Peggy Noonan

John Hay had a warm mind and a cool heart. The secretary of state to presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt (1898-1905) had two baseline gifts necessary for diplomatic achievement but not always seen together, a quick apprehension of the size and meaning of events and a subtlety and sympathy in the reading of human beings. A biographer, John Taliaferro, wrote: “His manners, his mind, and his conduct as a spokesman for a nation finding its voice on the world stage were nonpareil and pitch-perfect.”

As a young man Hay had been literary secretary to Abraham Lincoln ; no one had worked closer with him day by day. He was in the White House the night Lincoln was shot and at his bedside the morning he died in the boardinghouse near Ford’s Theatre. In the years afterward he held high Lincoln’s standard in books and speeches, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1905, when Hay himself was dying, that he fully understood what Lincoln had been to him.

He had a dream, he wrote in his diary, that he had been called to the White House for a meeting with Roosevelt, but when he walked in the president was Lincoln. “He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He said there was little work of importance on hand. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey. I was not in the least surprised at Lincoln’s presence in the White House. But the whole impression of the dream was one of overpowering melancholy.” At what was gone, and surely what Hay had lost.

History is human. We know this but our knowledge gets lost in considering other factors such as landmass, economic strength, weaponry and energy sectors.

Here we get to our subject. In his years as America’s leading diplomat, no country vexed the patient Hay more, no nation drove him more to distraction, than Russia. I went back to Mr. Taliaferro’s excellent 2013 biography, “All the Great Prizes,” to quote some passages, and saw that I’d written in the margins “It didn’t start with communism.” It didn’t start with Vladimir Putin. Russia has long bedeviled.

In the first years of the 20th century the Russians were pushing to expand east, to extend their sphere and dominate trade and rail lines in Chinese Manchuria. They wanted to tax there. They wanted to secure the deepwater port at Port Arthur, where they had a naval base. They were moving to annex Manchuria. Japan felt its interest threatened—if Russia took Manchuria, it would move next on Korea.

When Hay protested Russia’s aggression, Russia responded with hurt feelings—how could you accuse us, we’d never hurt you. In time he told Roosevelt, “Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult and delicate matter.”

The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 was a human disaster, with land battles bigger than Antietam and Gettysburg. Near the end, at the battle of Mukden, an estimated 330,000 Russian troops went up against 270,000 Japanese, with more than 160,000 casualties. Russia lost that battle, as it had most of its fleet at Port Arthur.

America maintained neutrality. “We are not charged with the cure of the Russian soul,” Hay wrote to Roosevelt. But all the way through he communicated with both sides, once comforting the Japanese ambassador, who had burst into tears. Privately Hay was disgusted by Russia’s cavalier aggression, and Roosevelt, who had just taken up jujitsu in his daily workout and felt a special rapport with the Japanese ambassador, was privately rooting for the underdog. He wrote his son Theodore III, “For several years Russia has behaved very badly in the Far East, her attitude toward all nations, including us, but especially toward Japan, being grossly overbearing.”

At one point President Roosevelt was so angry with Russia’s conduct that he was tempted to “go to an extreme.” Hay, who didn’t unload much, unloaded.

“Four years of constant conflict with [the Russians] have shown me that you cannot let up a moment on them without danger to your midriff. The bear that talks like a man is more to be watched than Adam Zad”—a reference to Kipling’s Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man.

They were both blowing off steam. But Hay never wrote of any other country with the asperity he did of the Russians, and ever after he and Roosevelt called Russia “the bear that walks like a man.”

In the end Japan won and Russia was humiliated.

Here we see our parallels to today, which are obvious. Russia wanted something and went forward alone. A disapproving world expected it to crush little Japan and was shocked when it didn’t. As was Russia, which had overestimated its military and underestimated Japan’s spirit.

More than that, the war changed Russia. It spurred the 1905 revolution, which Lenin later called “the great rehearsal” for 1917. There were huge worker demonstrations, massive strikes, military mutinies. It was bloody. The people, peasants to urban intellectuals, rebelled, and the government almost fell, holding on only through new repressions and promises of reform.

Day by day the people of today’s Russia will come to hear about what has happened in Ukraine, will feel and absorb its consequences, will feel some embarrassment at what has happened on the international stage—all led by a leader who is detached from his people. They aren’t going to like it.

Something else happened in the Russo-Japanese war, and that was Tolstoy, the greatest man of Russia, its genius of literature and moral inquiry. He took to the Times of London for an essay. “Bethink yourselves,” he said to his countrymen. “Again war,” he said. “Again sufferings necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.”

“If there be a God, He will not ask me when I die (which may happen at any moment) whether I retained . . . Port Arthur, or even that conglomeration which is called the Russian Empire, which he did not confide to my care, but He will ask me what I have done with that life which He put at my disposal.” He will ask if I have fulfilled his law and loved my fellow man.

“Yesterday I met a reservist soldier accompanied by his mother and wife. All three were riding in a cart.” The soldier had been drinking, the wife crying. “Goodbye,” called the soldier, “off to the Far East.”

“Art thou going to fight?” Tolstoy asked.

“Well, some one has to fight!”

“No one need fight,” said Tolstoy.

The soldier reflected for a moment. “But . . . where can one escape?”

That, Tolstoy said, is the heart of the matter. What journalists and officials mistake for patriotism—“for the faith, the Czar, the Fatherland”—is simply a spirited admission that one is trapped.

The families of the boys sent to fight, Tolstoy said, will think what he himself thinks: “What do we want with this Manchuria, or whatever it is called? There is sufficient land here.”

We end where we began. Do you know what American Tolstoy revered? Lincoln. Tolstoy thought him the greatest man in history.

Greatness sees greatness. I wonder who will be the Tolstoy, in Russia, of today?

I’m thinking of the astounding events of the past three weeks—how history throws its curves and you watch stunning new factors emerge and at some point you feel grateful to feel humble. This ol’ world can still surprise. It can confound every expectation.

One surprise, the central one. No one knew the people of Ukraine would fight so bravely and effectively. Maybe they didn’t know. The past week I realized they will never stop. They are not going to give up. If Russia knocks down, blows up and occupies the entire country they will continue to resist. Ukrainians are proving each day that there is a country called Ukraine, and it isn’t Russia. It shares much with Russia, including blood lines and languages, but it is another place, an independent country with a proud people.

Vladimir Putin went in saying Ukraine wasn’t a nation. He made it a nation. He gave it the conditions by which it would reveal itself to itself.

