Vladimir Putin stated that the Soviet Union’s demise was the century’s biggest catastrophe. But for us, it was among the greatest blessings. That is why his attempt to re-create as much of it as he can is some business of ours. Ukraine has always been the key to Putin’s venture. Europe is morally and politically incapable of stopping that venture, and will cooperate with anything we may do only under duress. Geography makes senseless any U.S. military intervention other than supply to Ukraine. But U.S. economic leverage on Russia can be overwhelming—provided it also excludes from economic intercourse with America any nation that has any dealings with Russia. The rest of the world would mightily resent such a measure. But it would have no choice. We must face facts: serious economic measures are not cheap, while cheap ones buy only contempt.

Increasingly since the 1970s, and most violently in our time, countless Muslims, sensing American statesmen’s weakness and irresolution, have made themselves our business. Iran’s 1979 seizure of our embassy and its personnel was an act of war. Our failure to treat it as such opened the floodgates of terrorism. Our attempts to stem that tide by trying to identify and sort individuals and groups whom we consider noxious out of the several Muslim countries—effectively to police those countries—was doomed from the start and opened the gates wider. In fact, policing foreign lands is none of our business. Rather, our business is to hold those lands’ rulers and potentates responsible with their lives for anything that comes out of them or that threatens to come out of them that might harm us. They should be certain that failure to prevent their subjects from harming us would result in America descending upon them—with nation-destruction rather than nation-building—and that they would be America’s prime targets.

Minding our business is serious business.