Say what you like about Boris Johnson, but he has at least been pushing Conservatives in the right direction, says Matthew d’Ancona in Tortoise. Margaret Thatcher left office more than three decades ago, yet many Tories still view her low-tax, small-government principles as irreplaceable dogma. Johnson, like Theresa May before him, recognises that we live in a different world now. He is rightly relaxed about government intervention, especially on big infrastructure, the NHS and “levelling up”. That’s anathema to his party’s swelling libertarian faction, who claim the PM has been “captured” by the left, the “deep state”, his wife, or whoever. But the “principal problems of the next decades” – climate change, our ageing population, adapting to automation and AI – simply cannot be addressed with market solutions alone. Suggesting otherwise is “borderline bonkers”.

Donald Rumsfeld, George W Bush’s defence secretary, liked to say “weakness is provocative”, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. It’s the perfect explanation for our current “predicament” with Russia and Ukraine. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the Bush administration “protested but did almost nothing”. President Obama pursued a “reset” with Moscow, accepted a Russian offer of mediation in the Syrian civil war, and did “almost nothing” when Putin’s “little green men” seized Crimea in 2014. President Trump sought to block new sanctions on Moscow, although he was eventually overruled by Congress. And the Biden administration has waived sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany, increasing Moscow’s “energy leverage” on Europe, and sent “paltry” amounts of military aid to Ukraine.