My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.

Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian targets have increased in frequency in the week since the U.S. election, killing civilians and destroying another dam. Russian troops continued to make incremental gains toward the city of Pokrovsk. The Russian army is preparing a new offensive, this time using North Korean troops. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his election but implied that he would have discussions only if the U.S. initiates talks, drops its sanctions, and refuses to offer any further support for Ukraine—accepting, in other words, a Russian victory. Meanwhile, Russian state television welcomed news of the election by gleefully showing nude photographs of Melania Trump on the country’s most-watched channel.

How will the new U.S. administration respond? What should the outgoing administration do?

In one sense, nothing will change. For nearly three years, many, many people, from the right to the left, in Europe and in America, have called for negotiations to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration repeatedly probed the possibility of negotiations. The German government endlessly proposed negotiations. Now a new team will arrive in Washington, and it will be demanding negotiations too.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

The new team will immediately run into the same dilemma that everyone else has encountered: “Land for peace” sounds nice, but the president of Russia isn’t fighting for land. Putin is fighting not to conquer Pokrovsk but to destroy Ukraine as a nation. He wants to show his own people that Ukraine’s democratic aspirations are hopeless. He wants to prove that a whole host of international laws and norms, including the United Nations Charter and the Geneva conventions, no longer matter. His goal is not to have peace but to build concentration camps, torture civilians, kidnap 20,000 Ukrainian children, and get away with it—which, so far, he has.

Putin also wants to show that America, NATO, and the West are weak and indecisive, regardless of who is president, and that his brutal regime represents some kind of new global standard. And now, of course, he also needs to show his country that nearly three years of fighting had some purpose, given that this costly, bloody, extended war, officially described as nothing more than a “special military operation,” was supposed to end in a matter of days. Maybe Putin could be interested in stopping the fight for some period of time. Maybe he could be threatened into halting his advance, or bribed with an offer of sanctions relief. But any cease-fire treaty that does not put some obstacle—security guarantees, NATO troops in Ukraine, major rearmament—in the way of another invasion will fail sooner or later because it will simply give Russia an opportunity to rest, rearm, and resume pursuit of the same goals later on.

Putin will truly stop fighting only if he loses the war, loses power, or loses control of his economy. And there is plenty of evidence that he fears all three, despite his troops’ slow movement forward. He would not have imported thousands of North Korean soldiers if he had an infinite number of Russians to replace the more than 600,000 soldiers whom he has lost to injury or death. He would not have paid American YouTubers to promote anti-Ukrainian propaganda if he wasn’t worried by the American public’s continued support for Ukraine. His economy is in trouble: Russian inflation is rising fast; Russian interest rates are now at 21 percent; Russian industries particularly vulnerable to sanctions, such as liquefied natural gas, are suffering. The Russian navy was humiliated in the Black Sea. The Russian military has still not recaptured territory lost in Russia’s Kursk province, conquered by the Ukrainians last summer.

When the next U.S. president, secretary of defense, and secretary of state take office, they will discover that they face the same choices that the current administration did. They can increase Putin’s agony using economic, political, and military tools and make sure he stops fighting. Or they can let him win, quickly or slowly. But a Russian victory will not make Europe safer or the U.S. stronger. Instead, the costs will grow higher: A massive refugee crisis, an arms race, and possibly a new round of nuclear proliferation could follow as European and Asian democracies assess the new level of danger from the autocratic world. An invasion of Taiwan becomes more likely. An invasion of a NATO state becomes thinkable.

[Karl Marlantes and Elliot Ackerman: The abandonment of Ukraine]

In the final two months of his presidency, Joe Biden, together with Ukraine’s European allies, will have one last chance to push Russia hard, to respond to the extraordinary Russian–North Korean escalation, and to stabilize the Ukrainian front line. This is Biden’s last chance to allow Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes against targets inside Russia. Although the Russians can strike any target, military or civilian, anywhere in Ukraine and at any time, the Ukrainians have been limited to their own drones. They have had some startling successes—their drone operations are now the world’s most sophisticated—including hitting military factories all over Russia, and several targets in Moscow this week. But to stop attacks on their cities and to prevent the Russian military from moving troops and equipment toward their borders, they need to be able to use missiles to hit air bases and logistical hubs inside Russia too.

Even more important is the question of money. Biden must press upon the Europeans, as a matter of urgency, the need to transfer frozen Russian assets to Kyiv—not just the interest but the capital. This money—more than $300 billion—can be used to purchase weapons, rebuild the country, and keep the economy going for many months. Most of this money is in European institutions whose leaders have delayed making final decisions about it for fear that Russia will retaliate against European companies, especially French and German companies that still have assets in Russia. But now time is running short: Perhaps the Trump administration will preserve sanctions on Russia, but perhaps it will not.