I am struck again by what a disaster this is for Mr. Putin however it turns out, even if he “wins.” He too is revealed. His army doesn’t work, he is an anathema. His nation is economically injured, its standing in the world sullied, and its great new ally China is realizing it isn’t on the side, as it had thought, of deadly competence. This week Beijing felt forced to defend itself in the Washington Post.

Qin Gang, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., insisted in an op-ed piece that Beijing had no idea Russia was about to invade Ukraine and didn’t acquiesce to or tacitly support the war: “All these claims serve only the purpose of shifting blame and slinging mud at China.” Why, Europe is our trading partner. “China has made huge efforts to push for peace talks.” Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity . . . must be respected.” America better not get tough: “Wielding the baton of sanctions at Chinese companies while seeking China’s support and cooperation simply won’t work.”

It sounded defensive and screechy. Guess they fear sanctions. Good to know.

But here is what must not be lost from our thinking in the next few weeks, or months: When you take part in historical events you are speaking to history. You are telling it a story. History in turn will be telling it in 10 and 50 years: “The Guns of February,” “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 2022.” So far the West’s is a pretty admirable tale, one marked with mistakes but also discipline and spirit.

We want history to say this: “Throughout, America did everything it could, took every possible measure, to keep Putin from using the most dreadful weapons at his disposal and unleashing a new dark era in human history.”

That will be quite a job, and great restraint has been shown. Connected to that, this might be a good time for a recommitment to public discretion. As, for instance, the U.S. and its allies showed when at the beginning of the war Mr. Putin appeared to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. We let it pass without official comment, as a businessman does when ignoring the curses of a mentally ill person on Third Avenue, or a confident man does with a devil.

There’s so much power in the unsaid, or the publicly unsaid. Retired American generals are showing up on cable TV to chat about killer drones with names like Switchblade that can do a lot of damage, and lawmakers appear extremely excited to be saying words like “lethality.” Maybe we should do what needs doing—help Ukraine defend itself and protect its people—and talk less. Or at least with greater modesty.

I think Joe Biden has got a lot right so far, especially his warnings of the war, his determination to get the West and Ukraine to focus, and his adroit sharing with the world of U.S. intelligence on the massing of Russian forces and Mr. Putin’s intentions. But he could probably be quieter and maintain more distance. He doesn’t have to answer every shouted question. He shouldn’t talk like this, as he did to House Democrats at a March 11 retreat in Philadelphia: “But look, the idea—the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand—and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say—that’s called World War III. OK? Let’s get it straight here, guys. That old expression—‘Don’t kid a kidder.’ ”

Presidents can’t speak in public on this subject in such a casual, colloquial manner, and a tone of calming down his caucus.

Leaders are grave in Ukraine. We should be grave here, too.

As for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech this week to a joint session of Congress, he was really speaking to America. Before he spoke he received a standing ovation with cheers, but afterward the members, who stood and applauded again, looked more subdued. They all insisted afterward that it was beautiful, powerful, they were all so moved—they really like their emotions up there on the Hill—but it wasn’t, really. Three weeks ago he was a poignant figure bravely beseeching.

Now he is bolder. “I am addressing President Biden. . . . Being the leader of the world means being the leader of peace.” There was a sense he has the American president over a barrel—if Mr. Biden is sincere and strong, he will do as Mr. Zelensky requests. I don’t much like it when foreign leaders, even great ones, think they have the American president over a barrel. My impression is the vast political center in America is highly sympathetic toward Ukraine and greatly admires Mr. Zelensky, and members don’t want to get on the wrong side of that.

A House member worth listening to is Mike McCaul of Texas, ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who is just back from Poland. Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he said we have to give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself and protect its people. But, he implied, we also have to think. “We don’t want a miscalculation or an escalation that will put us into a world war.” Mr. Putin has a lot of different weapons, including chemical ones. “I would say also these short-range tactical nukes that Putin—Russia has many more of them than we do. If he gets pushed into a corner like a scorpion, and he’s in a desperate situation, he could very well sting with a short-range tactical nuke, which would really wake up the eyes of the world. I can’t see the world just standing back and allowing that to happen without further involvement.”

He has a sense of how the Ukrainian military is thinking. They might have refrained from taking out the famous long Russian convoy because they’re conserving so that when Kyiv is “encircled they will unleash everything they have.” They have put signs near the capital that say in Russian, “Welcome to Hell.” “They’re going to give them everything they have and all the weapons we’ve given them, and you’re going to see quite a fight take place.”

It is good to be moved. It feels good to admire without ambivalence. The West is united, suddenly and surprisingly, and that feels good too.

Volodymyr Zelensky stirred the world not only by what he said but what he did. He has put it all on the line, including his life. Early on he told the press the intelligence services had informed him he is Russian target No. 1, his wife and two children target No. 2, but they’re staying, they won’t leave. It is reminiscent of the summer of 1940 and London bracing for the blitz. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, asked if the children of the British royal family, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, shouldn’t be sent to safety overseas. This was the answer of Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI: “The children could not go without me, I could not possibly leave the king, and the king would never go.” So they stayed. Princess Elizabeth has been queen now for 70 years.

To move the world as Mr. Zelensky has, to become a David figure, an international icon of liberty and guts, is more than a human achievement, it is a true strategic fact of the conflict. If two weeks ago he had fled for London and were now making spirited Zoom speeches to his countrymen back home, would Ukraine have stood and fought as it has? He gambled his courage would be contagious, and could be leveraged.

Things are certain to become more full of feeling as the war shifts into a sustained phase of brutality. Civilian populations targeted, hospitals and apartment buildings shelled, the dead buried in trenches, food shortages, more than two million refugees, a number that will grow far higher if they can get out, though Russia seems less interested now in letting them out than leaving them trapped. All this in the first real-time war, being delivered moment by moment to your phone. People think the gruesome pictures function as helpful propaganda for Ukraine, but in time they will function as well as propaganda for Vladimir Putin: You think I’m losing? Look at your winners, digging mass graves.

Talk of providing Mr. Putin a face-saving “off-ramp” strikes me as absurd. He doesn’t want an off-ramp; he wants to stay on the highway, and Russian diplomats aren’t acting as if they’ve lost face or even been embarrassed. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns is surely right: On Tuesday he told the House Intelligence Committee that Mr. Putin will likely “double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.” He’s going for the rubble.

And yet. The West must try with everything it has to end this. Cease-fires, talks, negotiations that become serious, possible compromises, efforts at “deconfliction”—every attempt has to be made and made again. That’s what diplomats exist to do, find a way out when history turns hard.

