WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Open Ukrainian Society And Its Enemies:

The West has been caught off guard by Putin because it underestimated the Russian capacity and will for mischief and overestimated its own strength and coherence. This is still to some degree a problem: We are still underestimating the damage that Russia can do to us. The EU is much more vulnerable than many people grasp. The euro project has divided Europe’s north from its south, and the still-evolving euro crisis has the potential both to paralyze European policymaking for years to come and to shake the foundations of the European order. Most NATO members are not fulfilling their obligations on military spending, and Germany’s political appetite for taking on expensive projects on behalf of foreign states is diminished, to say the least.

The West’s distractions and divisions created an opportunity for Russia, a weak and declining power with very poor longterm prospects, to catch the stronger West off guard and pose a significant challenge to the liberal order that the West wants to build. But Putin’s ugly and brutal invasion of a peaceful neighboring state isn’t just a problem for the West. It is also a historic opportunity. The future of Putin’s Russia is as much at stake here as the future of Ukraine, and Putin has quite unintentionally given the West a second chance to promote the construction of a genuinely democratic and prosperous Russia.

Despite its problems, the West is much richer, much bigger and enormously more powerful than Vlad the Invader and the ramshackle state he has built. Putin has rashly challenged us to a contest in which the odds are heavily against him. Our job isn’t to respond to his military probes in the Donbas as much as it is to grasp the nature of our advantages and to bring the immense advantages of the West into play in ways that demonstrate to Russia that the path Putin has chosen is a historical dead end. We didn’t beat the Soviet Union on the battlefield; we beat it by forcing the Soviets leadership to realize their utter inability to compete economically, technologically and ultimately militarily against the kind of open and dynamic society the western world built after World War Two. Putin, from a much weaker position and with a much less coherent set of ideas and institutions, has challenged us to another round of Tear Down That Wall. Dealing with his challenge will be a much less all-consuming and dangerous enterprise than dealing with the empire that Stalin built, but deal with it we must.

Unfortunately, we have the worst political class in our history, and if Europe is doing better than that, it’s only because its history is so much worse. . . .