Washington is full of talk about how to minimize Vladimir Putin’s gains from the Ukraine war. We should be having a different conversation — one about maximizing Russia’s losses. That isn’t exactly the same thing.
If you had asked me a year or two ago what the United States should be doing about Russia, my answer would have been: not much. And I think that would have been the right answer. Vladimir Putin’s grotesque mafia-state was a problem for the United States, but it was much more urgently and immediately a problem for the Europeans — and most of the relevant Europeans were not very much interested in doing anything about it. It wasn’t just the energy-hungry Germans: The Italians, the French, the Spanish, and the European Union at large all took a mostly blasé view of Russia. It is difficult to succeed in helping allies solve their problems when the allies aren’t interested in doing much to solve them.
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