Peggy Noonan

Let’s start with true anger and end with honest hope. The alarm many felt at the leaking of an entire draft Supreme Court decision shouldn’t be allowed to dissipate as time passes. Such a thing has never happened. Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary opinion being taken from the court, without permission or right, and given to the press was an act of sabotage by a vandal. It hardly matters whether the leaker was of the left or right. It reflected the same spirit as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot—irresponsible destructiveness. As the book has been thrown at the rioters, it should be thrown at the leaker.

The justices can’t sit around and say oh no, we’re just another victim of the age. If they have to break some teacups to find who did it, break them. Chief Justice John Roberts worries, rightly, about the court’s standing. This is the biggest threat to it since he joined. At the very least it might be good if the justices would issue a joint statement that they are appalled by the publication of the decision, don’t accept it, won’t countenance it.

Apart from the leaker, here is what I always want to say when the issue is abortion. The vast majority of human beings on both sides are utterly sincere and operating out of their best understanding of life. Yes, there were plenty of people the past 50 years who used “the issue” to accrue money and power. But this long life tells me the overwhelming majority of people held their views for serious reasons. They sincerely saw the prohibition of abortion as a sin against women; they sincerely saw abortion on demand as a sin against life.

And you have to respect that as a wound, the Roe v. Wade decision never healed, never could. Josh Prager, in his stupendous history of that decision, “The Family Roe,” noted the singular fact of this ruling: Other high court decisions that liberalized the social order—desegregation of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage, gay marriage—were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings were very unpopular. Most came to have overwhelming support. But not Roe. That was the exception. It never stopped roiling America. Mr. Prager: “Opposition to Roe became more hostile after its issuance.”

Why? Because all the other decisions were about how to live, and Roe was about death. Justice Alito seems to echo this thought in his draft opinion, which would turn the questions of legality and illegality over to each state. This is not a solution to the issue, it is a way of managing it—democratically.

Some states, New York and California for instance, have already passed their own liberal abortion laws. Some states, such as Texas and Utah, will ban most or all abortions within their boundaries. It will be uneven, a jumble. But the liberal states will have their liberal decision, the conservative states their conservative ones, and that is as close to resolving the dilemma as we, as human beings in a huge and varied nation, will get.

I respect and agree with the Alito draft, didn’t think Roe was correct or even logical, and came to see the decision as largely a product of human vanity. Of all the liberal jurists who have faulted it, the one who sticks in the mind was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who after questioning Roe’s reasoning said, in 1985, that it appeared “to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” It did.

I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for 50 years and it damaged everything. Including of course our politics.

It left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past 25 years, to the party’s drift.

Abortion distorted both parties.

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

Democrats too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.

Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.

But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.

And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.

Sometimes a thing keeps nagging around your brain and though you’ve said it before you have to say it again. We factor in but do not sufficiently appreciate the real possibility of nuclear-weapon use by Russia in Ukraine. This is the key and crucial historic possibility in the drama, and it really could come to pass.

And once it starts, it doesn’t stop. Once the taboo that has held since 1945 is broken, it’s broken. The door has been pushed open and we step through to the new age. We don’t want to step into that age.

The war is in its third month. Diplomatic solutions are less likely than ever; war crimes and atrocities have hardened the Ukrainians, and in any case they’re winning and the world is on their side. British intelligence this week reported Russia has lost around 15,000 troops, 2,000 armored vehicles and 60 aircraft. The ground invasion force has lost an estimated 25% of its combat strength. Russia is grinding through a disaster.

We aren’t worried enough about Russian nuclear use in part because we imagine such a thing as huge missiles with huge warheads launched from another continent and speeding through space. We think: That won’t happen! It has never happened! But the more likely use would be not of big strategic nuclear weapons but smaller tactical ones on the battlefield. Such weapons have a shorter range and carry lower-yield warheads. America and Russia have rough parity in the number of strategic nuclear weapons, but Russia has an estimated 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S. and delivery systems that range from artillery shells to aircraft.

Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?

To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians—that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.

Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “lightning fast.” He said: “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”

He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.