Here is where the figure of Mr. Zelensky and all he means, all his power to move and persuade, can become a different kind of factor. His great and primary mission is to save his country. That is his job and his purpose. It isn’t, and probably can’t be in human terms, seeing to the broader security and safety of “the world.” He is simultaneously running a government, commanding its military, addressing his people to keep up their morale, and talking to the world to stoke its support. All while being bombed.

To put it crudely, it isn’t bad for his purposes if the war escalates, as long as escalation means more allies giving Ukraine what it needs. He won’t mind broadening the conflict if it protects Ukraine. It is his allies who have to worry about broadening the conflict.

On Wednesday Mr. Zelensky tweeted a video of a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol. He called it an “atrocity,” asked how much longer the world will be an accomplice. He has beseeched the West for a no-fly zone: “Close the sky right now!” It would be a blunder to give him what he asks for. A no-fly zone enforced by the U.S. or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would inevitably entail direct engagement with the Russian military. Since the dawn of the nuclear age the U.S. has carefully avoided direct hostilities with the world’s second-biggest nuclear power. If the war in Ukraine escalated in this way, Mr. Putin could use it to justify the use of terrible weapons, not only nuclear or cyber but also biological or chemical.

So while we are being moved by Mr. Zelensky, we must keep all these questions in mind. Mr. Putin has stated that if he is impeded in Ukraine the world will be shocked by his response. At the beginning of the war he put his nation’s nuclear forces on high alert. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told House Intelligence that Moscow hasn’t made such a pronouncement since the 1960s.

Mr. Putin’s threats can be understood as a bluff or as a clear and factual warning of intent. It’s possible he himself doesn’t know how far and how low he’d go. But I’m struck by the assertion of the justly confident Fiona Hill, the diplomat and Putin scholar, in an interview with Politico last week: “The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it.”

Obviously if Mr. Putin decided at some point to use a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon, it would be a catastrophe for the world. But it’s even more than that. What must be said is that once something like that starts, it doesn’t stop. The taboo is broken. It is extremely important for the world that the taboo not be broken. Once a nuclear weapon is used, the use of nuclear weapons is “on the table” in human history—a possibility, another move open to leaders when a war begins. And we can’t let that happen in a world full of monsters who’d use such weapons in a shot but so far haven’t quite felt permitted to break the taboo and usher in a new, dark age.

Even in times of high Western passion—the Soviet suppression of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and during the brilliant Polish freedom movement called Solidarity in the 1980s—America maintained a spirit of responsive restraint, of judicious engagement, that got us through without missiles flying. We don’t know that “stick with what worked” guarantees anything now, but that it worked in the past is its own encouragement.

We must do what we can without sparks flying, and Lord knows we should be talking to Russia about Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors. It’s not only a matter of “don’t hit them,” it is that human beings have to work there to keep them safely operating—showing up each day during a war, sustaining their professionalism, not being unnerved and making mistakes while they’re being shelled.

The West must feel what it feels and not let it compromise our judgment. You probably know this without someone saying it, but I’m getting the impression not everybody does.

It wasn’t geopolitics or ideology that determined world reaction to what happened in Ukraine this week, it was normal human feeling. An army of tanks and troops violently invades a border country populated by its cousins—a country a third its size with a tenth its might—and people watched and thought: That’s not right.

If it works, if Vladimir Putin gets what he wants, we go back to a world red in tooth and claw, with old restraining rules melted away. That’s not right.

An amazing aspect of the crisis is that something reminded the West it’s the West—more than a geographic entity but a certain shared history and political traditions, a certain shared human experience, even some shared commitments. So they stood together—a unified Europe. Who would have guessed that would happen? Not Mr. Putin. And maybe not a lot of Westerners.

The reaction is international, and you know this not only from the United Nations General Assembly vote condemning Russia, with only four other dissenters. A friend, an immigrant from Central America, a working woman here 20 years, said wonderingly, “I can’t stop watching.” She meant the video from Ukraine of the explosions, the refugees. She was a child when the Cold War ended, has no special investment in European history, no ties to Ukraine, yet the story has wholly engaged her, and she knows who the bad guy is.

All immigrants understand what it is to flee, to be in the crowded conveyance with the kids crying. And we are a world of immigrants.

But also maybe what’s different in this story is a lot of people would be taken aback that we all still have normal human emotions. Most of the forces of modern life tend toward the synthetic, the presentational—virtual feelings and enactments. And yet here we are, feeling something.

Some people, not all of them dimwitted, ask the secret of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “communication skills.” Is it a heavy use of verbs? But what we are seeing isn’t “communication skills.” A brave man stands and tells you what he is doing—staying, fighting, leading. It’s straight and clear because he is, but also because he doesn’t have time for “eloquence.” Crisis is an editor, it removes the cheap and extraneous and keeps the essential. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” That’s not something clever you thought up, it’s the simple expression of a human predicament. And a universal one. At some point in your life you’ll have to stand and fight. You too will need ammo and not a ride.

In week two, things will get meaner, more brutal.

The extremely demanding task for the U.S. and the West: Keep cool, stay committed, don’t waver, continue to speak in one voice, save Ukraine. At the same time, look for any opportunity to de-escalate, maybe, against the odds, to talk the madman holding the baby off the ledge.

It was right that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled a long-scheduled test of the Minuteman III ballistic missile at California’s Vandenburg Air Force Base this week. Why give Mr. Putin something he could seize on as a supposed provocation? GOP senators were wrong to protest: Grrrr, grrrr, now’s the time to be tough. Now’s the time to be careful.

Mr. Putin has lost his old reputation as a cool and cunning player, a calculator; now he’s grouped with Hitler and Stalin, and this for him will never change. His legacy is in ruins, his invasion a historic blunder, his threat to use nuclear weapons a moral and strategic mistake. Among other things it underscores that the weakness of his conventional weapons has been exposed.

I spoke with some diplomats this week, including one veteran of politics and high strategy I’ll call the Wise Old Hound. All agreed: Keep up lines of communication with the Russian government, no matter how seemingly futile. Create and maintain lines of communication to Russian elites, people and military. Talking doesn’t necessarily solve anything, but it can at least lower the odds of miscalculation, and it might unexpectedly help.

The first week of the invasion shattered the Russian army’s mystique. These aren’t Siege of Leningrad killers; these aren’t fur-hatted Cossacks 15 feet tall on their nimble steeds; these are modern, slouchy 20-year-olds who play videogames.