Biden’s team says it will expedite the delivery of the remaining weapons and resources that Congress has already designated for Ukraine. The goals should be to stabilize the front lines and prevent a collapse in Ukrainian morale; to provide long-term support, including spare parts so that repairs and maintenance of existing weapons systems can continue; and, most of all, to hit the North Korean troops in Kursk. It’s very important that the North Korean leadership perceives this escapade as a catastrophic failure, and as quickly as possible, so that more troops aren’t sent in the future.

After that? The choices, and the stakes, remain very similar to what they were in February 2022. Either we inflict enough economic pressure and military pain to convince Russia that the war can never be won, or we deal with the far more ominous, and far more expensive, consequences of Ukraine’s loss. Biden has a few more weeks to make a difference. It will then be up to Trump to decide whether he will help Ukraine to succeed and to survive, or whether he will push Ukraine to fail, along with the broader democratic world.

Europeans should pay Donald Trump the compliment of believing what he does and says, not what they desperately want to hear. He has clearly indicated that he wants the United States out of the Ukraine war as soon as possible. Both the president-elect and his most important supporter, Elon Musk, have reportedly been in frequent contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vice President–elect J. D. Vance has outlined a “peace” deal with Ukraine that would serve Russian interests. American aid to Ukraine, which has been vital to the beleaguered country’s ability to resist Russia’s ongoing invasion, could stop not long after Trump is inaugurated. European nations must accept this reality and make their own plans—not just to support Ukraine in its existential fight but also to protect their own security as America’s global role shrinks.

Perhaps the best that Ukraine and its supporters can hope for is that Trump doesn’t walk away from NATO and allows European states to purchase U.S. weapons for Ukraine. This minimal position might represent a victory of sorts for Europeans who believe in democracy and the transatlantic alliance—but it would still signal a historical break. The United States will likely stop leading the global opposition to Russian aggression, and perhaps stop caring about the results of the largest war in Europe since 1945. Indeed, the president of the United States will be closer personally to the head of Europe’s largest dictatorship than to any of the continent’s democratically elected leaders.

[Anne Applebaum: The case against pessimism]

Those leaders should have started preparing for another Trump presidency long ago. They had been warned. But for the past year many Europeans have been surviving on hope. Surely the American people won’t vote for Trump, particularly after the January 6 insurrection. The prudent assumption now is that the U.S. will no longer guarantee Europe’s security from Russia and other threats. Leaders should envisage a world where NATO no longer exists—or where the United States is no longer the leading force in the alliance.

In some ways, this is more scary psychologically than in practice. Europe—which is to say, the democratic countries enmeshed in institutions such as NATO and the European Union—has the economic and technological resources to underwrite a serious defense effort. It has a large and educated enough population to staff modern armed forces. It also has some strong and growing military capabilities. For instance, European states either have received or will receive in the coming years as many as 600 F-35 fighters—the most advanced and capable aircraft in the world. Such a force could dominate the skies against a clearly inferior Russian opponent.

Yet Europe also has many weaknesses. It has developed a shockingly large number of military-hardware systems but then only builds a small number of each. This boutique way of addressing military capability has been exacerbated by a weakness in investing in logistics and a limited ability to produce supplies and equipment quickly and reliably enough to sustain a war effort.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 prompted a lot of dramatic talk. The continent had supposedly reached a turning point—a Zeitenwende, in the phrase of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. But Europe has frittered away much of the past two and a half years, making the smallest and most incremental of changes even as a grotesque war raged to the east; even as Russian forces regularly attacked civilian targets; even as military technology, particularly relating to drone systems, raced forward. European defense spending has only crept up. Even now, a number of NATO states fail to meet the alliance’s agreed-upon target of spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. The United States, even after a significant decline in defense spending after the War on Terror, spends 3.5 percent. Two percent—a standard set in 2014, when European states felt far more secure than they currently do—won’t cut it now.

[Read: I’ve watched America and Ukraine switch places]

Scaling up defense systems quickly will be difficult, but it is essential. In the meantime, the highest priority from the European perspective should be to keep Ukraine supplied and in the fight in case Trump pulls the plug on American military support for Kyiv. Europe can provide more ammunition and more ground-based air-defense equipment. It can give Ukraine long-range weapons, such as German-made Taurus cruise missiles.

