Many people who dismiss warnings about a third world war were, before February 2022, confident that state-on-state war in Europe had become unthinkable. Even though Russia at that point was in the eighth year of its war to extinguish a contiguous European nation.

This war began with Russia's 2014 seizure of Crimea. Today's phase began in 2022 with a now-forgotten rationale: "Russia, which began the war proclaiming that its goal was the liberation of the innocent Ukrainians from the allegedly drug-addled, fascist government of [Volodymyr] Zelensky, now talks about ordinary Ukrainians as traitors."

So wrote, last year in Foreign Affairs, Margaret MacMillan, great-granddaughter of British prime minister David Lloyd George. He was a principal participant in the Versailles Conference after World War I. In 1916, Lloyd George had mused, "Who are the Slovaks? I can't seem to place them." At Versailles, he participated in placing them in a new — and perishable — nation: In 1938, Adolf Hitler called the dismembering of Czechoslovakia "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe." Poland was next.

Only for Americans did World War II begin Dec. 7, 1941. It did not begin with Germany's September 1939 invasion of Poland. Or with Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. Rather, the 14 years of global anarchy properly designated World War II began with Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Today, two major regional wars are raging (against Ukraine and Israel), China is conducting edge-of-war aggression in the South China Sea and Iranian-armed Houthis are disrupting Red Sea navigation.

As analysts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine argue in Foreign Affairs, the 1940 Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy, Japan) is echoed by the intensifying collaboration among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The authors note that one attack this year on Ukraine cities involved "weapons fitted with technology from China, missiles from North Korea, and drones from Iran." Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine call the full-scale invasion of Ukraine "the point of no return in Putin's long-standing crusade against the West." "Crusade," with religious connotations, is apposite.

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English political philosopher John Gray, in his 2023 book "The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism," writes that the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia described the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as "the active manifestation of evangelical love for neighbours." Eight months later, he conferred upon Vladimir Putin the titles "fighter against the Antichrist" and "chief exorcist." Tass, Russia's state news agency, has quoted a high state official who characterized the invasion as "de-satanization." Do not assume that Putin disbelieves such ideological-cum-theological applesauce.

Fortunately, regarding Putin there is no Panglossian optimism of the sort President Franklin D. Roosevelt entertained about Joseph Stalin. ("I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.") And, after Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no U.S. susceptibility to what Princeton and Hoover Institution historian Stephen Kotkin calls the "Pygmalion syndrome": hope for transforming Russians, making them more like us.

Putin has partially transformed, by revitalizing, the West. Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage writes (in the Wall Street Journal) that Ukraine's strength is "the aggregate will" of the dozens of countries "across the globe" whose aid is "comparable to" U.S. Lend Lease for World War II allies. For example, Sweden, the Financial Times reports, "ended two centuries of military non-alignment to join NATO," and in May announced that "it would provide Kyiv with a surveillance aircraft to allow it to conduct longer-range strikes, and long-range air-to-air missiles." The collective effort is, Kimmage writes, commensurate with the stakes: preventing Ukraine from becoming "a failed state or a Russian colony the size of Texas, bordering five members of the EU and NATO."

The West's most important laggard is Germany. When NATO was founded in 1949, a pithy statement of its purpose was: to keep the Americans in (Europe), the Russians out and the Germans down. Today, Germany needs to step up.

Germany has become symptomatic of Western nations, including the United States, allowing welfare spending to crowd out defense needs. The Wall Street Journal reports that Germany's 2025 defense spending was increased just enough to cover military pay raises. Increased child payments for all German families, regardless of wealth, will equal the defense ministry's budget.

The West, including Germany, has given Ukraine substantial succor. But absent many more weapons, with fewer restraints upon their use, the West might be purchasing protracted defeat, thereby vindicating Putin's estimation of the West's inability to persevere.

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