“He’s afraid his military isn’t cutting it,” the Wise Old Hound said of Mr. Putin. “Something is going on there. There may be some question, is he gonna dump his military or is his military gonna dump him? They’ve got to be disillusioned with his commands and orders, and I suspect the disillusionment is a two-way street.”

This unfolds within a highly “unpredictable and dangerous” context. “This is not just two giants standing off against each other. We’re in a cyber race, and midgets get to be in the game.” When a nation goes on nuclear alert, as Russia has, “you’re setting up more risk of a false warning in which Russia is wrongly told it’s undergoing some kind of attack. Some third-party states would love to see a nuclear exchange. If Russia’s warning system goes haywire—if our warning system goes haywire . . .” He didn’t complete the sentence.

More than ever back-channel communication is crucial, “military to military, top military leaders talking to each other.”

Along with that, “I think we have to have much broader outreach in the long run directly to the people of Russia,” he said. “Putin is in trouble with his elites, and has to be worried about public opinion.”

Another diplomat said it’s important to speak to the Russian people, who not only are suffering economically, with long lines at the ATM, and the value of their savings and salaries falling with the ruble, but will suffer politically. “You don’t get to do a move like Ukraine, with all its oppression, without increasing oppression at home.”

Thousands have gone into the streets to protest the war and Mr. Putin’s dictatorship. Reuters reported Sunday that 5,500 people had been arrested, 2,000 that day alone.

Mr. Putin will crack down, hard. Russians will suffer in another way. The past 30 years their lives have materially expanded—they are more prosperous, have more options, go on vacations, have children at colleges in Europe. As the diplomat said: “They shop at Ikea.” (The Swedish furniture chain shut its Russia stores Thursday.) Under Mr. Putin they didn’t have freedom at home but they became integrated into the world, which was its own kind of freedom.

They don’t want to be the pariah people of a pariah state. They want to be proud of themselves and their country. Most Russians don’t like the oligarchs and the hard men around Mr. Putin any more than we do.

We should find every way to tell the people of Russia the facts of the war as it unfolds, what the West is trying to do and why. Tell it as straight and clear as Mr. Zelensky. They should be told that the world has lost respect for Mr. Putin but not for the Russian people. Urge them to see Ukraine for what it is, and Mr. Putin for who he is.

It is ugly and will get uglier. Vladimir Putin isn’t going to stop anytime soon. You don’t launch a full-scale military assault on another nation and two days later say, “Oh, I think I’ve made my point,” and go home. He was never interested in negotiations, he was never open to argument, he set this in motion and will follow through to the imagined victory point in his head.

He has shocked the West. He wanted to shock the West.

In doing so he has shattered the European peace, broken international law, and attempted to re-establish brute force as a primary political determinant of the future. All this constitutes a major upheaval.

We will find out if world leadership is up to it, and American leadership equal to the moment. So far the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that fractious alliance, has held together, and the U.S. tactic of publicly sharing its intelligence proved wise.

People draw parallels to World War II, and there are some, but this isn’t 1938. The Speaker of the House, on returning Wednesday from the Munich Security Conference, said, “This is our moment. . . . This is a Sudetenland.” There was something bizarrely rah-rah and certainly half-baked about her statement.

Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland took place in a prenuclear world. The world of 2022 has thousands of nuclear weapons of all sizes, weights, purposes and delivery mechanisms. Sudetenland occurred in a world of physicalness—big printing presses, hand-calculated bank balances. Our world is run by computers vulnerable to devastating cyberattacks. Sudetenland was a quick and largely unresisted invasion. Ukraine won’t be bloodless, and there’s no reason to believe it will be quick.

The point is we are not repeating history. This war is uncharted territory. So no, we’re not living through something you streamed on Netflix; you don’t know the end of the story; and if you’re in government you may or may not be Churchill, we’ll see.

When I was a kid they used to say a coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man but one. In time I came to think no, the imaginative die a thousand deaths, the dullard but one. You have to maintain an eye for peril and see its implications. The world is in new peril.

On the unimaginative end of the spectrum there is J.D. Vance, a candidate for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Ohio, whose Theory of Enacted Populism apparently involves hearing the most careless thing a voter says in a diner and repeating it with an air of ingenuous self-discovery. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He cares about fentanyl coming over the border and killing our kids. So do a lot of us, but responsible people care about both. This is a lousy moment for mindless pandering.

You may not care about war but war cares about you. Russia isn’t Upper Volta with a gas station; it’s Upper Volta with a gas station, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and a furious owner. What he does may have repercussions. If you would lead, you don’t get not to care.

I see little profit in continuing to go over who blew it most since the collapse of Soviet communism. Did the West in its blithe triumphalism miscalculate by letting NATO move east? Did our diplomats, those Brooks Brothers smoothies, patronize the old apparatchiks in their boxy gray suits? Yes, they did. I’m where George Kennan was: It was a mistake to enlarge NATO by admitting former Warsaw Pact states; it fueled resentment, encouraged paranoia and embarrassed democrats in Moscow who’d pushed against communism at some cost.

But that debate shouldn’t freeze thought now. Argue later who was the biggest jerk 25 years ago. Whether the U.S. and the West were wrong or not, Mr. Putin is still wrong to invade Ukraine.

Is Mr. Putin mad? Are his actions the result of increasing instability?

“[Emmanuel] Macron noticed a change in Mr. Putin’s demeanor when speaking to him on the phone over the course of the pandemic. ‘He tended to talk in circles, rewriting history,’ a close aide to Mr. Macron said.” This is from reporters Ann M. Simmons, Noemie Bisserbe and Bojan Pancevski in their Wednesday front-pager in the Journal.

Mr. Macron, a French official said, found Mr. Putin “more rigid, more isolated” than in the past.

In his speech to the Russian people on Monday, Mr. Putin’s mind circled within a tightening narrative of grievance. Lenin and Stalin failed to make Ukraine’s standing clear, Khrushchev messed up Crimea. The speech has been called fiery but it wasn’t; it was preoccupied with the historically arcane and made no attempt to persuade anyone outside Vladimir Putin’s head. It had the wound-up particularity of the local grocer when he talks about his 30-year feud with the butcher down the street.

It was Mr. Putin’s speech the night the war began that had real menace. In an unscheduled statement on Russian television, he warned those nations that might “consider interfering” with Russia’s actions that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”

That was some kind of threat from a man with a nuclear arsenal and a talent for malware. It was followed by the sound of explosions in Kyiv. He is trying to scare the world.