There are signs the Russians are deliberately creating a historical paper trail, as if to say they warned us. On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risk of nuclear conflict is “serious” and “should not be underestimated.” Earlier, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. saying it was inflaming the conflict. The Washington Post got a copy. It said shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”

The U.S. at the same time has become rhetorically bolder. This month President Biden referred to Mr. Putin as a war criminal. In March Mr. Biden called for regime change; the White House walked it back. This week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters the U.S. aim in Ukraine: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it’s done in Ukraine.” The original American aim was to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. Has the U.S. strategy changed, or has its officials’ talk simply become looser? What larger strategic vision is the administration acting on?

In my experience with American diplomats, they are aware of but don’t always grasp the full implications of their opponents’ histories. Mr. Putin was a KGB spy who in 1991 saw the Soviet system in which he’d risen crash all around him. He called the fall of the Soviet Union a catastrophe because it left his country weakened, humiliated and stripped of dominance and hegemony in Eastern Europe. He is a walking, talking cauldron of resentments, which he deploys for maximum manipulation. He isn’t secretive about his grievances. In his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference he accused the U.S. of arrogance, hypocrisy and having created a “unipolar world” with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision making,” headed by “one master, one sovereign.” As for NATO, “we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended?”

Antagonism to the West has been the central intellectual organizing principle of his life. America is an object of his life’s obsession.

So let me make an argument for my anxieties: For this man, Russia can’t lose to the West. Ukraine isn’t the Mideast, a side show; it is the main event. I read him as someone who will do anything not to lose.

In October he will turn 70, and whatever his physical and mental health his life is in its fourth act. I am dubious that he will accept the idea that the signal fact of its end will be his defeat by the West. He can’t, his psychology will not allow it.

It seems to me he has become more careless, operating with a different historical consciousness. He launched a world-historic military invasion that, whatever his geostrategic aims, was shambolic—fully aggressive and confident, yet not realistically thought through. His army wasn’t up to the task. It seemed thrown together, almost haphazard, certainly not professional.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, often notes that Mr. Putin has killed all the institutions in his country, sucked the strength, independence and respectability from them, as dictators do. They take out power centers that might threaten them but might also warn them of weaknesses in their own governments. All dictatorships are ultimately self-weakening in that way. But this means Mr. Putin has no collective leadership in Russia. It’s all him. And he’s Vladimir Putin.

When I look at him I see a new nihilistic edge, not the calculating and somewhat reptilian person of the past.

People who have known Mr. Putin have told me I am wrong in my concern about his potential nuclear use in that he knows if he makes one move with such a weapon, Moscow will in turn be reduced to a smoking ruin. But I am reading Mr. Putin as someone who’s grown bored of that threat, who believes he can more than match it, who maybe doesn’t even believe it anymore. In any case the Americans would not respond disproportionately.

No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking: It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.

But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.

For the administration’s leaders this should be front of mind every day. They should return to the admirable terseness of the early days of the invasion. They should wake up every day thinking: What can we do to lower the odds?

Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.

I want to talk about Joe Biden and his unique problems presenting his presidency. You’re aware of his political position and the polls. The latest from CNN has him at 39% approval. Public admiration began to plummet during the Afghanistan withdrawal. That disaster came as it was becoming clear the president was handing his party’s progressive caucus functional control of his domestic agenda, which fell apart and never recovered.

James Carville the other night on MSNBC amusingly and almost persuasively said Democrats in the 2022 congressional elections should hit Republicans hard on their weirdo content—candidates who are both extreme and inane, conspiracists in the base. But the Democrats too have their weirdo quotient—extreme culture warriors, members of the Squad—and last summer the president appeared to have thrown in with them. That and Afghanistan were fateful for his position, and then came inflation.

But what struck me this week was a little-noticed poll from the New Hampshire Journal. It’s always interesting to know what’s going on in the first presidential primary state, but the Journal itself seemed startled by the answer to its question: If the 2024 election were held today and the candidates were Joe Biden vs. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who would you back? Mr. Sununu trounced the president 53% to 36%. Mr. Sununu is popular and that unusual thing, a vigorous moderate conservative who appears to have actual intellectual commitments. But Mr. Biden carried New Hampshire in 2020 with 53%. He’s cratering.

