The failures of American will exposed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are numerous and mounting. Coming on top of the tepid response to China’s declaration of an air defense identification zone over Japanese waters and the withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “red line” in Syria, they have revealed Barack Obama as a man who not only “leads from behind” but marches to the rear.

In some ways, however, critiques of Obama’s weakness may be as revealing of America’s new strategic timidity as the president’s policy. Take, for example, Charles Krauthammer’s recent “How to Stop Putin” essay in the Washington Post. Krauthammer neatly eviscerates Obama’s policy. He goes on to describe what an effective response would consist of: reassuring NATO, deterring further Russian adventurism in Ukraine, and reversing the annexation of Crimea. But having imagined what a victory would look like, the clear-eyed columnist tries to reassure us: “This is no land-war strategy,” he writes. “This is the ‘trip-wire’ strategy successful for half a century in Germany and Korea.”