Vladmir Putin’s swift, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine instantly challenged the Western World and threatens to unravel the Post-World War Two order. Seeing a world already exhausted and eager to “get on” from the two-year old Coronavirus Pandemic, perhaps Putin believed the United States and the West would quickly condemn the aggression and then return to “business as usual.” (Watch conspiracy theorists claim that the Coronavirus was developed in a Russian lab and intentionally released to battle the West.)
President Biden has risen to the challenge and constructed the largest coordinated response to aggression since George H.W. Bush built a “coalition of the willing” following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. In these first days, we seem more unified and in common cause than we have been in a long time.
But it is early in this conflict. This is day eleven. Recall that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lasted ten years, 1979 to 1989 – 3,650 days give or take.
Only 3,639 days left to go.