Just as important, European democracies can work with Ukraine to upgrade and expand its drone capacity—and in doing so help establish that industry elsewhere in Europe. Europe and even the United States have much to learn from Ukraine about unmanned aerial vehicles. The innovation cycle in Ukraine is quick; major advances take mere months or even just weeks. In this dynamic environment, where homegrown Ukrainian technology looms so large, few Western systems are of much use if sent whole. What Ukraine needs is the ability to mass-produce the drone technology that its engineers develop, working with European partners. That will require specialized components and equipment—and Europe can help with that.

If the United States abandons Ukraine, European states can start taking steps that the Biden administration, in its excess of caution, did not allow. The four most powerful states in Europe today—the U.K., France, Germany, and Poland—could give Ukraine their blessing to attack any Russian military targets. After all, Russia is using its weapons—and those provided by its allies, such as Iran, to attack targets in Ukraine; the American refusal to let Ukraine use Western systems against military infrastructure in Russia itself makes no sense.

European countries could go still further, by openly deploying their forces at least to western Ukraine. They could take over air-defense responsibilities—shooting down Russian missiles and drones without directly killing Russian soldiers. European forces could also openly assist in training Ukrainian forces in Ukraine and assist with air defense and training. Moves like these will reassure the Ukrainian people that they are not alone if the U.S. withdraws—and that their future is in Europe.

To be sure, the continent suffers from a collective-action problem. French President Emmanuel Macron asked this week, “The question we, as Europeans, must ask ourselves, is: Are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?” Detractors might ask why he was raising the issue only now. In Germany, Scholz’s government appears on the verge of collapse. Even if it survives, it likely lacks the boldness to move decisively to help Ukraine.

And yet the greatest obstacle is a mental one. After decades of expecting the United States to act wisely and forcefully in defense of the broader democratic world, Europe needs to start thinking and acting on its own and in its own interests. Trump’s return means that things previously inconceivable must be faced. And in Ukraine, a new Europe can be born.

Waking up to the election results on Wednesday, many Americans who opposed Donald Trump may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness.

But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or exploited—authoritarianism, misogyny, conspiracism.

And yet: This country has always been a big, beautiful land of contradictions. As an Iranian Canadian socialist who moved here from Europe in 2017, I hear my share of anti-American chatter from left-leaning Middle Easterners, Canadians, and Europeans. Many seize on simple stories about America as a land of hyper-capitalism, violence, racism, and imperialism—and such stories are not in short supply. The United States remains the world’s only developed country not to have public health care. It is by far the world’s biggest military power. And expressions of racial animus can be loud, deadly, and persistent.

[Jennifer Senior: Focus on the things that matter]

But to reduce America to these clichés is to miss much that is extraordinary. This same country of megalomaniac capitalism is home to public libraries and research universities that are the envy of many European social democracies—institutions tended by millions of Americans deeply committed to their survival. Those who imagine America as a country of racists perhaps haven’t actually visited its small towns, where mosques, Hindu temples, and gurdwaras prosper next to churches and synagogues. In this supposedly immigrant-hating country, Trump banned entry to the residents of seven Muslim countries in 2017—only for thousands of Americans to show up at airports in protest. Thousands more Americans staff immigrant-rights groups. For a narcissistic country, the United States has a lot of excellent public museums that acknowledge historical injustice and encourage self-reflection.

This country got its start as a naively daring social experiment already riven with contradictions. A group of European slave owners on ethnically cleansed land pledged to establish a nation whose self-evident truth was the equality of all. And yet, what they founded was a breathtakingly dynamic republic whose tree of creativity has never ceased leafing. The hopes vested in the United States have been sometimes vindicated, sometimes dashed. Chattel slavery endured here long after it was eradicated in Britain. But in 1860, Americans did elect a president who brought about its abolition at the end of a bloody civil war. The postwar promise of Reconstruction gave way to Dixiecrat rule and Jim Crow, but the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s was to become the most inspiring example of civil disobedience of its era, encapsulated in the call of Martin Luther King Jr. for the United States to “live up to the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

American actions abroad have also been contested and contradictory. In the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Washington played the role of imperial power. The same Washington helped establish the League of Nations in an effort to end all war—before the U.S. Senate refused to join it, undermining its efficacy. The United States first vowed to stay out of World War II, then joined the Allies to help defeat fascism on the beaches of Normandy and the plains of Manchuria. After the war, the United States helped establish democracies in Japan and West Germany—during the same era in which it took part in organizing an antidemocratic coup in Iran.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.

Don’t give up on this beautiful country. Its best traditions are now in danger, and no special genius of constitutional design will automatically keep them intact. In the hands of a president who may wish to model himself on Vladimir Putin, democratic institutions will be tested like never before. Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level of government. Daunting as this task may be, I have faith that Americans will rise to it. Trump may be the Founders’ nightmare, but their dreams can still outlive him.