The American people, however, if not the Washington establishment, should set another priority: establishing responsibility for the failed proxy war. No doubt, much blame should fall on the Biden administration, which refused to seriously negotiate with Moscow before the war, undermined talks between Ukraine and Russia, and steadily expanded a proxy war with a nuclear-armed power over stakes far more important to it than to the U.S.

Members of the bipartisan war party share the blame. Many, including most Republican leaders, have been even more reckless than the administration. The GOP paladins often pressed extreme and dangerous approaches, such as the Mississippian Sen. Roger Wicker’s mad plan for ground and nuclear war with Moscow. (The ever-irresponsible Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had previously suggested nuclear conflict against North Korea with equal nonchalance.) Why worry about the possibility of a few score million deaths?

Moreover, both Republican and Democratic administrations have helped turn Moscow hostile with an aggressive, expansionist military policy. Washington treated the Soviet Union and then Russia as defeated foes with the expansion of NATO, despite multiple assurances to the contrary. The U.S. also inverted the Monroe Doctrine, insisting that everything up to Russia’s border was in America’s sphere of interest, and promoted “color revolutions” and street uprisings within Moscow’s neighbors.