Yesterday, President Obama explained that while “Russia’s actions are a problem,” it’s not really that big a concern. “They don’t pose the No. 1 national security threat to the United States,” said Obama. Russia, the president continued, is a “regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength, but out of weakness.”

That’s Obama—the evolved one, the world’s hall monitor. From his perspective, Russia acts out because it’s insecure, like all bullies. Maybe that’s always true of power politics, but American allies want a strategy and leadership, not descriptions of the world drawn from child psychology. Whether Obama wants to see it or not, Vladimir Putin, as Michael Doran writes in his recent column in Mosaic, has made himself “the permanent adversary of the United States.”