Foreign policy crises have a way of reshuffling the priorities of a president. JOE BIDEN’s standoff with Putin happened to come along just when Biden had lost some urgency in confronting his three big domestic threats.

The pandemic is becoming endemic. There’s not much Biden can actually do about inflation. And the key senator standing in the way of Biden’s domestic agenda remains immovable.

While the war in Ukraine is just five days old, administration officials and Biden allies are starting to grapple with the ways in which Biden’s presidency may be fundamentally altered.

What Biden world is eager to talk about: Biden is an Atlanticist who likes to brag about how he stayed in touch with European leaders while out of office from 2017 to 2021. He is a creature of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Munich Security Conference. He came up in politics immersed in the debates of the Cold War, which are now newly relevant. When he said recently that “the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power,” he could have been lifting the line from one of his 1988 presidential campaign speeches.