Reagan was roundly despised for his supposedly cowboy manner in reinstating deterrence. In November 1983, Hollywood gave us The Day After—a melodramatic account of what life in the heartland would be like after a nuclear strike. The message was for America to brace for a nuclear winter that Reagan would earn in his absurd effort to “win” the Cold War.

Prepare for the same hysteria in 2017. The Pentagon, to remain the world’s most powerful and respected military and to help to keep the world order relatively calm, quietly accepts that it will have to demonstrate soon to America’s enemies that it is quite a dangerous thing for any nation to shoot a missile near a 5,000-person, $5-billion American Nimitz-class carrier; or to hijack an American naval craft, humiliate the crew to the point of tears, and then video the embarrassment; or to attack a U.S. consulate. Yet it will not be so easy for our military to reestablish credibility in 2017. And over the next 10 months we may see some scary things not witnessed since the annus horribilis of 1980.

Trying to persuade Putin that NATO has commitments to the territorial integrity of the Baltic states, and deterring him from further expansionism will be one of the most dangerous gambits of 2017— and one that will be widely caricatured.

The effort will be somewhat akin to what would have happened had Neville Chamberlain said “no” at Munich, instead of waving a worthless scrap of paper to the adoration of huge British crowds. Assembling a British-led coalition in 1938 of the Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch, and Belgians, while ensuring the Soviet Union was neutral, would have checked Hitler’s rather still weak Wehrmacht, but in the short term earned Chamberlain the slur of war-monger rather than for about a year canonization as a League of Nations humanitarian.