Elsewhere, too. Putin’s war has been enough of a shock to sober up even such figures as Annalena Baerbock, the leader of Germany’s thoroughly loopy Green Party, who has taken a hard turn toward realism in her new role as foreign minister. Compared to the Biden administration’s climate envoy, former secretary of state John Kerry, the minister from the Green Party comes off like General Patton. Antony Blinken may not be the most commanding figure on the scene, but we are fortunate that John Kerry has been put out to pasture, an emeritus figure in semi-retirement. He is not the only figure who remains senseless to the demands of the times: You’ll notice that nobody is really very interested in what former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks about any of this — her most recent headline reads: “Hillary Clinton and Eric Adams Bond over Bubble Baths.” Thanks for that update, New York magazine. Somebody ought to point out to Mayor Adams, if he can be pried away from his rose petals and incense for a moment, that the people of Kyiv run toward their subway when seeking safety.

The dead have no politics, but the politics of the living matters — to the Ukrainians, to the refugees, to us, and to the future. What is at stake here is not the reputation of Jens Stoltenberg or the career of Olaf Scholz, the future of Emmanuel Macron or the past of Angela Merkel. We are seeing the emergence of the two broad coalitions whose competition will shape the rest of the 21st century, and the lines of that division run not only between countries but also through them.

One of the ironies is that the great figure of this episode is Volodymyr Zelensky, who was an actor on a television comedy before he was the leader of a nation in a fight for its life. Zelensky is now better-placed than any other political leader in the world to appreciate that the age of politics-as-entertainment is coming rapidly to a close.