All politics grows from policies, and policies are announced and argued for through presentation, including, crucially, speeches. Joe Biden has a presentation problem. This is worthy of note because his entire career has been about presentation, specifically representing a mood. In 50 years he has cycled through Dashing Youth, the Next JFK, Middle-Class Joe and Late-Life Finder of His Inner Progressive. But the mood he represents now isn’t a good one. It’s there in the New Hampshire poll. Asked if they thought Biden was “physically and mentally up to the job” if there’s a crisis, “not very/not at all” got 54% and “very/somewhat” 42%. Here we all use euphemisms: “slowing down,” “not at the top of his game.” If Mr. Biden’s policies were popular, nobody would mind that he seems to be slowing. But they aren’t.

So to the presentation problem. Here are some difficulties when he speaks.

When he stands at a podium and reads from a teleprompter, his mind seems to wander quickly from the meaning of what he’s saying to the impression he’s making. You can sort of see this, that he’s always wondering how he’s coming across. When he catches himself he tends to compensate by enacting emotion.

But the emotion he seems most publicly comfortable with is indignation. An example is his answer to a reporter’s question in November about the administration’s plans to compensate illegal-immigrant parents who’d been separated from their children at the border. Suddenly he was angry-faced; he raised his voice, increased his tempo, and started jabbing the air. “You lost your child. It’s gone! You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstances.” Then, catching himself, he added mildly, “What that will be, I have no idea.” He was trying to show presentness, engagement. But there’s often an “angry old man yelling at clouds” aspect to this.

There are small tics that worked long ago. He often speaks as if we are fascinated by the family he came from and that formed him. Thus he speaks of the old neighborhood and lessons. And my mother told me, Joey, don’t comb your hair with buttered toast. This was great for a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but not now. For all the mystique of the presidency, people hired you to do a job and want you to be clear and have a plan. They aren’t obsessed with your family, they’re obsessed with their family.

Mr. Biden tends to be extremely self referential: “I’ll give it to you straight, as I promised that I always would.” Because I’m such a straight shooter. It’s better to shoot straight and not always be bragging. He should lose “Lemme say that again.” When you speak to America you don’t have to repeat yourself for the slow. I don’t think he’s aware he often seems to be talking down. People will tolerate this from a politician when they think he’s their moral or intellectual superior, but they push back when they don’t, as in the polls.

The larger problem for the president is that in his most important prepared speeches there’s a lot of extremely boring faux-eloquence, big chunks of smooth roundedness, and nothing sticks. Last April to a joint session of Congress: “America is on the move again, turning peril into possibility, crisis into opportunity, setback into strength.” This sounds as if it means something—it has the rhythm and sound of good thought—but it doesn’t, really. It’s the language of the 60-second advertising spot, and America tunes it out. Not from malice but from Alice. It’s the sound of the past 40 or 50 years, meaning it’s had its day.

Mr. Biden has an opportunity to do something new, reinvent his rhetorical approach. Why not, nothing else has worked. He should commit, when speaking, to Be Here Now. He should be straightforward and modest.

When I think of what is needed at this moment in history, my mind goes to the brisk factuality, the lack of emotionalism, of Oct. 22, 1962. John F. Kennedy from his desk in the Oval Office offering 18 minutes of fact and thought. “Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island on Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. . . . Having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.”

It was down to the bone, stark and completely compelling. The military response he explained was persuasive because it was based in fact and clearly put interpretation. He provided complicated information: “The characteristics of these new missile sites indicate two distinct types of installations.” You talk only to the intelligent this way; his listeners were aware of the compliment. He didn’t stoop to them but assumed they’d reach to him.

He wasn’t self-referential: He didn’t say “as I promised,” but “as promised,” because putting himself in the forefront would be vulgar. It was “this government,” not “my government.” He said, “This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word.” He was declaring the American position while putting the virtue of it on America, not himself.

