The Russian government isn’t trying to please us or work with us anymore. Mr Putin has formally set himself as our antagonist. Something big got broken here. It will have world-wide implications, and be a major foreign-policy challenge for the United States in the coming years

But we are in a new time and will have to plan anew and think anew.

That is how I think the artist formerly known as Reagan would judge what’s happening. He’d see it clear and figure it from there. He wouldn’t think it was about sanctions and tweeted insults…

It is my opinion that Reagan wouldn’t be alarmist because there’s no use in alarm. At the same time he’d be serious as a heart attack about what has happened and what it implies. Being serious would not involve putting down Russia as a merely regional power, as President Obama recently did. No nuclear power is merely regional. If Putin were merely regional, he wouldn’t have been able to save Obama’s bacon in Syria.

I do think Reagan would be startled—that isn’t quite the word, because it doesn’t encompass a sense of horror—that it clearly won’t be the American president leading the West through the start of the new era, but a German chancellor.