It’s difficult to predict how a Ukrainian defeat would reverberate. Abandoning allies in a humiliating fashion has unpredictable consequences. When we cut lose South Vietnam in the 1970s, it catalyzed an anti-Western offensive around the world, and Joe Biden’s botched pull-out from Afghanistan may have tempted Putin into Ukraine.

The current presidential campaign is becoming a grand drama of dueling versions of reality, with us, the voters, sitting in the jury box, hoping to witness some semblance of justice.

In the aftermath of “from the river to the sea” anti-Israel protests on many college campuses and in the streets comes a perfectly timed book by Johns Hopkins University Professor Benjamin Ginsberg, titled “The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, The Right, and the Jews.”

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine began in 2004 with a covert attempt to subvert Ukraine’s 2004 national election and install a Putin puppet. Putin failed. Suddenly, the Russian despot had a czarist nightmare on his border — a food-exporting Slavic state with democratic aspirations and high-tech expertise.

Ukraine’s desire to be a sovereign state of its own and, in particular, to align itself with the hated West is intolerable for Putin. He’s explained at great length why he believes Ukraine has no legitimacy as an independent nation, and his model of a neo-tsarism where elections are fake and opposition leaders die in Arctic prisons would be threatened by a Ukraine that successfully embraced a version of the Western model.