Sometimes leaders are mad. Sometimes they want you to think they’re mad. Sometimes both.

What is important from the West is unity and strength—not “toughness” but strength. You don’t have to make a great show of determination if you’re really determined, you just have to be who you are.

Mr. Putin is alone, not that he cares; everyone knows who the bad guy is in this drama. No country has said he is in the right, not one, not even China. He is alone, burnishing his credentials as a junior monster of history.

The opinion of the world matters and has a force of its own.

Wars are expensive, occupations extremely so; it costs money to keep an army on the ground, to fuel and feed it. There is the human cost: young men will die. This will all cost Mr. Putin and the cost will increase with time. He knows this, he’s factored it in, but the West should make it costlier wherever possible.

All the West is going to have to play a long, cool, careful game. Leaders and officials should do nothing to provoke. In Europe they should speak in one voice to the extent possible: define, describe, be precise, no histrionics. Don’t taunt. Britain’s defense minister, Ben Wallace, said Wednesday said they’d “kicked the backside” of the Russians in the Crimean war in the 1850s, and “can always do it again.” That war is mostly remembered for the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sometimes it’s good to quiet your rousing voices and concentrate on not letting this become World War III.

The West is on the right side. It should keep its height, keep its nerve and hold together. Be cool, press hard, resist.

Let the world see what happens to a man who does what Vladimir Putin is doing. Show gravity. Because it’s all very grave.

It was a landslide. That’s the important fact of San Francisco’s school-board recall election: There was nothing mixed or ambivalent about the outcome. Three members were resoundingly ejected from their jobs: 79% voted to oust Alison Collins, 75% to fire Gabriela López, the board president, and 72% to remove Faauuga Moliga, the vice president.

This was a vote against progressive education officials in the heart of liberal San Francisco. It is a signal moment because of its head-chopping definitiveness, its clarity, its swiftness and its unignorable statement by parents on what they must have and won’t accept. It was a battle in the Democratic Party’s civil war between liberals and the progressive left. And it marks a continuation of the parents’ rebellion that surfaced in November in Virginia’s upset gubernatorial election.

It is in the way of things that Democratic leaders in Congress won’t feel they have an excuse to crack down hard on the progressive wing of their party until the entire party loses big in the 2022 elections. But Democratic voters on the ground aren’t waiting for permission. They are taking a stick to wokeness whether the party’s leaders do or not.

You know most of what was at issue. During the height of the pandemic, when San Francisco’s schools were closed, parents were increasingly frustrated and newly angry. They saw that remote learning was an inadequate substitute for children being in the classroom. Many sensed that a year or two out of school would leave their children with an educational deficit that would not be repaired. The teachers unions balked at reopening and the Board of Education approached the problem with what seemed muted interest. Although they did a lot of word-saying featuring impenetrable jargon, as school boards do, they didn’t have a plan and the schools didn’t open.

While the board was failing to open the schools it was doing other things. It produced government by non sequitur. The board focused on issues of woke antiracism and oppression. The problem wasn’t whether the kids were getting an education, it was whether the boarded-up schools had unfortunate names. They spent months researching the question and proposed renaming a third of the system’s 125 schools. Many were named for previously respectable people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Francis Scott Key and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their names were “inappropriate” because their lives and actions could be connected with charges of racism, sexism and colonialism. From the San Francisco Chronicle: “The move shocked many principals and families, who questioned whether changing a name was a mid-pandemic priority when their children cannot physically attend the school in question.”

The public rose up—stop this stuff, get our kids back in school! The backlash intensified when it was revealed some of the board’s historical research was dependent on cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.

So it wasn’t only government by non sequitur, it was inept. The board backed off and said, essentially, that the matter needed more study.

The board soon moved onto another item on the progressive wish list. It homed in on academically elite public high schools that based admission on testing and grades. For people who can’t afford a $40,000-a-year private-school tuition, such schools are a godsend; they were designed long ago to offer demanding course study to students with limited money but demonstrable gifts.

The board decided too many Asian-American and white students were accepted in the schools. So they voted to scrap testing and replace it with a permanent lottery system for admission at Lowell High, one of only two campuses in the district to use merit-based admissions. (The decision was later overturned by lawsuits.)

Now parents exploded, very much including the Asian community. It got more heated when it was discovered Ms. Collins had an old tweet accusing Asian-Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” She seemed rather a creepy and bigoted person to have in a position of such authority.

Even aside from that, parents who were up nights helping their children with homework, seeing that schoolwork was done and discipline learned, felt their effort was being discounted and their children abandoned to abstract notions of equity. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Kids have to be taught to earn their way through effort. Lotteries don’t teach them that; lotteries teach them it’s all luck.

Now the recall process took off.

It did not help that just before the pandemic, in 2019, the board had famously turned to censorship. There was a big, colorful series of Depression-era frescoes in a local high school. They’d been there since the 1930s and were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal, a stylized depiction of the founding of America that included slaves and American Indians. The board decided it was racist, cruel, reductive; there was the implication it was right-wing art. In fact the frescoes were the work of a Russian immigrant to America, Victor Arnautoff, who was a communist and trying to bring attention to the cruelty present in some of America’s history. No matter, it was offensive, so the board decided to paint over the murals.

Art-sensitive San Francisco rose up: This is akin to book burning, you don’t lay waste to art. The board then decided it wouldn’t paint over the frescoes, merely conceal them behind barriers of some sort.

What was astonishing as you followed the story is what seemed the board members’ shock at parental pushback. They seemed so detached from the normal hopes of normal people. They seemed honestly unaware of them. It was as if they were operating in some abstract universe in which their decisions demonstrated their praiseworthy antiracist bona fides. But voters came to see their actions as a kind of woke progressive vandalism that cleverly avoided their central responsibility: to open the schools.

School boards somehow always seem to think they are immune from pushback, that their pronouncements will never be opposed because they can barely be understood.

But people have a way of seeing. If, during a pandemic lockdown, board members speak often and thoughtfully of the increased likelihood of the abuse of neglected children, one will get a sense of their motivation and heart. If instead they dilate on political issues that deflect, one will get a different, darker view of their motivation and heart.

That’s why the three in San Francisco were fired.

What happened shows again that there is a real parents movement going on, and it is going to make a difference in our politics.

Democrats dismiss these issues as “culture-war distractions.” They are not; they are about life at its most real, concrete and immediate. That easy dismissal reveals the party’s distance from the lives of its own constituents.

