In George Will's Alternate Reality - The Biden Family Is Not Corrupt And Zelensky Is Not Degenerate...,

WaPo  |   The Ukrainians’ effective resistance is forcing President Biden to make a delicate calibration that he is fortunate to be in a position to make: How much embarrassment can Putin suffer without taking a catastrophic step — use of a tactical nuclear weapon? Biden’s calculation occurs in this context of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s saying U.S. objectives are the restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. This might maximally imply the reversal of Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

The rhetoric of imagined but rarely attained precision is common in modern governance. Policymakers speak of “fine tuning” an economy that is powered by hundreds of millions of people making hundreds of billions of daily decisions and subject to “exogenous” events unanticipated by policymakers. Military planners contemplate “surgical strikes” as “signaling devices” as conflicts ascend the “escalation ladder.” In 1965, war theorist Herman Kahn postulated 44 rungs on that ladder. The 22nd: “Declaration of Limited Nuclear War.” The 44th: “Spasm or Insensate War.” Rung 21 was “Local Nuclear War — Exemplary.” As Biden calibrates, we might be rising from Rung 20: “‘Peaceful’ World-Wide Embargo or Blockade.”

After 1945, it was understood that nuclear weapons might, by deterring military interventions to counter aggressions, enable wars of considerable conventional violence. Biden, however, has orchestrated a symphony of sanctions and weapons deliveries that has — so far — nullified Putin’s attempt to use nuclear threats to deter effective conventional responses to his aggression.

Presidents are pressured by friends as well as foes. In 1976, as Republicans convened in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan was almost tied in the delegate count, having potently attacked President Gerald Ford’s policy of U.S.-Soviet detente, including Ford’s refusal to meet with Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Kansas City, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, detente’s architect, asked Tom Korologos, a Ford aide who enjoyed tormenting Kissinger, who would be Ford’s running mate. Korologos answered: “Solzhenitsyn.” Volodymyr Zelensky is to Biden what Solzhenitsyn was to Ford, someone whose prestige encourages firmness.

Ukraine’s president illustrates Churchill’s axiom that courage is the most important virtue because it enables the others. Zelensky has stiffened the West’s spine, made something like victory seem possible, and made it impossible to blur the conflict’s moral clarity. So, a collateral casualty of the conflict is a 19th century German philosopher.

Before sinking into insanity, Friedrich Nietzsche propounded a theory that still reverberates in the intelligentsia: There are no “facts,” “only interpretations.” That today’s war has been caused by one man’s wickedness is a fact. War is a harrowing means of embarrassing the faux sophisticates’ moral relativism, but by doing so, this ill wind has blown some good.