You say: Well, that was a crisis, you cut to the chase in crisis. But our political moment is pretty much nonstop crises, and there are more than enough national platforms for emotionalism.

All politicians could learn from this approach. They have no idea how refreshing it would sound, how gratefully it would be received: “I’m not being patronized by my inferiors!” How people might listen again.

It was the Easter of epochal events. All that Holy Week history came like a barrage. It was April 1865, the Civil War. No one touched by that war ever got over it; it was the signal historical event of their lives, the greatest national trauma in U.S. history. It would claim 750,000 lives.

Everyone knew the South would fight to the end, but suddenly people wondered if it was the end. Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army was trapped and under siege in the middle of Virginia. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was bearing down, his army going from strength to strength.

The two exchanged letters under flag of truce. Grant to Lee: Did the general not see the “hopelessness” of his position? Lee sent a roundabout response, Grant a roundabout reply, but he was starting to see: Lee knows he is beat.

On the morning of April 9, Palm Sunday, Lee sent word: He would discuss terms of surrender. They met that afternoon in the Appomattox home of Wilmer McLean.

Lee got there first. Allen C. Guelzo, in his masterly “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” quotes a reporter from the New York Herald who had joined a crowd outside. He was bowled over by the bearing of the imposing Lee, in full dress uniform with “an elegant sword, sash and gauntlets.”

In truth, Lee didn’t know what to expect. He’d told his staff, “If I am to be General Grant’s prisoner to-day, I intend to make my best appearance.” His close friend Gen. James Longstreet thought Lee’s fine dress a form of “emotional armor,” an attempt to conceal “profound depression,” according to Ron Chernow’s superb, compendious “Grant.”

Grant, who at 42 was 16 years Lee’s junior, arrived a picture of dishevelment—slouched hat, common soldier’s blouse, mud-splashed boots. He was painfully aware of how he looked and feared Lee would think him deliberately discourteous, Mr. Chernow writes. Later, historians would think he was making a political statement, but he’d simply outrun his supply lines: his dress uniform was in a trunk on a wagon somewhere.

But he projected authority. Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, wrote that he saw Grant trot by, “sitting his saddle with the ease of a born master. . . . He seemed greater than I had ever seen him,—a look as of another world around him.”

The armies of the North and South, in blue and gray, were massed uneasily beyond the house. Neither Lee nor Grant wanted them to resume the fight. Some of Lee’s officers had urged him not to surrender but to disband his army and let his men scatter to the hills and commence a guerrilla war. Lee had refused. The entire country would devolve into “lawless bands in every part,” he wrote, and “a state of society would ensue from which it would take the country years to recover.”

The generals sat in McLean’s parlor and attempted conversation. But of course it is the surrender agreement, on whose terms they quickly agreed, that will be remembered forever. Lee’s army would surrender and receive parole; weapons and supplies would be turned over as captured property. Officers would be allowed to keep their personal sidearms.

Lee suggested Confederate soldiers be allowed to take home a horse or mule for “planting a spring crop,” Mr. Guelzo writes. Grant agreed, and Lee was overcome with relief. Lee then asked Grant for food for his troops. They had been living for 10 days on parched corn. Grant agreed again and asked how many rations were needed. “About 25,000,” Lee said. Grant’s commissary chief later asked, “Were such terms ever before given by a conqueror to a defeated foe?”

Grant asked his aide Ely Parker, an American Indian of the Seneca tribe, to make a fair copy of the surrender agreement. When Lee ventured, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker memorably replied, “We are all Americans.”

Grant would write in his memoirs “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know.” His own feelings, which had earlier been jubilant, were now “sad and depressed.” He couldn’t rejoice at the downfall of a foe that had “suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

Now the door to the parlor was opened, and Grant’s officers were introduced to Lee, including “a newly minted captain, Robert Todd Lincoln, the twenty-one-year-old son of the president,” Mr. Guelzo writes.

Grant and Lee shook hands; Lee stepped onto the porch and signaled his orderly for his horse. An Illinois cavalry officer, George Forsyth, remembered every Union officer on the porch “sprang to his feet . . . every hand . . . raised in military salute.”

