You put no blame on Trump? He empowered Putin in ways we still cannot fathom. As for Afghanistan, please. Bravo to Biden for finally extracting us from that nightmare. The graveyard of empires, and America proved also no match for the chaos and corruption of Afghanistan — it indirectly brought us a Trump. Could the exit have been done better? Yes. Does any of what happened while exiting matter now? Nope. Any relevance to this article? Again, no. Putin’s age plays into this because internally, the youth are challenging his power at every turn and he was being written off by some in European capitals as irrelevant. His hiding out to escape infection from COVID led some to believe he was failing. As to what I suggest, please see above. What I suggest most of all, is that we stop being so absolutist in our prescriptions for these crises. This is a massive game created by Putin’s insecurities and imagining that we will come into the fight with guns blazing and old glory inspiring the troops is precisely what got us into the so many problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. One does not stop a cancer, you isolate it, hit it with radiation and sometimes surgically remove it but just because it goes into remission, does not mean its gone. The same thing can be said for Putin — what do we do? At this point, we hold our ground be ready to lose the eastern part of Ukraine and then stop it there.