Vladimir Putin is right to see the Ukrainian war as a titanic struggle against the West. Not, of course, in the sense that NATO provoked the war. Far from pushing for confrontation, Western leaders desperately tried to talk Putin down from the ledge. But the Russian framing of the war as, roughly speaking, “tradition, hierarchy, and sacrifice versus liberalism, capitalism, and comfort,” is accurate enough. I’d use different terms — autocracy, oppression, and violence versus freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law — but it amounts to much the same thing.