Lee looked to the east, where his army was in its last encampment. As he turned to leave, Grant came out to the steps and saluted him by raising his hat. Lee reciprocated and rode off slowly to break the news to the men he’d commanded. Mr. Guelzo: “He spoke briefly and simply, as to a theater company after its last curtain.”

They had done their duty, Lee said: “Leave the result to God. Go to your homes and resume your occupations. Obey the laws and become as good citizens as you were soldiers.”

Grant had something Lee didn’t have. Lee couldn’t act under instructions of his government because it had effectively collapsed when Richmond fell. Events had moved too quickly for Grant to receive specific instruction from Washington, but he knew the president’s mind. In the last year of the war he and Lincoln had become good friends, and in their conversations Grant had been struck by the president’s “generous and kindly spirit toward the Southern people” and the absence of any “revengeful disposition.”

Days before the surrender Lincoln had visited Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Va. The president spent a day at a field hospital, where in “a tender spirit of reconciliation” he “shook hands with wounded confederates,” in Mr. Chernow’s words. A Northern colonel who described Lincoln as “the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,” with an “expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face,” spoke with him and found “a very honest and kindly man” who was “highly intellectual.”

The mercy shown at Appomattox is a kind of golden moment in American history, but history’s barrage didn’t stop. America exploded with excitement at the end of the war, and all Washington was lit with lights, flags, bunting.

On Good Friday, April 14, Lincoln met with his son Robert to hear of what he saw at Appomattox, and then with his cabinet, including Gen. Grant, where he happily backed up Grant’s generosity. Grant, he said, had operated fully within his wishes.

Lincoln was assassinated that night, died Saturday morning, and for a long time the next day would be called “black Easter.”

But what is the meaning of Appomattox? What explains the wisdom and mercy shown? How does a nation do that, produce it?

As you see these past weeks, I have been back to my history books. You learn a lot that way, not only about the country and the world and “man,” but even yourself. Would you have let your enemy go home in dignity, with the horses and guns? And not bring the law down on their heads? And the answer—what does that tell you about you?

Journalists and people who think aloud for a living are often invited to gatherings where experts in various fields share what they know. These meetings often operate under Chatham House rules, in which you can write of the ideas presented but not directly quote speakers. At such a gathering this week I was especially struck by the talks on Big Tech, and since Congress is considering various regulatory bills I want to say what I gleaned.

First and most obviously, nobody understands the million current aspects of social media sites. They raise questions ranging from the political (misinformation, disinformation, deliberate polarization, ideological bias) and the technological (hidden data harvesting) to the legal (antitrust law, First Amendment rights) and the moral and ethical (deliberately addicting users, the routine acquisition and selling of private information, pornography). It’s all so big and complex. Mark Zuckerberg, who invented the social-media world we live in, appears to have thrown in the towel and fled to the metaverse, where things will no doubt become even more complex and bizarre. But what he calls a visionary next step looks very much like an escape attempt.

The breakthrough event in public understanding of social-media problems was the congressional testimony, last fall, of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. She said Instagram, owned by Facebook parent Meta, was fully aware it was damaging the mental health of children and teenagers. She had proof, internal documents showing Instagram knew of studies showing increased suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among young girls who used the site. Big Tech had failed what Google, at the turn of this century, famously took as its motto: “Don’t be evil.” That wouldn’t seem the most demanding mission, yet they all failed.

One thing that was strange and unreal about her celebrated testimony is that it was a revelation of what everybody already knew. Professionals in the field knew, think-tank observers knew, Big Tech knew it had addictive properties, they were put there deliberately to be addictive. It was part of the business model. Attentive parents knew as they watched their kids scroll. Ms. Haugen spoke of what she called “little feedback loops” in which “likes and comments and reshares” trigger “hits of dopamine to your friends so they will create more content.” But now at least everyone else knows.

The difficulty at the heart of all Big Tech debate is how hard it is to get the facts, and how the facts keep changing. Transparency and disclosure are urgently required—how much information is being gathered about you each day, to whom is it sold, and for what purpose? The social-media sites don’t want to tell you, or tell each other. The nature of the beast is opaque and fluid. How do you audit an algorithm? It’s a moving river changing all the time. And the algorithms are proprietary. But constructive regulation must be based on clear information.

