Having crumbled against Covid, the great-grandchildren of D-Day’s heroes think they’ll stand up for Kyiv.

(Originally published Jan. 31 in “What in the World“) North Korea’s seventh missile test this month, conducted Sunday, was its biggest and boldest so far. Meanwhile, China’s new ambassador to the United States, Qin Jang, used his first interview to deliver an unusually stark warning that the U.S. risks military conflict with China if Taiwan continued to move toward independence.

Speaking of boundaries, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly aggressive moves toward Ukraine and Eastern Europe are reportedly being influenced by hardline advisers who, like him, came of age at the Soviet Union’s zenith of power. These Cold Warriors are staring down a U.S. President who also came of age at the height of U.S.-Soviet tensions. So it’s little surprise that the U.S. also seems to be pushing towards confrontation—beefing up military forces in former Soviet states, threatening economic hardship and failing to offer any conciliatory concessions, serving up instead only bellicose rhetoric that makes it hard for Putin to be seen trucking any compromise.

While Putin the strongman may only have a few voices whispering in his ear, leaders in the West must listen to a cacaphony of domestic political interests, which are dividing them and making the consequences of invasion look even lower to Moscow. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, has been taking an independent tack from the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization, looking to engage with Russia and carve out a new European security arrangement that’s less reliant on Washington.

Macron’s is a completely rational policy ambition, particularly given that Washington has seemed intent on antagonizing Moscow in recent years by pushing NATO’s membership ever-closer to Russia’s border. This worked when Russia was weak, but that decline has paused if not reversed. (It’s interesting to note that analysts variously refer to China, Russia and the U.S. as being in inexorable decline). Covid has given Putin an opening to reverse the West’s advance across what used to be Russia’s backyard.

And for his part, Macron is still smarting from France’s ouster by the U.S. from its Australia sub deal. It doesn’t help that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while seeking European unity on Ukraine, has been negotiating Europe’s future with Moscow without Europeans in the room. Unfortunately for Macron, his longstanding attempts to engage rather than contain Russia look like appeasement now that Putin has responded to Western encroachment by massing troops around Ukraine.

The pandemic isn’t getting any better. Indeed, Omicron’s rise is now being somewhat obscured by the rapid rise of a new subvariant, BA.2. This new and improved Omicron is often mistaken for earlier strains like Delta in PCR tests because it isn’t lacking one of the genes that had been used to distinguish Omicron.

Nonetheless, there’s been a bizarre and truly baffling resolution in the West to surrender to (referred to as “living with”) the virus and thus condemn thousands of other people to death in order to resume gathering and traveling freely. As part of this new fatalism, people are likening Covid to everyday causes of death like car crashes and lung cancer, even though Covid deaths are totally preventable and unlike cancer due to smoking, aren’t based on individual lifestyle choices (unless that choice is socializing).

Unfortunately, preventing Covid illness and death is massively inconvenient, in that it depends on collective action, so many people would rather risk it in the mistaken belief that it’s someone else who’s likely to die from Covid, not them. My advice to those people is to buy a pack of smokes next time they buy their next box of masks. Don’t bother wearing a seat belt (or a helmet) when you do. What’s the point?

U.S. deaths to Covid—now at roughly 900,000—are still rising, and daily hospitalizations have started to ebb but remain near their all-time high. Giving in to Covid now is like surrendering to Germany after the fall of Paris. The war was, after all, nearly over at that point. So why not just declare it over and give up?