as they become a pariah in the lands they long to visit and whose products and technology they cannot hope to consume.

The final pillar of Western strategy lies in building an impregnable eastern glacis for NATO and, in particular, strengthening frontline allies and those leading the defense of the continent against Russia. Poland is the key state: Its determination to confront Russia is unlimited, its military is competent and accustomed to service alongside the United States, and its willingness to spend on its own defense is evident in its recent decision to increase defense spending to 3 percent of its GDP, rather than the NATO-mandated 2 percent, and to buy 250 American M1 tanks.

The American role here is partly to maintain a visible presence on the front lines. Now is the time to permanently station American armored forces in the Baltic states and Poland—a deterrent, but also part of the price Russia would pay for its aggression. An equally important task is to help quickly arm those countries seeking to defend themselves: Lend Lease 2.0, some have called it, referring to the program of American aid during the Second World War. That means once again turning the United States into an arsenal of democracy, advancing the smaller European states the funds they require to obtain the full panoply of military hardware needed to defend themselves against Russian aggression. Holding as it does large stocks of surplus military hardware, the United States can move to strengthen its European allies.

The rearmament of Europe is an astonishing spectacle, beginning most notably with Germany’s declaration that it will spend the equivalent of two years’ defense budgets to refurbish the decayed forces of the Bundeswehr, once an army more formidable in Europe than that of the United States. Even under the agreements concluded upon German unification, Germany can field an army of more than 300,000, close to the size of the entire United States Army. The United States alone can lead and shape this rearmament as other states finally meet their 2-percent-of-GDP targets, creating forces so powerful that even to an isolated and semi-delusional Russian leadership, an attack against the West would be folly. The U.S. will need to do so, urging Europeans to rebuild their heavy armored forces, construct hardened defenses (e.g., aircraft shelters), while expanding air and missile defense and acquiring long-range missiles to disable Russian air bases and staging areas in the event of war.

Rearmament has an ideological component as well: piercing the information bubble that the Putin regime has constructed in Russia, and administering that antidote to nationalist propaganda, truth. That task was well understood during the Cold War, and we created capable institutions to accomplish it, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. In the new world of social media, the tools and organizations may be different, but the mission remains the same. John F. Kennedy recruited the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to create the United States Information Agency for that aspect of the struggle. Like talents are available for government service in the age of Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as many individuals and organizations that will fight that battle in tandem with official institutions.

Ultimately, strategy requires a theory of victory—a story line explaining why we think things will turn out the way we wish. The confrontation with Russia will not end with its Western invasion and conquest, and hence not with its reconstruction, as happened with Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II. The road that the West should seek will lead either to the collapse of Putin’s regime or to a long-term weakening of the Russian state’s capability and appetite for aggressive war. Such outcomes occur the way Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt—gradually and then suddenly. The trajectory is clear, but we do not know yet just how fragile the Russian army and economy are. The collapse could take weeks, months, or years, so persistence will be necessary in the face of inevitable setbacks and counterstrokes.

If the Russian government does not simply collapse, and possibly even if it does, negotiations will occur. Conceivably, if Moscow is feeling pressure now from sanctions, losses, and the psychological jolt of its initial failures, preliminaries may be under way. At some point the West, with Ukraine, may wish to offer Russia an “off-ramp,” particularly after Putin exits power—but there is no point in doing so now. States, like individuals, accept off-ramps only when they are looking for them, and thus far Russia has offered no indication that Russia is seeking a way out of its predicament. Moreover, it is a Soviet technique of old, for which arms controllers in the United States in particular have always had a fatal weakness, to induce opponents to begin negotiating against themselves. Let the Russians make the first proposals.

[Amy Zegart: The weapon the West used against Putin]

For the United States, the decade ahead will require not merely the initial moves made by the Biden administration but a more profound readjustment of strategy. A new defense-strategy document has been in the works for months now; it should be set aside and rewritten for a very different world. There will be no overwhelming shift to focus on China. Rather, the United States will have to be, as it was for most of the 20th century, an ambidextrous power, asserting its strength and managing coalitions in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific. That will, in turn, require larger defense budgets and no less important, a change in mindset.

More profoundly, American administrations will have to accept the primacy of national-security concerns in a way that they have not for decades. That does not exclude reform at home—the experiences of the Civil War and Vietnam, among others, suggest that doing both simultaneously is possible. But it does mean that national security will have to be at the forefront of American thinking. Americans will have to hear from their leaders why that is so—and because this president is insufficiently eloquent to do so adequately on his own, he will need to recruit surrogates from both parties to aid him. The Republican Party’s political leadership in Congress has rallied to the Ukrainian cause; the Biden administration should take advantage of that.

Many hazards lie ahead, for that is the nature of conflict with an unscrupulous and possibly somewhat deranged opponent. But all the odds are on the West’s side. The valiant Ukrainian population is willing to fight to the end and for the moment, the West has found the unity and resolve to aid it. The Western economies are far and away the wealthiest, most resilient, and most advanced. The Western militaries deteriorated after the end of the Cold War, to a shocking degree, but their disarmament is not comparable to their desultory state in the 1930s. And the West faces not an ideological challenge comparable to Nazism or Communism, but a vicious form of nationalism entrenched in a country that saw a million more deaths than births last year, that is burdened with a corrupt and limited economy, and that is led by an isolated, aging dictator.

Vladimir Putin has one advantage only. As a KGB officer he learned to play head games with his enemies, be they dissidents or foreign powers. Fear is not the consequence of Russian actions, but rather their object. It is Moscow’s chief weapon, and Russian leaders are adept in its use. But fear is also susceptible to the remedy applied by the Ukrainians today, and by many others in the past. Courage, as Churchill famously said, is the virtue that makes all other virtues possible. Without courage, the West cannot succeed, but with it, it cannot fail.