To think parents would sacrifice their children for your ideology, or an ideology coming from within your ranks that you refuse to stand up to, is political malpractice at a high level.

Joe Biden received 85% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. Those board members just lost their seats by more than 70%. A cultural rebellion within the Democratic Party has begun.

Simi Valley, Calif.

The Reagan Foundation and Institute inaugurated a series of speeches last spring on the future of the Republican Party. It is called “A Time for Choosing” and has been a great and lively success, with speakers from all corners of the party. Monday night I spoke, at the Reagan Library, and this week’s column is adapted from my remarks:

America is in a crucial, high-stakes moment. Since 2020 we have been roiled over the pandemic, wokeness, crime, inflation, the schools, illegal immigration. The Democratic Party has stood for, or failed to oppose, many unpopular policies. The Republican Party seems poised to rise.

So what is the job of the Republican Party at this time?

It is to be sane. It is to stand against excess. It is to put itself forward as worthy of leadership. It has to be centrist in its mood and attitudes, and in its internal understanding of itself.

Thirty-two years ago, in my first book, “What I Saw at the Revolution,” I addressed the party and said: “This is the future. You’re a working-class party.” I still believe this but would no longer cast the argument in the language of class. It is too limited and has an aggressive undertone. The Republican Party should see itself too as the party of parents, who in the face of bullying and indifference need someone to stand with them. It should be the party of the unprotected, of regular people—the party of strivers who don’t want to be oppressed, creators who don’t want to be thwarted, store owners who shouldn’t feel constantly afraid of crime or regulation or governmental fees.

The party should retain its ancestral beliefs—for power being held closest to the individual and the family, and radiating out from there to county, state and nation. In the century-old formulation the party was meant to be Main Street, not Wall Street or any other center of concentrated power—big business, big tech. Really anything that begins with “big.”

But an enduring party’s stands must reflect and address the needs and demands of its era. The pressing challenges America now faces aren’t those of 1970 or 1980. A great party must be in line with the crises of its time.

Be prudent stewards, keep your eye on the long run, cultivate economic growth, defend free markets, but make peace with the welfare state. Your own voters did long ago.

Make peace with programs that support the poor and middle class. Appreciate and respect that members of your party, and potential supporters, rely on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—the whole edifice created in the past century by both parties to help people feel more secure and with a steadier foothold in the world. These programs have been a positive good. Make them stronger; undergird them.

Republican congressmen enjoy receiving credit for damning such spending while not cutting it. They think this the best of both worlds. It isn’t. It leaves voters afraid that once in power you’ll revert to type and pull the rug out from under them, when the past few years they’ve had too many rugs pulled from under them—the end of U.S. manufacturing, a tottering culture.

It should be said of the Republican Party of the future what was said long ago of the Catholic church: “Here comes everybody.”

You saw the funeral last month of Jason Rivera at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. He was 22, a New York City policeman from a Dominican immigrant family, gunned down and killed with another cop, Wilbert Mora, 27, who was also from a big immigrant family. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York buried those men the way you bury a president—in the presence of dozens of priests and officiants, a choir, a certain liturgical solemnity and grace. The cathedral was packed, filled with family, friends and colleagues of the fallen—the immigrant community, members of minority groups, all of them Americans, normal people there in affiliation with one of their own. It was beautiful. And when the service was over and the mourners walked out of the cathedral, what they saw for blocks, downtown and uptown, was a sea of police in full regalia, come to honor their own. A street full of flags.

It was a statement, it was a show of cultural force, and it was a question: Who will stand with us?

The Republican Party should come to understand it is the answer to that question.

Many of those men and women are new here, work hard, fled something bad, and want America to work. They are invested in it. And they are the big center. As America tries to cohere and regain its cultural and societal balance, it is the job of the Republican Party to be the party of the big center, to stand for normal, regular people in all their human variety—all races, ethnicities, faiths—against the forces of ideology currently assailing them.

It is your job to see this moment for what it is and be serious. It is not your job to be extreme—to pose for Christmas photos with your family including little children fully armed with guns in order to troll the libs, as two members of Congress did. It is not your job to call the events of Jan. 6, the riot in the Capitol, “legitimate political discourse.” That is a lie the cops and their families in the cathedral can see right through, that everyone can see through.

If you knew how high the stakes are you wouldn’t be so frivolous.

(I add here: The Jan. 6 committee carries a gift for the Republican Party. It can fully, formally resolve what was done in the Capitol that day. It can reveal and expose who goaded it, guided it, encouraged lawbreaking. Once these things are fully known there can be an endpoint to that day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has it right: It was a violent insurrection meant to stop a constitutionally mandated process. Investigate, air, absorb, understand, vow—and walk forward into better history.)

The Republican Party should stand against excess on all fronts—excessive regulation, excessive controls, excessive rejiggering of cultural norms. The Democrats right now are in love with excess—spending new trillions without care, even when that gives rise to inflation.

A great party can’t be a cult. Cults are by definition marginal, not of the majority. Donald Trump brought new voters in, it’s true, and the party would do well to hold them by taking good stands. But don’t forget the votes he lost. He never came close in two tries to winning the popular vote, he lost once-Republican suburbs, in 2020 he lost Arizona and Georgia, dooming Senate candidates and giving control of the chamber to the Democrats. As long as he dominates the scene the party will not succeed nationally.

How sad that would be when the problems we face are piled so high.

To his friends and followers I would say, put America first. Don’t be a cultist, be a patriot. Help your country, let go of old obsessions. Go forward with a spirit of repair and lead this wounded country.

I don’t know what’s coming in Ukraine or what the U.S. should do beyond think first of its national interests. The trick is defining those interests for this moment and with these players. We have to get it right and the stakes feel high, but there seems a paucity of new thinking. I find myself impatient with confidently expressed declarations that we have no interest in a faraway border dispute, that Russia and Ukraine have a long and complicated history, and in any case the story of man is a tale of organized brutality, so get a grip. That’s not . . . right. A major land war in Europe? The first since World War II? We have no interest in what might be the beginning of a new era of brute-force violations of sovereignty? One involving our allies, with which we have treaties?

The arguments on the other side sound careless, rote: Get tough, push back, ship weapons, show Putin who’s boss. That sounds like politicians saying what they’ve said for 70 years, and at this point not out of conviction but because they have no new moves, barely a memory of new moves.

None of our political leaders are thinking seriously, or at least thinking aloud in a serious way.

