The conventional wisdom is that the West can’t do much to stop Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, says Kevin Williamson in National Review. It’s false. In reality, there’s plenty we could do to give the Russian strongman pause for thought. We could start by kicking all non-resident Russians out of the US – in particular the children of the Russian elite who are studying at our universities. “Give them two weeks to pack, and then expel them.” Boris Johnson could “stop allowing Russian oligarchs to use high-end London real estate as a covert bank” – something even the neutral-minded Swiss have managed.

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it seemed like liberalism had won, says Paul Kingsnorth in his Substack newsletter. But 30 years on, Russia is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times, and the West is “boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance”. The last global empire is led by a confused 79-year-old; the world’s biggest economy will soon be China, a communist dictatorship. So much for the end of history. But liberalism always contained, even at its high point in the 20th-century West, the seeds of its own failure. It unmoored people from “networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture”, and unleashed “the vast destabilising engine of capitalism”.