I asked a speaker if I was thinking correctly when I imagine algorithms: I see them as a series of waves, not necessarily in sequence, different in size, pushing my small skiff in this direction or that. No, she said, the algorithm isn’t the wave, it’s the water. It’s the thing on which you sail. To go to a site is to choose to cast off.

Another speaker: When we speak of the internet we speak of “privacy rights.” Companies are taking information they glean from your use of tech and without your permission selling it for purposes that aren’t fully clear. This violates your privacy, but there’s another way to look at it. Many of the devices you carry with you are pinging out exactly where you are. They know you got out of a car at 23rd and M. But your current location should belong to you. It is a private property issue when someone takes it from you. Because you belong to you. Making it an issue of property rights makes things clearer.

No one among the experts or participants had faith in Congress’s ability to understand adequately or to move in a knowing and constructive way to curb Big Tech. The previous hearings have shown how out of their depth they are. The heads of Big Tech had been hauled in a few years ago and were supposed to break out in a sweat under heavy grilling, but they were pressed on petty irrelevancies and sucked up to, along the lines of: You started your business in a garage—only in America! Does Facebook charge for membership? No, Senator, we’re totally free! Why doesn’t my page load? The hearings were a signal moment—the stakes were high and the inventors of Big Tech walked out more arrogant than ever. Because now they knew their opposition, their supposed regulators—the people’s representatives!—were uninformed, almost determinedly so, and shallow. Big Tech had hired every lobbying shop in Washington, made generous contributions to organizations and candidates.

We’ll see what happens on Capitol Hill. It would probably be best for America’s worried parents to assume the cavalry isn’t coming and take matters into their hands.

A participant suggested an at least partial solution that doesn’t require technological sophistication and could be done with quick and huge public support.

Why can’t we put a strict age limit on using social-media sites: You have to be 18 to join TikTok, Youtube, Instagram? Why not? You’re not allowed to drink at 14 or drive at 12; you can’t vote at 15. Isn’t there a public interest here?

Applying such control would empower parents who face “all the other kids are allowed,” with an answer: “Because it’s against the law.”

When we know children are being harmed by something, why can’t the state help? In theory this might challenge economic libertarians who agree with what Milton Friedman said 50 years ago, that it is the duty of companies to maximize shareholder value. Instagram makes massive profit from ads and influencers aimed at teenagers. But a counter and rising school of conservative thought would answer: Too bad. Our greater responsibility is to see to it that an entire generation of young people not be made shallow and mentally ill through addictive social-media use.

The nature and experience of childhood has been changed by social media in some very bad ways. Why can’t we, as a nation, change this? We all have a share in this.

A participant here told a story of a friend, the mother of a large Virginia family who raised her kids closely and with limited use of social media. The mother took her children to shop for food. The woman at the checkout counter, who had been observing the family, asked the mother, “Do you homeschool your kids?” The mother wasn’t sure of the spirit of the question but said, “Yes, I do. Why do you ask?” The checkout woman said, “Because they have children’s eyes.” And not the thousand-yard stare of the young always scrolling on their phones.

There were many different views expressed at the meetings but on this all seemed to agree, and things became animated.

This extended moment of history reminds me of Washington in the years before and during the Civil War. There was a kind of hysterical intensity among our political class in those days, on all sides. The instability was so dramatic—Rep. Preston Brooks caning Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856, poor Mary Todd Lincoln with her rage and manias, and her husband telling her that if she continues like this she’ll wind up in the asylum. Those are famous examples, but you can’t pick up a book about those days and not see what looks like real and widespread personal destabilization. There was a lot of self-medicating, as they say. The journals and diaries of Mary Chesnut, who resided in the heart of the Washington establishment as the country broke apart and in capitals of the Confederacy as it formed, tell constantly of the officers and politicos coming to her home to drink into the night, and the ladies and their laudanum. Something strange had been let loose as things broke apart.