It is hard not to be skeptical of sanctions as a deterrent to Russia. Aren’t we sort of sanctioned out? Does Vladimir Putin really fear them? Hasn’t he already factored them in? And wary of other responses: U.S. troops on heightened alert, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization reinforcing Eastern Europe with ships and fighter jets. Doesn’t this carry the potential of a spark that turns into a fire? This is the moment a writer would add “especially in the nuclear age.” I’d say especially in this later and I fear less rigorous part of the nuclear age. Forty-five-year-old field commanders are 76 years removed from Hiroshima and have likely never read John Hersey. They don’t carry a natural and fully absorbed horror about a launch caused by confusion, miscalculation, miscommunication. I sort of explain life to myself by assuming everyone’s drunk. That could literally be true of any given Russian general marching through the steppes.

So let me say at least one constructive thing: that we don’t worry enough about nuclear weapons. We have lost our preoccupation with them. For leaders who remembered World War II, it was always front of mind. Now, less so. Which is funny because such weapons are in more hands now than ever before. The world we live in, including the military one, seems more distracted than in the past, less rigorous and professional.

We’re used to being lucky. Luck is a bad thing to get used to.

If I read Mr. Putin right, he wants the fruits of war without the war, in line with the leaders of the Soviet system whose end he still mourns. A difference is those leaders were impressed by us and factored that into their calculations. Mr. Putin isn’t. A lot of people aren’t impressed by us anymore. The long-term answer to that is not to beat our breasts and shout “USA!” but to become more impressive in terms of our economic strength, political leaders and character as a people. But we are in the short term.

Which gives rise to the question: Shouldn’t the United Nations be involved? “Major land war,” “violation of state sovereignty”—isn’t this what the Security Council is for? As I write I hear echoes of Adlai Stevenson in the Cuban missile crisis. Stevenson asked the Soviet ambassador to the council, Valerian Zorin, if Moscow had missiles in Cuba: “Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no?” Then his staff produced huge photos of the missiles, which convinced the world who was right and who was wrong.

If Mr. Putin is going to invade a sovereign nation, shouldn’t he at least be embarrassed and exposed in the eyes of the world? Shamed? Nikita Khrushchev was. The whole Soviet system was.

I want to close with something I’ve been thinking about. American presidents in crises always fear being called weak. They fear this more than they fear being called unwise. But recent years have given me a greater appreciation for a moment when a president in crisis didn’t fear it, or didn’t let his fear govern his actions, and it involves Ukraine.

It was August 1991. The Soviet Union was in its astounding day-by-day fall. George H.W. Bush had just met in summit with Mikhail Gorbachev and then went on to Kyiv, where he spoke to a session of what was still then the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine.

It was a great moment in the history of freedom. A totalitarian empire was falling; the Warsaw Pact nations had already broken free. Bush had some human sympathy for those like Mr. Gorbachev, who were seeing the system they’d known all their lives crash down around them. He had affection and respect for those reaching for democracy. But he had a deep and overriding concern: There were thousands of strategic nuclear warheads long ago placed by Moscow in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and more than 20,000 smaller tactical nuclear weapons. They had to be dealt with. So it was not only a joyous moment; it was a delicate, dangerous one.

In his speech, Bush said Ukraine was debating “the fundamental questions of liberty, self-rule, and free enterprise” and Americans followed this with “excitement and hope.” Become democratic, Bush said, and we will help and assist you. But don’t tear yourself apart with long-repressed internal resentments, or external ones. “President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika and democratization point towards the goals of freedom, democracy and economic liberty.” Bush urged Ukraine to appreciate what Russia was trying to do. Between the lines he was saying: History is already overcharged; don’t bust the circuit-breakers, don’t further destabilize what is already unstable. Don’t let “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred” take hold. He was also signaling to Mr. Gorbachev: We’ll do everything we can to keep your dissolution as peaceful as possible. Unspoken, he was saying: We’ll help you with the missiles.

It was a thoughtful speech, sophisticated and inherently balanced save for one too-hot phrase—“suicidal nationalism.”

It got a standing ovation. Then the dread pundits descended, chief among them New York Times bigfoot William Safire, who thought Bush missed the revolutionary moment. Bush sounded unexcited about freedom, even “anti-liberty,” Safire wrote in November 1991, calling it the “‘chicken Kiev’ speech.”

With that memorable phrase Safire did real damage to Bush, making him look . . . weak. Fussily prudent. Less than a year later, Bush lost his bid for re-election. People found him not of the moment, out of touch.

I thought my friend Safire right then. Now I think we were mostly wrong. The Soviet republics did break off and forge their own paths, and with Western help the nukes were deactivated and sent back to Russia, where they were dismantled. It was one of the great and still not sufficiently heralded moments of the Cold War, and it was done by a political class that was serious, and even took a chance on speaking seriously.

The long news conference wasn’t a success, though it was daring (almost two hours, live) and probably worth the dare (nothing else is working). President Biden came out swinging, pushed back on critics, made big claims—it’s been “a year of enormous progress.” The White House seemed to want to show him thinking aloud, being reflective, at ease. He gave it his best, but it didn’t work. Unfinished sentences, non sequiturs; sometimes his thoughts seem like bumper cars crashing and forcing each other off course. I still don’t understand his defense of his comment equating opponents of his voting bill with historic Southern racists. Angrily: “No, I didn’t say that. Look what I said. Go back and read what I said and tell me if you think I called anyone who voted on the side of the position taken by Bull Connor that they were Bull Connor. That is an interesting reading of English. I assume you got into journalism because you liked to write.” A lot of things simply couldn’t be parsed. After the Afghanistan debacle he was defiant and defensive. You could see some of that on Wednesday also.

Asked what he will do different in the second year of his presidency he spoke of a “change in tactic.” He will get out of Washington more and speak to the people—“on the road a lot making the case around the country.”

He is misdiagnosing his problem. It isn’t that his stands and decisions haven’t been fully understood and will be embraced if comprehended more fully. It’s that his stands and decisions the past year were basically understood and disliked. It’s not a communications problem, it’s a substance problem. It would be better if he spent his second year readjusting his positions. But politicians always think it’s a communications problem. Because that means the back office is blowing it, not you.

I’ve written of how the non-left experiences Joe Biden. The past week I’ve been thinking about Mr. Biden himself, whom we’ve gotten to know in a new way the past year. I turned back again—for the third time, actually—to “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” the great classic of presidential politics by the late Richard Ben Cramer. Before I give it its due I’ll note its flaws. It is casually sexist—Cramer didn’t seem to think a lot of the women entering national politics and journalism in the late 1980s—and bitchily score-settling, especially against his journalistic competitors. Most seriously, what keeps it from being a masterpiece is that he failed to deal with or account for his political biases and predilections. Democrats are rather good, Republicans rather bad; Dems are serious about policy, Reps use policy as a tool for advantage, or ignorantly. Their stands are spoofed, often with a Southern accent—“sosh’lahzed medicine.”

