We're all living in Putin's world now

But more fundamentally, the events of the past week will necessitate a radical rethinking of the European project. For the last 30 years, Europeans have convinced themselves that military strength was not worth the cost, and that American military pre-eminence was enough to dissuade other countries from pursuing war. Spending on defense fell. What mattered, the received wisdom intoned, was economic power and soft power.

Now we know that sanctions can’t stop tanks. Europe’s cherished conviction that economic interdependence is the best guarantee for peace has turned out to be wrong. Europeans made a mistake by universalizing their post-World War II experience to countries like Russia. Capitalism is not enough to temper authoritarianism. Trade with dictators does not make your country more secure and keeping the money of corrupt leaders in your banks does not civilize them; it corrupts you. And Europe’s embrace of Russian hydrocarbons only made the continent more insecure and vulnerable.

The most destabilizing effect of Russia’s invasion could be that many around the world start to agree with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. At the Munich Security Forum this month, he stated that Kyiv had made a mistake abandoning the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union.