I started thinking things were entering Civil War territory during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 and the demonstrations around it—the hissing mobs in a Senate office building, where 293 were arrested; the screams as the Judiciary Committee chairman began his opening statement; the harassing of senators on elevators; the surrounding of the Supreme Court and scratching on its big bronze doors. I know the charges against Justice Kavanaugh were grave, I know they incited passion on both sides, but this looked to me not like activism, which to achieve anything must have at its core seriousness, maturity and discipline, but like untreated mental illness.

And then of course the insurrection of Jan. 6, the prime example of this new, strange era.

Connected are Ginni Thomas’s texts to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days after the 2020 election. They capture two characteristics of radicals on both sides, now and maybe forever. The first is that they have extreme respect for their own emotions: If they feel it, it’s true. The other is that they tend to be stupid, in the sense of having little or no historical knowledge or the sense of proportion such knowledge brings.

The texts were revealed last week by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Robert Costa of CBS News, and you have seen them. In the days after the election, Mrs. Thomas warned Mr. Meadows of “the greatest Heist of our History.” There’s proof: “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states.” There will be justice: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators . . . are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” “Do not concede,” she warned him. “It takes time for the army who his gathering for his back.”

This is a person who lives in the heart of the Washington establishment and had no proof for any of the wild things she is saying. But when you’re a conspiracist, every way you look there’s a grassy knoll. Naturally the chief of staff wrote back. “This is a fight of good versus evil.” “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues.” He appears to be patronizing her and speaking in a way thoroughly in line with Sinclair Lewis and the great American tradition of hucksters wrapping their con in the language of Christian faith.

But it’s worth noting the focus of their obsession, the continued belief in some quarters that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election. Joe Biden won not closely but by seven million votes, and every challenge was thrown out of court, including by Trump-appointed judges.

Here we should remember the man who may well have had a presidential election stolen from him, but who ended a stop-the-steal movement before it could take off. It was 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon vs. Sen. John F. Kennedy. It was the closest popular vote in the 20th century, with Kennedy receiving 34.2 million votes and Nixon 34.1 million, a margin of barely one-sixth of a percentage point. Widespread fraud was suspected in Illinois and Texas, which had enough electoral votes to be decisive.

Nixon’s biographers haven’t usually agreed with his political views—they’ve mostly been fascinated liberals—but virtually all speak with respect of this chapter in his life. The best treatment is in John Farrell’s very fine “Richard Nixon: The Life.” “In Chicago, election fraud was a work of art,” Mr. Farrell writes. On that nail-biting election night Mayor Richard J. Daley called Kennedy in Hyannisport and said, “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.”

As for Texas, everyone knew what Robert Caro later established, that Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee, had the state wired, with credible charges of ballot-box fraud going back to 1948.

Theodore White, the journalist who helped invent the mythos around JFK, wrote in 1975 that no one will ever know who won in 1960, but in Illinois and Texas, Democratic “vote-stealing had definitely taken place on a massive scale.”

Nixon believed the election was stolen. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen wanted him to challenge the results. Nixon thought it could take months and might not succeed, but his thoughts went deeper than that. In the Cold War, the nuclear age, unity at home and abroad was needed. Young democracies looked up to us. If they thought our elections could be stolen it would hurt the world’s morale.

The New York Herald Tribune had launched an investigative series, but Nixon talked the reporter into stopping it: “Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”

In Evan Thomas’s brisk “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,” he reports that the GOP wise man Bryce Harlow urged Nixon to challenge, but Nixon said no: “It’d tear the country to pieces. You can’t do that.”

So he didn’t. On Jan. 6, 1961, Nixon presided over the formal certification of his opponent’s election. “This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent,” he said. “In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.”

For once his colleagues gave that complicated man his due, with a standing ovation that wouldn’t stop until Nixon took a second bow.

History went on and took its turns. Nixon came back and won the presidency in 1968. But when you read all this you wonder: Why can’t self-professed patriots love America like that now—maturely, protectively? And: How important it is to know something of history, to know it so well you can almost trust it. Instead of just feeling what you feel and making a hash of things.

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.