And yet. It is for all that a very great work of political reporting, telling the tale of the 1988 campaign with real breadth and depth—with sprawl. His mastery of detail is simply stupendous. As for his prose, he wrote with a zest that was almost a kind of love, about the great game and those who choose to be part of it. He makes you see what he’s telling you.

Cramer focused on six candidates, but the one he most loved, the one in whom he seemed most invested, was Mr. Biden, who flamed out in his first presidential race after charges of plagiarism and lying about his record.

It’s a wonderful portrait. Cramer’s Biden is from childhood scrappy and proud, “with a grace born of cocky self-possession.” By college he knew he would go into politics. He was voluble, a talker who’d talk until you loved him. He was sensitive about his intelligence—in law school if someone said he wouldn’t make the cut, “well, Joe was ready to step outside and settle who was smarter.” All this caused him problems when he ran in ’88—he’d made inflated claims along the way that he’d graduated with three degrees, on a scholarship—and reporters found out.

In his first debate Tom Shales, television critic of the Washington Post, zeroed in on something that still pertains. “He comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit.”

From the beginning of his political career Mr. Biden had deep faith in his own judgment. It wasn’t always well placed. Cramer: “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” He also had deep faith in his ability to persuade—anyone at any time, just get him in the room with them. He could make any deal once he had made what he called the “connect”—a mystical moment between him and the audience when he knew he had them, when some magic of emotion happened and they realized: He’s the one. He was good at it in that first presidential run. He brought union members to their feet.

But his gurus tore their hair out because he was “speech driven.” He didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it. He rode them to come up with the message of the campaign, its meaning. When they tried he was in response both irresolute and stubborn: Major speeches were torn apart and rewritten with only minutes to go. He had a high tolerance for chaos and created it. He usually ran an hour late. In the end he didn’t really have a message; what he had was hunger and a sense of destiny.

His national political career began exactly 50 years ago, in early 1972. He was an obscure Delaware county councilman, 29 years old, a dashing, charismatic nobody. Republican J. Caleb Boggs was running for his third term in the Senate. Boggs was beloved in Delaware, a former governor, a Republican moderate who voted for the 1964 and ’68 Civil Rights Acts and helped put Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Senate Democrats loved him too: His good nature and common touch helped make the place run.

No one would challenge Boggs, but young Joe Biden looked at him and thought: “He’s tired.” By which he meant: He’s old. Boggs turned 63 that year, which seemed older then than now. Mr. Biden ran against him vowing to be an “activist” senator, who’d put energy in the state, which needed “change.” At one point Boggs was ahead 30 points. Mr. Biden had no money or name recognition, but he had “a great radio voice,” and he ran not so much on policies as on a mood—fresh, vital youth must take its place. It was the first federal election in which 18-year-olds could vote.

In the biggest congressional upset of 1972, Mr. Biden beat Cale Boggs by 1.5 points, and his great career began.

Now he is the target of the kind of critique he used against Boggs, coming from his natural opposition but also from within his own party: he’s lost his bite, he’s not quite with it, he’s . . . old.

Themes repeat themselves in life. What goes around, comes around, and politics is a rough old business.

It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.

The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.

By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.

He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.

In the speech Mr. Biden claimed he stands against “the forces in America that value power over principle.” Last year Georgia elected two Democratic senators. “And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia? Choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.” They want to “suppress the right to vote.” They want to “subvert the election.”

This is “Jim Crow 2.0,” it’s “insidious,” it’s “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”

The problem is greater than Georgia. “The United States Senate . . . has been rendered a shell of its former self.” Its rules must be changed. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.” Senators will now “declare where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.”

Most wince-inducing: “Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

If a speech can be full of itself this speech was.

From the floor of the Senate the next day came Mr. McConnell’s rebuke. It was stinging, indignant to the point of seething. He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights. The plainness of his language was ferocious.

Mr. Biden’s speech was “profoundly unpresidential,” “deliberately divisive” and “designed to pull our country further apart.” “I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.” Mr. Biden had entered office calling on Americans to stop the shouting and lower the temperature. “Yesterday, he called millions of Americans his domestic ‘enemies.’ ” That, a week after he “gave a January 6th lecture about not stoking political violence.”

“Twelve months ago, this president said that ‘disagreement must not lead to disunion.’ But yesterday, he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors.”

“Twelve months ago, the president said that ‘politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.’ . . . Yesterday he poured a giant can of gasoline on that fire.”

“In less than a year, ‘restoring the soul of America’ has become: Agree with me, or you’re a bigot.”

“This inflammatory rhetoric was not an attempt to persuade skeptical Democratic or Republican senators. In fact, you could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery.”

American voters, said Mr. McConnell, “did not give President Biden a mandate for very much.” They didn’t give him big majorities in Congress. But they did arguably give him a mandate to bridge a divided country. “It is the one job citizens actually hired him to do.” He has failed to do it.

Then Mr. McConnell looked at Mr. Biden’s specific claims regarding state voting laws. “The sitting president of the United States of America compared American states to ‘totalitarian states.’ He said our country will be an ‘autocracy’ if he does not get his way.” The world has now seen an American president “propagandize against his own country to a degree that would have made Pravda blush.”

“He trampled through some of the most sensitive and sacred parts of our nation’s past. He invoked times when activists bled, and when soldiers died. All to demagogue voting laws that are more expansive than what Democrats have in his own home state.”

“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power.”

What Mr. Biden was really doing was attempting to “delegitimize the next election in case they lose it.”

Now, he said, “It is the Senate’s responsibility to protect the country.”

That sounded very much like a vow. It won’t be good for Joe Biden.

When national Democrats talk to the country they always seem to be talking to themselves. They are of the left, as is their constituency, which wins the popular vote in presidential elections; the mainstream media through which they send their messages is of the left; the academics, historians and professionals they consult are of the left. They get in the habit of talking to themselves, in their language, in a single, looped conversation. They have no idea how they sound to the non-left, so they have no idea when they are damaging themselves. But this week in Georgia Mr. Biden damaged himself. And strengthened, and may even have taken a step in unifying, the non-Democrats who are among their countrymen, and who are in fact the majority of them.