@akkartik absolutely. but when that happens, it reflects a failure. Putin’s crimes are on him morally, but in a technocratic way we signally and pretty egregiously failed, grew lazy, took some kinds of war to be unthinkable so ceased to take seriously sustaining conditions under which a would-be adventurer would either not dare to, or else not desire to, transgress. we did a poor job with both the stick of deterrence and the carrot of integration with respect to Russia.